Friday NOT Cheese: The coming of the warm April 20, 2012

My first summer in my first apartment away from home was in 1996. The apartment was the second floor of a two story brick building in the downtown area of San Rafael, where it seemed fated to be mercilessly baked by the sun for most of the day, and I felt like human tandoori inside a clay oven. I also had the evening shift at the movie theater job later that night, so I tried to roust myself up and around to at least do some light tidying. And what's great getting-shit-done music? Industrial. 

However, my catalog of music was fairly light on industrial at that time, so I scooted out the door and around the corner to the used record store. I didn't know much about industrial, but I did know about Front 242. Or at least, I thought I did. The Front 242 I knew sounded like this: 

This seemed like it would be compatible with attacking the giant stack of dishes that only bachelors are capable of creating, so I grabbed the one CD they had, which was this:

I scraped together my crumpled and hard-earned money - and calculated that I'd be eating popcorn for dinner that night, but what the fuck, new music god dammit! - and made my purchase & headed back around the corner to my apartment. And during the time I'd been gone, the temperature had easily jumped another 15 degrees inside. The cats were ever elongating tubes of miserable fur, stretching themselves as far as they could to maximize exposure to even the tiniest amount of breeze that came through. The dishes could, quite honestly, get fucked. It was too hot to clean. 

So I dropped down at my desk and hopped online. I put my headphones on, dropped the CD in, and pressed play. 

What came out of that disc was like being trapped in the hot sticky exhalation of some long forgotten god, finally rising out of some ancient slumber. It was like being pinned physically to that very spot with a lance of near-religious ecstasy and almost-mania. I want to cry, I wanted to laugh, I wanted to explode, because it was too much too much of... something. And when that opening wail finally let me go, I shivered as sure as I had just had some lover run ice down my spine. I listened and heard the sound of a desert full of life and misery and joy and love and lust that was at once made of sand and hot baked asphalt, both crawling with the memories of a million people. For the first time in my life, I openly cried over a piece of music.

Out of nowhere and having not expected it or gone looking for it, I felt changed, as if I had seen the world beneath the world in a dream, and although I was not allowed to remember the details, I had been given permission to hold the feelings of wonder and amazement in my heart. 

Every time in my life where I have needed to remember that there is another world than the one I am currently inhabiting, where I am in dire need of reminding that there is a life beyond work and toil and repetition, I listen to just this track. It's all I need to tell my waking brain what my dream self is whispering to me: That there is a world out there full of wonder and love and beautiful heartache. And I can make the choice to live in it just as much as I am forced to inhabit the other that is full of the hard gravity of responsibility.