Nearly Forty Years Ago

Why don’t I do this every time I come to the Beijing Capital airport?  I have all but completely tuned out the entire airport because the noise cancellation headsets are blasting Minor Threat.  Ahh, it’s important to tap into our distilled core.  I can’t but think of my own fifteen-year-old whose back at home heading to the same high school I did when I first encountered these tunes.  They sound so sharp and crystalline. 

I feel young of course.  And then I look at other fifty year old western-ish men and consider whether or not they too stood in line outside CBGBs listening to the same sound check that I heard when this bled through the walls and made me feel as excited as one could possibly be to imagine that soon, we’d be seeing this inside, for real. 

Responding to one of these tunes, of course, I smashed my mother’s car.  “Screaming At a Wall” came out of the skank and sped up along with the six cylinder engine of her Oldsmobile.  Up on to the guard rail.  No one hurt.  Just a car, totaled and another straw in the back of my mom’s patience. No.  I don’t want my daughter to mimic that degree of enthusiasm for her tunes just yet. 

You might be interested to know, I have the first Bad Brains album queued up.  That’s the album I used to take in a box over to the neighbors and do guarding with to earn more money to buy more music like the Bad Brains.  That made it all go faster.  My daughter has a job tutoring Chinese kids on line with a tutoring service and makes about twelve-times what I used to make back in the day.  If I put the first Bad Brains cassette on now at the airport things may get unruly.  My plane is boarding.  I could go and join them but frankly I suspect it will be difficult to enjoy the tracks, sitting in my window seat.    1982 .  . . Damn that’s nearly forty years ago.  As far back as World War II was to the present when I was over there weeding the neighbor’s lawn.  Is that really possible?

Tuesday, 12/10/19