I missed a bus yesterday & had to take one of the University's evening "combo" busses (cheaper than their "super-size" busses - no one can finish those trips!) & it went through a neighborhood I lived in five or six years ago & am never really around anymore. It's also been a glorious spring in Austin, so everything is lime green & glowing, even though the degrees the past few days have been closer to January temperatures than April ones (it's fine, though - it's over 80 degree today). Anyway, I did that thing that everyone does, clucking to myself how much has changed, oh, I remember who used to live there, etc., etc. It made me a little melancholy & I thought to myself, "If only I had never moved from here, I wouldn't be surprised by how much has changed."
Isn't that a weird thought? I really wouldn't want to live over there anymore - I like my house, I like my neighborhood - so what was I thinking? I was just missing stuff. Scientists have proven that, the longer you live, the more time you have spent, the more stuff you'll miss. Even with heavy drinking & possible brain damage from a lifetime of stumbles & head injuries, you can still have a sense of a place which, when disturbed, causes the feeling called "missing." I miss a lot of stuff. I've forgotten most of what I miss, but I miss it the same.
Tomorrow I'll talk about the last of my poorly-received Membership Drive shows, which is based on a song by the now-defunct band called My Favorite called "The Black Cassette," but today I just want to remember how amazing cassettes were for what seemed like the longest time of my life.
Nowadays, of course, we know the CD is over & we wait for the computer chips they'll plant in our head into which we can download songs. But I remember stealing my mother's cassettes - cassettes on which her parents in Germany had recorded their lives for her, cassettes she might have wanted to listen to when they died years later - to record nonsense on because, being 8 years old, I couldn't afford the 99 cents that a bag of three cheap cassettes cost. (Here's a fun correlation: a bag of cheap cassettes then, a spindle of cheap blank CDs today.)
I remember learning about cassette snobbery: when I asked a friend of mine to record something for me, he refused the cheap three-for-99¢ cassette I gave him, & used something he called "high bias" or something. Maybe I even learned that Dolby was not the name of that "Blinded Me With Science" dude. Whatever. It played just fine for me.
When I was was at KVRX, in the dwindling days before CD burning became a reality, I taped stuff from CDs that I reviewed. Short of buying the CDs (or stealing them, which I didn't do) taping was the only way to have them. Then - I think it must've been ten or so years ago - suddenly my department at work got a CD burner. I burned a shitload of stuff from KVRX in my last months there - I wonder what might have happened if technology were just a little bit faster...
Do I miss cassettes? They hissed. They got chewed up. They came (like CDs!) in plastic containers that cracked when dropped. I know I do miss making mix cassettes for girls. I do miss the care required in filling up two sides of 45 minutes each. An 80 minute CD seems charmless by comparison.
I have a feeling we'll be saying the same thing about [insert current technology here] in a couple of years. & I'll miss it. & hey! I might even make a radio show about it. What fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment