Preface To You Will Never: I Will Never Know How To Write About Shows With Themes Like These

This is a true story: I used to be on several mailing lists, like those that existed in the early days of the Internet, or maybe the middle-aged days of the Internet, as I have no idea how old the internet really is.

(According to this site, the Internet is 8,967 days old; Google answered the questions "How old is the Internet?" with a report from 2014 which said, "The World Wide Web is 25 years old & this year the Internet is 45 years old. Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989.")

Okay, so I was involved in the Internet in its single-digit years.  In those days, I signed up for a million mailing lists for a million different things I was interested in, & soon I discovered that most people who are interested in things are so interested in them that they are not at all interested in criticism about the things they're interested in.  So it became in my best interest to leave most of these mailing lists, because soon enough I was being called a hater before I even knew there was such a thing as a hater.

(On one band mailing list, for example, I was ganged up on because I didn't like the new solo album of the band's lead singer.  When I mentioned I liked the band's second record best of all, I was not only told that I didn't understand the singer at all, but also that a couple of the critics hadn't yet gotten around to listening to the first two records, so I had ruined it for them.  It was quite confusing.)

There were a couple of mailing lists I did stay on for a time, although currently I am just on my radio station's mailing list, which is mostly utilitarian.  Anyway, on those old mailing lists, I would announce, like I do here, & on the Facebook, & on the Twitter, when I have shows, & I would mention the show's theme.  At some point, I started doing themes like the one I'm doing this week, which consisted of a phrase or phrases that recur in songs.

(Interrupting here to note that I once had a somewhat friendly argument with a person who did a show similar to this one who told me that such things, phrases & grammatical things, did not constitute actual "topics" for a radio show.  He was referring to the show with the theme Here I/You/He/She/It/We/They Come.  It really, really bothered him.  I agreed to disagree with him.  He agreed with himself that he was right.)

Boy this is turning out to be a long story.  On this mailing list, when I announced a show with a theme that was just a phrase that happened to be in a lot of songs, one person whom I did not really know or interact with on the mailing list sent a message in response to my email about the theme with the simple line, "Is it just me, or is Gary losing it?"

(Seriously, I've dreamed of losing it.)

It still doesn't help me when tomorrow I have to try to explain why I'm covering this theme, though.