On February 6th, 2013, I was pushing two liquid oxygen cylinders through a nursing home in Canonsburg. This place, like many, is content to play easy listening FM radio in its hallways -- because you've gotta have something. You can't just have people mulling about in an environment without some sort of structured and intentional sound. I don't know why, but you can't.
By 2013, I had stopped all investigation into the mystery song. If it crossed my mind at all, it was quickly followed by a quick and informal calculation the likelihood of me not hearing a moderately popular song more than once in the past nineteen years.
All but dismissed, I still hadn't forgotten it. In fact, it had become a weighted corner of my internal mythology. It reminded me that something as benign as a middle of the road classic rock track had the potential of spinning me hard enough for me to question the way I perceive reality. I started to assume that I had imagined hearing it. Case closed. Live with it.
With my defeat securely in place, I was contemplating, on that bright winter day, the morality of selecting someone's musical environment. Sometimes you go to these places and they're playing "Rock Around the Clock". And if you were a young person in the heyday of this song, you must have heard it nearly ten thousand times by the time it became a mandatory component of your everyday environment. So maybe it was better after all if the residents of this particular facility were being placated with adult contemporary radio, even if the current selection was "Hold the Line", by Toto.
I hate this song.
We used to play this when I was in a band. It's a repetitive, tedious, carpal tunnel factory of a song for a piano player ... almost nothing but eighth note triplets. . Steve Lukather is playing a super-crunchy aggressive guitar figure in the chorus, and yet here he is on adult contemporary radio... the lyrics don't mean anything... it fails on a lot of levels.
After 3:52 of unmatched monotony, the song ends cold.
"Love isn't always on time/Oh no noooooooo." (E majoooorrrrr)
And I think, "That's funny. I never really noticed how close that song is to fitting the criteria of the imaginary song from 1994. It's got that vocal thing, the tonic, down to the sixth, down to the dominant... and it ends cold. But it ends a step below the tonic. Not the dominant. Too bad."
By 2013, I had stopped all investigation into the mystery song. If it crossed my mind at all, it was quickly followed by a quick and informal calculation the likelihood of me not hearing a moderately popular song more than once in the past nineteen years.
All but dismissed, I still hadn't forgotten it. In fact, it had become a weighted corner of my internal mythology. It reminded me that something as benign as a middle of the road classic rock track had the potential of spinning me hard enough for me to question the way I perceive reality. I started to assume that I had imagined hearing it. Case closed. Live with it.
With my defeat securely in place, I was contemplating, on that bright winter day, the morality of selecting someone's musical environment. Sometimes you go to these places and they're playing "Rock Around the Clock". And if you were a young person in the heyday of this song, you must have heard it nearly ten thousand times by the time it became a mandatory component of your everyday environment. So maybe it was better after all if the residents of this particular facility were being placated with adult contemporary radio, even if the current selection was "Hold the Line", by Toto.
I hate this song.
We used to play this when I was in a band. It's a repetitive, tedious, carpal tunnel factory of a song for a piano player ... almost nothing but eighth note triplets. . Steve Lukather is playing a super-crunchy aggressive guitar figure in the chorus, and yet here he is on adult contemporary radio... the lyrics don't mean anything... it fails on a lot of levels.
After 3:52 of unmatched monotony, the song ends cold.
"Love isn't always on time/Oh no noooooooo." (E majoooorrrrr)
And I think, "That's funny. I never really noticed how close that song is to fitting the criteria of the imaginary song from 1994. It's got that vocal thing, the tonic, down to the sixth, down to the dominant... and it ends cold. But it ends a step below the tonic. Not the dominant. Too bad."
"Then again, it's in G♭ minor -- the relative major of which is A. E major is the V chord of A major. Huh. Interesting."
"But still. This isn't it. It's in a triple meter and I hate it. If I'd flipped past this song on the radio, I'd know it. And this is NOT the first time I've heard this song in twenty years. Although, I'll grant you, this could be the first time I heard the end of it because, well, who wants to hear the whole thing."
"Although, if I'd only heard the last two measures, it wouldn't have registered to me as being in a triple meter. That would have confused things. This could be it. I mean, it's not. It fits all the criteria, but it's not the song because holy crap it's exactly the song and I am going to lose it in the lobby of this nursing home in a way that's probably going to involve crapping my pants."
If I were at all capable of doing a cartwheel...
It's hard to describe the quiet enormity of that moment. When you remember something that you forgot that morning, there's a feeling of relief because you're returning to a state of normalcy. For me, this dumb, empty space in my head that I've carried around for two decades became a natural condition. And when it was filled, things became sort of surreal.
For the rest of that day, I tried to prepare a concise way to describe to my family what an amazing thing had happened to me. But as it happened, my son, who had not yet been conceived in December of 1994, got his letter of acceptance to Pitt, which was a sort of enormous event because Mr. Laser Focus didn't have a safety school. His acceptance was a big deal. No one was going to be interested in my weird little story.
My experience lacked the insight that Sheldon's did. There was no glimpse into my subconscious mind... at least not as far as my conscious mind was concerned. But the realization that something you'd relegated to being a neural glitch was real after all is uncommonly satisfying and maybe... worth the wait.*
It's hard to describe the quiet enormity of that moment. When you remember something that you forgot that morning, there's a feeling of relief because you're returning to a state of normalcy. For me, this dumb, empty space in my head that I've carried around for two decades became a natural condition. And when it was filled, things became sort of surreal.
For the rest of that day, I tried to prepare a concise way to describe to my family what an amazing thing had happened to me. But as it happened, my son, who had not yet been conceived in December of 1994, got his letter of acceptance to Pitt, which was a sort of enormous event because Mr. Laser Focus didn't have a safety school. His acceptance was a big deal. No one was going to be interested in my weird little story.
My experience lacked the insight that Sheldon's did. There was no glimpse into my subconscious mind... at least not as far as my conscious mind was concerned. But the realization that something you'd relegated to being a neural glitch was real after all is uncommonly satisfying and maybe... worth the wait.*
*Totally not worth the wait. Never, ever let this happen to you.
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