“I can lock all my doors. It’s the only way to live.”

Dear Job Muzak: This is, in fact, not the last worthless evening that I’ll have to spend, and so I’ll thank you to quit reminding me of the fact.

It’s been an especially stress-filled day. I feel like I’ve done a good job not letting the stressors get to me, but the comedy of retail store errors I’ve experienced today has been a bit over the top. Now Blogosphere, you know I don’t like or advocate drinking alone. But I wanted to provide my self with what I thought was some well deserved positive reinforcement for a full day’s work put in. So this evening, blog, let’s unwind together, and talk about what’s on our minds.

Stacy’s Pita Chips: Now with less-subtle 420-friendly marketing.

As I drove home tonight, my brain finally left to its own stewed-up thoughts, I again found myself with a hankerin’ for a bloggin’. I think I think a lot of my best thoughts while driving, and that’s the thought that I thought about tonight while driving and thinking. And that got me thinking about all the thoughts I’ve thought while driving in the past, and thoughts that made me think I should get in my car and drive and think, and what I thought about the outcomes, and where I thought those thoughts and drives would lead me. And what I think those driven thoughts have brought.

This morning I wanted to hear that Passion Pit album on the way to work. It’s a fair driving album, and I have a lot of good associations with listening to it in Kirksville while cavorting around that last semester, having included at the time it in an MP3CD of albums I had downloaded (in b4 RIAA LOL) and wanted to get to know better. Squinting at the California sun, I rifled through my now post-post-post-ironic ATO CD visor, and my you-didn’t-opt-for-the-iPod-hookup nook below the radio in my car, but the CD was not to be found. I was already running late for work, and at this point I wanted something familiar, but not the same-old new stuff I’d been listening to.

Right at that thought, I pulled out a CD marked CUL8R. It’s a particularly significant and great mix in the context of my life, but just like a mess in the corner of your room so old that your mind forgets that it’s a mess and starts to process it as furniture, it’s a CD that I haven’t thought to listen to in months. It’s an un-finalized version of a heartfelt goodbye mix I crafted for easily one the closest and most important friends I’ve ever had in this worldline. My solid rock, yet a whirlwind I got too swept up in; A liberating pair of wings that I too often confused for crutches; A personality so epic, I often felt dwarfed in its shadow. Every time I pull this disk out of the visor, I remember that giving it an inappropriately-lighthearted name like CUL8R was a hilarious inside joke to myself. God, I really like, get my sense of humor, me.

Now, you gotta understand, my car/room/iTunes/life is just littered with mixes I’ve made for people. I know it’s a cliché, but I am the Mixtape Master, still struggling to pour sacredness into Frankenstinian audio creations during what is now a post-cassette and post-CD world. The thing about re-finding artifacts such as these mixes is that each so encapsulates a time in my life. Creations become memory receptacles that way, be they photos or mix CDs or paintings or blog posts.

Now, a few perturbations on this model vis-à-vis CUL8R:

My mixtape mastercraft has, over the years, evolved into a bit of a model. The necessary elements are:

Some time-tested favorites of the listener’s. These are the easy targets. The low hanging fruit. The empathy trigger.

Some songs similar to the first category, but which you consider to be obscure enough that your recipient is unfamiliar with them. Feigning ignorance in the recipient’s musical knowledge is acceptable in this category.

A song or two from your favorite bands, even if they have the thinnest of justifications for inclusion. (Read: Depeche Mode) This is kind of like leading the horse to water, making it drink, and then waterboarding it until damn well likes whatever you tell it to like.

Some new stuff that fits with the flow seamlessly. This establishes your credibility, and implies that you might be the harbinger of good things, new or otherwise.

But CUL8R doesn’t conform to this model. It’s made up of all old favorites, selected very very carefully for nostalgia and significance. So it comes off as less subversive and more timeless than anything else lying around.

Mixtapes as a genre themselves tend to provide a lot of surprises in the replay-value aspect, because they are one person’s harnessing of the creations of others.

This wasn’t the finished product.

And, not being the finished product, the song that I was struck by on tonight’s drive back home was one that was left on the cutting room floor. This is mainly because all of my friends hate Sheryl Crow. But because of its soon-to-be-discarded presence on a primordial version of expression, tonight I was presented with a song that reminded me way too much of the significant drives of my life. While driving. And thinking.

Ever since college, driving for me has accumulated weird connotations of independence, fear, wrongness, rebellion, comfort, and above all the undeniability of emotion. For years and years I’d sneak off on weekend jaunts in my car, seeking friendship and the big city, but hiding it from my parents. I got so thorough in covering my tracks that I’d be sure to leave my local friends in the dark about what I was doing, to spread the umbrella of defensive ignorance. Every moment in that car, flying down those dark and all too familiar highways there was an empty ache of fear in my heart, that a deer or a flat or a cop’s ticket would establish my existence somewhere that I shouldn’t be, like a phantom blip of a stealth bomber on a radar screen. It was, in retrospect, a needless worry held up by the architecture of my own immature lies. But it left its mark on my psyche nonetheless, mixing the flavor with a joy and freedom uncomparable to anything I’d ever known.

About a year ago, I found myself run over one weekend by an unexpected truck of emotion. These relationships we get into in our silly lives…. We pretend they’re no big deal when they start, but that’s only so that they’re approachable enough to start up in the first place. My silly-seeming-at-the-time flood of feelings still feels justified today. But I digress. The point is, I was faced with a startling view of loneliness and futility, and all I could think to do was drive. Things got better, got resolved, and I had perhaps the best summer of my life. But a few weeks later, I was again driving. This time it was the 28.4 miles to the Iowa border, and it was the only way I knew to focus enough to listen through all of CUL8R as a sort of proofread before the final product. The symptom had become the cure, and I’d come to respect the effect that driving and thinking had on me.

Looking back on it now, that drive was like THX1138, whereas my trip to Cali was like Star Wars. The morning when I packed up all my stuff and left was pretty out of the blue however you look at it. But maybe there’d been a little warning that something bigger was coming.

Oh God how did I write a blog post this long and not mention my new friend Cool Socks‽

Advertisement