I’m tired and it’s finals week, so you get my trash. It’s all part of my three part plan:
1: Provide garbage for content.
2: Start out the post by talking about how awful it is in order to alienate the audience.
3: Throw in a couple of pictures of David Lee Roth and a Horse Penis and watch the site flood with hits regardless of how bad the content is. (You thought step three was going to be “Profit”, didn’t you? Wrong. I’m unpredictable. That’s why you keep coming back.)
Enjoy.
***
The platinum records, the sex with countless groupies, the semi-successful solo career - It all pales in comparison to his most impressive accomplishment of all: taking himself seriously while simultaneously wearing a pair of buttless chaps.
The song “Let Forever Be” by the Chemical Brothers is attached, very vividly, to a specific three month period of my life. It was my first summer away from home, stumbling through Jr. College. After putting in level of hard work and dedication over the semester that had yielded an impressive 1.7 GPA, I decided that it was time for some richly deserved rest and relaxation. I would wake up around 11 or 12, and then sit around in my basement apartment and play Playstation games until three or four o’clock. At this point, I would go to work. At the time, my job didn’t really seem like a job. I worked with my friends, listened to CDs, food was free while I was at work and I was young enough to get a feeling of accomplishment from manual labor that I could tell most of my older coworkers did not share. I got paid to hang out with my friends and listen to music, and all I had to do in exchange was cook a little bit of food, which at the time felt like rewarding work.
After getting home from work around 12-1 in the morning, I would usually see what my upstairs roommates, friends from high school, were up to. About every third night they were throwing a party, which I would join in. On the nights that there was no party, one of my friends from work and I would go running. Either way, I was usually screwing around with my friends until about 3 in the morning. I would then dick around on the Internet until five or six in the morning. At five AM, a show on MTV called “Dawn Patrol” would come on. On that show, they would frequently play “Let forever be”. At that point, I would usually head to my room, get some sleep in my uncomfortable twin bed sized futon and repeat the whole process the next day.
As of when I write this, it’s been just shy of 10 years since that summer. I rarely think about it or even really remember it. But whenever I hear that Chemical Brothers song, I immediately feel a warm, euphoric rush of my memories from that summer. I can smell the hot summer air blowing in my window. I can see the layout of the apartment. I can see the gigantic Air Bud: Golden Receiver movie poster that Dan and I put up over the door to the kitchen because it was easier than doing the dishes to just pretend that the kitchen didn’t exist.
It’s funny, because that song played a relatively minor role in that summer. I never owned the CD it was on or thought much about it afterwards. The only time I heard that song was right around dawn on MTV during that summer, and I doubt that I heard it more than five times during that three month span. I would guess that I’ve only heard it seven more times since then. And yet, nothing brings back such a comprehensive and vivid recollection of that period of my life.
So why is it that a song that I only kind of like that I almost never hear brings back memories of that summer in a way that nothing else can? I think that it’s because I never listened to it except during that brief period. Nothing else from that summer is really exclusive to it. I wasted several more years of my life working at the same restaurant. I had been listening to all of the cringe-worthy rap metal that I loved so much before that summer (and continued to listen to it for longer than I would like to admit). I spent time with those friends and in that house long after that summer vacation. I think you know how much I’ve played games since then.
Even though that summer was a great combination of things that I loved to do, the only thing that I did that summer that I never did before or after it was listen to that one song.
Things like that are rare in my life.
Chemical Brothers – Let Forever Be
I’m going to bed. I’ll try to be more interesting on Friday after finals. If you’re lucky, maybe I’ll just throw my political science paper up instead.