Beep
KeithHandy posted in Old skool, Your Soul on September 9th, 2007
Speaking of cassettes, I threw a lot of them away so that I can hopefully whittle the collection down small enough to fit in one carrying case. A few that I kept, though, were from my old-skool answering machine (I lost a part of myself with the obsoletion of the art of creating twisted, non-sequitur, perfectly-timed 20-second outgoing messages — if that beast had kept kicking, I would have kept using it forever).
All I can say about these is: dear everyone, as a whole, you are so freakin’ confusing. Who the hell are you all? (That’s not a literal question — yes, I know all your names, I just mean, like, collectively.) And also, I feel like a dick. I’ve been a dick to everyone, in the name of “fighting the system” or something. Sorry. (But thanks for the funny ones.)
Oh, and anyone who gave me their phone number in 1994… it’s not good anymore. Yeah, I actually tried some of them.
Psychology question
Okay, so assuming most forward-thinking people have rejected Freudian psychology on the basis that the past is over (not to mention I’m pretty sure we really don’t want to hump our mothers), what if we believe that time is an illusion and therefore the past is not gone, per se, but just in a different place than we are now? It seems pretty easy to bring it back into existence when I go through old cassettes, go to reunions, or rack my brain for autobiographical details for this blog, etc. — so does this mean it still should be dealt with, since it’s not “in the past” so much as “in a particular box”?
Speaking of autobiographical details, there was a gap in my So You Want… series where I stated flat-out that I don’t remember deciding to do an album in my own name. But I seem to have found a missing link in the evolution of that idea. A cassette labeled Knocked Senseless helped to jog that memory. Actually, the box was labeled, but the cassette, which was not in the box, was not labeled, so I thought it had gone missing over a decade ago. The little piece of splicing tape connecting the tape to the leader had long since come off at both ends, so I had to take it apart and fix it — twice — just to listen to both sides. And since it was still labeled as a promotional demo that had been given to me (which it was, before I taped over it), it could have easily been mistaken for trash.
When I say “evolutionary link”, I’m not kidding — it really is the mutant bastard frankenbridge between the Episodes album and Open the Window. It’s only a demo-quality mockup, mainly for me to listen to in the car and “think about it”, but does include rare early versions of Cheap Thrills and Hard, aka B. D. Caterpillar, that I don’t have anywhere else. Shortly after this, I went through one of those “dark night of the soul” thingies, and the tone of my song selection shifted from callous (it’s hard to believe Children’s Abortion Workshop was still making the list) to hypersensitive (Lullabye for a Fallen Angel). But the main point is, I was already conceiving of a self-credited solo album while taking those classes in Buffalo; I just wasn’t announcing it yet.
