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this week i gave away most of
my tapes... a gentle purge of unnecessary stuff.
i have two boom boxes here, but
their tape players have gone bad. they whirr and screech and
squeal like slaughterhouse pigs. and i haven't had a tape player
in my car for two years past. most of these 200-some cassettes
have gone unplayed for even longer. they slept in a large box
in the other room amid dust, dead flies, dormant christmas decorations,
and my other untouched joliet moving boxes.
looking at those boxes i remember
how unsettled i still must be - am - even after three years.
if i were as settled as i could be, much of the stuff in those
boxes would be out on the walls and shelves around me, the kind
of Museum of Me that most of our places become. but the boxed
life reminds me of my semi-nomadic status.... and how much i
hate it.... how much i need it... better to move and become a
distant memory... a dream... than to stay and become an invisible
object... a rock.
no. i am not moving again - i
am just thinking about it. i don't want to move again in the
near future. but i am realiziing that in some ways - vague even
to me - i have not really moved in to this place yet. and that's
kind of freaky. what am i waiting for? the other foot? the next
earthquake? ("Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be
taken from you.")
so i stumbled into this big box
of tunes and decided... maybe it was my recent reading of thoreau,
but i doubt it. maybe it's just time to divest. i think i woke
up last sunday out of a dream or something... just knowing that
i had to give this stuff away... that it would be a good thing
to do... still...
there was a little sadness in
it. as i sifted through hands full of cassettes, i remembered
how much this music mattered... like that day pat and i sailed
down highway 61 into the heart of mississippi delta blues country
with (blasphemy!) morrissey's "viva hate" wailing and
whining... like jumping and shouting with muddy's blues (you
can't imagine me jumping and shouting , can you?)... like knocking
myself out on sweet schubert tunes for the very first time just
because angela carter wrote of their power to tame wild beasts...
which they did... and do.
all this would come to mind as
i noted which tapes these students would pluck up and cart off.
goodbye... goodbye.... and i would smile because i knew - or
hoped - that somebody was going to discover some very coolstrangenew
sounds in their own fresh contexts... in cars with friends, alone
in a room...
an accumulation of stuff may
be one of the most noticeable features of human living... in
our time... in our place. no longer citizens, we are consumers.
this is our most significant and valuable civic function. we
shop. we acquire stuff, welcome it, unwrap it, appreciate it,
despair of it, desire it, and shop again. as citizens and true
patriots, our most profound duty is to keep the economy running
smoothly (i.e. fuel the desire of the hoplessly wealthy whose
dream we are) by desiring all of this useless crap... which we
mistake for beauty... for that which is worthy of our desire...
i wonder what is worthy of our desire.
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