i continued digging into my old possessions this evening, resulting in huge stacks of paper going out to the recycling bin, and several hundred pounds of books and other items stacked up, headed for goodwill tomorrow morning. i listened to cassette tapes of my old band, PG-13, and marveled at how good we sounded, then i listened to some other tapes of various bands i tried to jam with and I marveled at how self-absorbed i sounded. i don't know if this experience is universal, but there's an odd sense of discontinuity when you hear an old song, and the lyrics take on new, improved meanings. many 80s songs do this to me. it's as if i had settled on some simplified, wrong idea of what a song meant, but now that i'm older, i hear the irony in the lyrics, or the nuances in an instrumental part, and realize why the song was so popular. tina turner's "what's love got to do with it" did this to me big time, recently. in a way the same thing happened while listening to the old jam tapes. there was so much that i wasn't hearing back then. in comparison to what was possible, i hear myself trying to fit into the musical fads of the day, and failing. i guess i'm my own worst critic, hearing all that old stuff makes me want to be in a band again too.
when i moved into this house three years ago I was much more of a pack rat. a lot of the stuff i wanted to keep just seems worthless now.
then there was the paperwork, binders and folders from a decade ago that feel as if they were excavated from 100 years ago. the japan internships program, my stint at a multimedia startup, austin community college, UT, the "writing on the air" radio show, tutoring at st. ed's.
No comments:
Post a Comment