ham fisted theatrics

Tuneskis. My long-suffering CD player is broken. In an infuriating bit of senility it insists "No DISC" when there is clearly a CD in there, ready to spin. At first I thought it was only burned CDs, but no, it's the bought-and-paid-for kind too. I'm spoiled, too; one of the things I gorged on when I was home was music. I hot-glued my too-big headphones back together and got Limewire and iTunes and had myself a regular illegal-music feast, when I wasn't out drinking and listening to the Black Album or Kanye at Trevor's apartment or annoyingly changing the CDs in people's car stereos. I made mixes for Ashley and Chelsea and Taryn and burned myself copies of each, before that, I rocked hastily assembled rough drafts in my dad's car on the rare occassions I got to borrow it.

This now-dead CD player is the one that played me Elliot Smith's "either/or" which I cracked open on the plane to New York City in August, the first time I heard the opening strains of "Stars of Track and Field" off "If You're Feeling Sinister" waiting in the terminal for a flight to Pittsburgh (initiating my since-broken tradition of buying a Belle and Sebastian album before every plane trip). Sure, the battery cover was missing, making the backpack-rummage-for-wayward-Duracells a necessary pre-jams ritual, and she was all scratched up and you had to press the play button down really hard, but we had memories, man. We had times.

Now I'm strung out, music-less, reading this book Please Kill Me about the origins of punk, and more than anything I just wanna throw on "Raw Power" but I have nothing to throw it on to, listening to Iggy Pop in a subterranean computer lab underneath a business school just seems kinda...sacreligious.

Walking down the street singing quietly to myself is a poor and creepy substitute, and besides, you can't sing the beginning of "Scared Straight" by The Long Winters anyway, it's all horns and sunshine, and when I listened to it on the beach in Hawaii last summer 'cause improbably the Kauai Borders just happened to have the album, clouds rolling by, the whole of my young life ahead of me, realizing I would maybe get four or five or at the very most a dozen perfect moments like this in the rest of my time on Earth, well, the late great CD player was there for that, too.

Music is one of the few things I'm extremely passionate about that I can't also do in some capacity. I love improv but I do improv, I love comedy but I perform comedy, I love to read but I write. I'd be lying if I said I had no aspirations to someday be somehow musically proficient, but for now, it's sort of nice just to be a fan.

I'm babysitting this weekend, interviewing for another gig tommorrow, I'd run out and buy a new CD player, but that's money that could go toward an iPod, or one of its more reasonably priced bastard cousins. That's also money that could go towards Level II improv class, or towards, like, rent.

My life is ridiculously good right now, on the grand radar of things, this is barely a blip. It's just, there are a couple things a 19 year old male shouldn't be deprived of, and one of them's rock and roll, and when you deprive him of it, what else do you expect him to write about?