Links of the week…
Links of the week:
Remember back in the early days of the internet, when we had angel fire sites and the page that nearly every hand coded html site listed was a link page? On hippiegrrl.com we called that page ‘linkland’ and it was where good links went to live and languish. The linkland page required a lot of upkeep as websites came and went in a flash, but it was a great repository for curating content of the time. Ah – the 90s. In honour of the webs beginning – I am going to post a weekly list of links that you might enjoy. I won’t have to go back and do maintenance to the ‘linkland’ page anymore, since we can consider them stale once the week is over. Such are the present days of the internet – here today, gone tomorrow. Thanks for reading and enjoy!
This week in gen x related content:
First – I am one of you. It took me 2 other candidates to get here, but I am now on board with Senator Sanders and sincerely hope he gets the nomination. Having said that, I wish that getting to this point would have been a little less contentious and I still feel that Senator Warren had the best coalition building power in the race, but it is a new day. A day for revolution.
Now that I am certain I have turned off a majority of the moderate Dems that will be voting “blue no matter who”, we can talk more candidly about what I came here to say.
I do not believe it is a surprise that I support Senator Sanders, considering my far left viewpoints on nearly everything, and at this point, my support is moot since I already voted in a primary (for Senator Warren – although I was still tempted to tick that box for Senator Harris) but I would still like to talk about what is to come. I am hopeful that you, as a Sanders supporter, would see that no matter what happens in this primary season, we will eventually need to unite as one to make change happen.
All this back and forth in the primary season is just a build-up for the real fight. November. The general election. The country is in dire need of a change to both the office of the Presidency and down-ballot races in key States where we either need to pick up or retain Democratic seats. Without a majority in the Executive and Legislative branches of government, we will have a stalemate throughout the next 4 years. This could be good if we flip the Senate and retain the House and still have Trump as POTUS*, but it would be VERY VERY bad if it goes the other way and the Republicans gain control of the House, retaining their hold on the Senate and Presidency.
That outcome would spell the end to every progressive policy that we want to put in place. It would set our country back hundreds of years since they could institute even more conservative (religious right based) policies that would restrict the rights of nearly everyone except the extremely wealthy, white, cis, straight, dudes.
As a Sanders supporter, I am pretty certain that you already know all of the above and that is why you are so adamant to elect Bernie in November. And again, I am with you, but here is the caveat. I have voted in every general election since 1992 and what I can say with certainty is, when you don’t unite behind the candidate that is put up for the nomination and come out in BIG numbers to vote, you lose.
And that is why I want to BEG you to please – if the candidate isn’t Bernie – still go vote. You may not want to pull that lever or tick that box for Biden, but the alternative will keep Trump in the oval office for 4 more years and inflict permanent and lasting damage to our country and the life that we all want to be living. The lives we all deserve. The freedom and rights that we should be able to take for granted and not have to continue fighting our whole lives to obtain.
The progressive (and even radical) ideas that we want to move forward will NEVER get legs if we don’t get rid of the current administration. 4 more years will give them more power than any administration should have and I don’t think our democracy can survive that. I am not being hyperbolic when I say that – I am being real.
And I know, from experience, that voting for a third party or write-in candidate causes the same thing to happen. I voted for Perot. I voted for Nader. I am not ashamed to say that I cast ballots for the third party, but I am disappointed in my former self that I didn’t see the writing on the wall. I told myself that I lived in a State (New York) where it didn’t really matter because the Democrat was going to sweep no matter what. I at least went to the voting booth and cast a ballot, but I still wish I would have united behind the party pick during those elections. In voting for the third party candidates I was setting a bad example for future generations. I was showing future voters that it would be just fine to vote for whomever you wish without any consequences.
Don’t get me wrong – when I voted for Nader it was because he was my parties pick, as I was registered Green for many years, but I still regret making those decisions because of the stir that they caused in future elections. The decision to vote for Nader, when he wasn’t the Democratic nominee set a standard for Clinton to lose in 2016. I can see a direct line from the 2000 to the 2016 election and I feel complicit in that decision.
So, having said that, I implore you, please, if Senator Sanders does not win the nomination, vote blue anyway. Don’t stay home and sulk (as I would have if I didn’t have Perot or Nader to fill that void) and don’t write in Sanders. Please, go vote for Biden and then vote in the down-ballot races as well, because they are SUPER important. I don’t think we are really stressing that fact enough in the media. The Senate needs to be flipped and we need to retain the House to continue this Sanders revolution. It might not be led by the person that we want to lead it, but it will happen if we get our country back from the clutches of the far right. Voting blue, down the whole ticket, is the only way to make this happen.
Thank you for listening to my ramble. I just really don’t want to see my fellow Sanders supporters do what I did back in the day and vote from a space of disillusionment. This race is TOO important to do that. No matter how sad, mad, frustrated, or angry we feel that our candidate isn’t the nominee, we have to set those feelings aside to do what is best for everyone in this country. We can grieve the loss of that particular form of radical action, but then we must get up and do what we need to do to continue fighting another day. This election could seriously determine whether we have the capacity and the ability to continue fighting in the next 4 years and beyond. Don’t make the same mistakes I made back in the day – vote Blue no matter who and move our country forward together.
Happy voting!
PS – After all is said and done, we need to have a SERIOUS talk about sexism and racism and homophobia in the electoral process and American politics in general. Starting with the most diverse field of nominees and landing with the two White, Cishet, dudes in the final primaries (I know that Gabbard is still in it, but I just cannot with her) is abominable. Dems can certainly do better, but we need to discuss how and make it real for the next cycle in 2022. A great start would be to LISTEN to people from marginalized communities and have constructive conversations led by those who are directly affected by bias in politics. Just a thought for the future.
Generation X – the perpetual middle child. We are often left out of conversations about generational contributions and that is most likely because of how we were treated from day one.
Growing up with the original “me” generation (boomers) as parents really took a toll on us as a group. We were seen as lazy in relation to their generation, but that was mainly because in the 80s/90s we were in our teens and twenties. What kids AREN’T lazy in their teens? Laziness is a defining factor of the teenage years. Sure there are those who have a drive from the day they are born, but those people are outliers. Most teenagers (and yes I am making a generalization here) are lazy.
Teenagers also need more sleep than children and adults do (read about that here) and so it can seem like they are lazy when their bodies are just craving more sleep. Due to their schedules, they usually don’t get the right amount of sleep (9 hours per night is what a teen actually needs) and so they may appear groggy during the day. Although these sleep patterns are seen in teenagers from all generations, somehow Generation X was tagged with the laziness and slacker labels. Due to these labels, we have been ignored or inched out of many conversations over the years and now, because we are a slightly smaller generation sandwiched between two larger generations (the ‘me’ generation boomers and the ‘me me me’ generation Millennials) things like this happen.
Being ignored has it’s upside too, though. It means that we were not marketed to heavily until we reached our 40s and 50s. Either advertisers didn’t believe we had disposable income (which could be the case since we lived through a pretty bad down turn in the markets in both 2001 and 2008) or they simply couldn’t figure out how to use our grunge music to sell us products. Our musicians didn’t sell out in their 20s like some of the current day musicians have. And hey – no judgement on the sell out thing – Millennials need to sell out in order to acquire all the things that will make them feel safe and happy. Gen Xers were just better at making due.
Now, we can thank our former latch key status for supposedly teaching us to be better with our finances, so it isn’t all bad, but it can be disconcerting to see our generation completely ignored. Especially when it comes to popular media. Specifically, a show that a lot of us adored when it first came out in the 90s, that has now decided to completely erase us from the timeline of, well, time!
That show is Tales of the City, which has been rebooted on Netflix for another go at it. Armisted Maupin has been brought on as a consultant and the new series revolves around the old characters, Anna Madrigal who is now 90 and the gang from Barbary Lane, who are now supposedly in their late 40s. They have also added new characters – Shawna, the daughter of Connie Bradshaw, who is 25 years old and a slew of other Millennials that are the new tenants and ‘Barbarians’.
I would normally suspend my disbelief to be okay with the fact that some of the ages of characters are not exactly correct, but when it results in everyone my age being written out of the story it makes me a little mad. I mean – Shawna should be in her 40s. She should be a Gen Xer. But that wouldn’t make for great television since they wouldn’t be able to have the boomers make fun of her as a Millennial (which they do several times throughout the new series). The main characters from the original series (Mary Ann, Brian, Mouse, DeDee, etc.), in this timeline, are actually Gen X, but because they should be in their 50s/60s, they act more like boomers. And they refer to them as old folks, even though the actors are clearly in their late 40s and early 50s. So although there are characters that are the age range of Gen X, they are not perceived as such. These people were in their 20s in the original show (filmed in the 90s, set in the 70s), which means that with the normal passing of time they would actually be in their 60s/70s now. All this to erase a generation that nobody wants to reference and be sure to include the 2 ME generations in the storyline.
I get that it is just a show, but think about how popular culture has treated Gen X over the years and you will see why this can be bothersome. It bleeds into other parts of our lives in a way that allows the 2 generations before and after us to not take us seriously. It allows them to dismiss us in order to serve their own needs. Even while we are generating social security to take care of the boomers and allowing the Millennials to come back home to live with us after college or their first failed attempt in the workplace. We have supported both generations emotionally for YEARS and what do we get out of it? Invisibility.
I suppose that as a generation, Xers might LIKE to be invisible as it did provide some good cover in our younger years. We had a lot more freedom than the Millennials are getting. But, in the long run, the price we paid for anonymity has caught up to us. We didn’t have to see our idols sell out for a quick buck, but we also lost a lot of our people along the way.
So – while we languish here in the next decade, trying to make our way as middle-agers, we will remain invisible. As we plow through all the stereotypical assumptions about our generation to help make the world a better place and rid our politics of boomers like our current POTUS*, we will just have to consider ourselves the new silent generation. Maybe we didn’t have a world war to unite us, but we have certainly had a lot to deal with in the last 40-55 years on earth and life will continue to be a grind. The upside is that Gen Xers know how to deal with ‘the grind’ and we will eventually prevail no matter how invisible we are. It is, after all, always the quiet ones that make the most lasting impact.
Today I was sent a link to an author Twitter account that brought up a very interesting dialogue concerning the state of Gen Xers. The author, Sally Kilpatrick, asked a question concerning the moms of Gen X women that know how to do domestic tasks that we, as Gen X women do not know how to do. She is doing research for a character in her next novel that is, apparently, going to be a Gen Xer, and she wanted to get feedback from women born between 1965 and 1980.
As you might have imagined, it brought her some nasty feedback as there are people on the radical side of feminism that were offended by her assumption that women need to do domestic work and people on the side of radical non-feminism that were upset that she thought they couldn’t do domestic work at all. Both of these opinions, and the resulting vitriol she received (this is a common occurrence on Twitter whenever a woman or person from any marginalized group tweets) are not where I want to focus this post. The question itself raised some interesting thoughts for me, as a Gen Xer that was raised by two working parents. My mom was the main breadwinner for the majority of my formative years and she certainly pushed me to be high achieving, but in my experience that was not a replacement for learning basic life skills.
I think the difference here, and what the twitterverse might be taking too seriously, is that I wasn’t taught domestic chores in order to ‘grab a husband’ or ‘live my life alone’, but I learned how to cook and clean so that I could function in whatever scenario I chose to put myself into as an adult. She wasn’t ‘training’ me for domestic life, she was preparing me for the inevitable. Humans need to eat and keep their living spaces clean. These are basic things that ALL humans, no matter what sex or gender they happen to be, need to know how to perform. Unfortunately, many people on the boy side of the gender spectrum do not get the same education or treatment when it comes to domestic chores, or at least they didn’t prior to the late 1980s. Today, in America, we are moving toward more egalitarian setups for our lives, so that means that people that fall on the male side of the gender spectrum have to learn the same things that people on the female side do. This also goes for non gender binary folks. Humans, in general, need to keep their spaces clean and have a way to feed themselves.
But her question was not specifically about cooking and cleaning. Even if you didn’t have a parent that taught you those skills, and you didn’t have a home economics class in school, you would still be able to read a cookbook or watch a YouTube video to figure out basic life skills. Kilpatrick was focusing more on the craft art type of tasks. Things that you would have learned if you finished high school before 1985, but possibly not if matriculated after that time. The only way to learn some of these things, like sewing, knitting, crocheting, and other household craft tasks, would be to have the knowledge passed down to you from someone older. In fact, in my case, I learned many of these skills from my grandmothers. My Nana taught me to knit and my Grandma taught me cross-stitch. I took the skills I learned from those ladies and learned beading and macrame on my own, with the help of books and videos (yes – videos – it was the 90s after all.)
I did learn to cook from my mother and she passed her sauce recipe down to me (as all Italian mothers do) but I also used the basic skills I was taught to continue learning on my own. When I was in junior high, I actually did take home economics (or home ec for short) as it was still offered. The class was divided into 4 ten week periods consisting of sewing, typing, cooking, and wood shop. In the 80s, home ec was combined with technology and that meant that all students took all home ec subjects. Prior to that time the ‘boys’ would take shop and the ‘girls’ would take sewing, cooking, and typing. But, I was in one of the last classes to have these mandatory classes so we just took everything. This was a very positive experience for me as it allowed me to learn how to use machinery as well.
That year I learned how to thread a sewing machine and make a pillow AND how to use a table saw to cut wood to make a base for a lamp. I also learned how to drill a whole in a Chianti bottle and not crack it to make the lamp itself. I learned how to type 80 words per minute on what would now be considered an old fashioned typewriter AND how to bake chocolate chip cookies. I am not certain if home ec is still offered in high schools today, but if it is, I hope that any human is able to take it no matter their gender. I hope we haven’t moved backwards to re-gendering the tasks. With everything going on in America to try and move our society back to the 1950s, I wouldn’t be surprised if home ec was again something that only girls were enrolled in while boys were enrolled in shop class. That would be a shame, but it wouldn’t be surprising considering the current state of thought in America. (see: Mike Pence – I refuse to give him any linked clicks, but you can Google him)
I also believe that those of us born between 1965 and 1980 found great ways to learn things on our own. Being latch key kids gave us a freedom that Boomers and Millennials did not have. We came home from school and had to figure out how to manage our time to complete homework or make a snack. We had to navigate public transportation and we were given much more freedom to ride bikes and play at friend’s homes without a lot of oversight. We learned how to be self-sufficient at an early age and that has helped us moving into our teen and adult years. Being able to seek out information to learn the things we need to know has always been a skill of Gen X and the Internet was the best tool we could have hoped for to assist us with that research.
In light of this, it seems that Gen Xers (and the author focused mainly on women here, but I want to open it up to ALL genders) are the most resourceful generation of all. We could take or leave the home ec and shop classes and still be skilled at tasks that were taught there simply by seeking out the skills we needed to complete those tasks on our own. Basically, we were happy when a teacher or family member or friend wanted to convey new skills to us that we could take with us, but if we couldn’t find someone that was willing to teach us in our immediate circle, we found the information other ways. Libraries were our friends back before the Internet and now we use all the tools at our disposal with a computer and a wi-fi connection. In the end, the members of Gen X should feel proud to have well rounded skill sets. We worked hard for that knowledge and we are willing to share it with any Boomer or Millennial that comes calling. Tech support or mentorship – either way we are always willing to lend a hand and impart knowledge that we gained on our own.
If you doubt the Gen X penchant for learning new things independently, consider these cartoons that were some of our favourites back in the day…
And the most important formative Gen X show – this made us readers!
This week, the Buffalo News printed a piece on coffeehouses in the Gusto section of the paper. This was very cool and I am super excited for the continued success of coffee in Buffalo, NY. While the scene is growing today, we at Gen X Reactions are more on the side of nostalgia and enjoy a trip down memory lane when it comes to coffee. I am also famous (amoung my small group of family & friends) for being somewhat of an archivist (read: hoarder), which is why I have the following gem from 1997. It was an article on the ‘new’ coffee scene in Buffalo. I’m certain that the 90s were not the only booming time for coffee in Buffalo – I mean it is a Rust Belt city and what substance keeps the working people going like coffee – but it was a great time.
In the mid-90s, we were just getting the Seattle scene wave in the city and it was glorious. You could still smoke indoors, which made the ambiance of the coffeehouses much more mysterious and murky. Baristas talked to patrons like bartenders – the relationship was not merely transactional as it can feel today. Technology had not reached everyone yet, in the form of smartphones and only a few lucky (read: wealthy) kids had cellphones at all. We would sit for hours, playing mancala and chatting with the various people that frequented these spots.
So – without further ado – here is the article that I speak of. Enjoy the nostalgia and be sure to patronize the coffeehouses of today! They are cool in their own way and in 20 years we will look back on them with the same fondness we do for these joints. After all, Grindhaus is Java Temple, Remedy House is Stimulance, Tipico is Topic, and Aroma will always be Aroma. It is all in your perception.
This was truly a great time in Buffalo for coffee and camaraderie. The 90s had it all – grunge, caffeine, nicotine, and that thing where you ingest substances until 4 am and then get up for school the next morning at 8 am like nothing happened – I am pretty sure it is called youth (h/t to Stefan).
2019 is shaping up to be pretty awesome, coffee-wise, too for Buffalo – so check out the Gusto article for more on that. I must say that I was very disappointed that they didn’t include Caffe Aroma in the article, if even just to give a nod with spot and sweetness_7 as one of the originals. At this point, they ARE the original for Buffalo. They also snubbed my favourite coffeehouse in Buffalo: Grindhaus. Why they were left out is confusing since they are an excellent place to get your caffeine fix. They also have awesome food choices for a quick snack or a lunchtime meal – like the VLT with a side of mujadara or a ricotta toast.
Still – lots of awesomeness is finally happening in the Buffalo coffee scene. They have embraced third wave coffee much better than the previous generation embraced fair trade (Stimulance did do fair trade and a cup program, just for the sake of clarity) and the baristas are extremely knowledgeable now by comparison.
The coffee scene in Buffalo has definitely been revived, after surviving a dry spell in the first decade of this new century. So get out there and enjoy!
Peace and happy caffeinating,
Punkgrrrl
Everyone has that one band that they are drawn to. The band that they will go see in any venue they can. The band they will travel to distant places to see, even if they can see them in a local venue as well. For me, that band was The Tragically Hip. Gordon Downie, Paul Langlois, Rob Baker, Gord Sinclair, and Johnny Fay. A band of friends that started cranking out hits in the 80s and toured relentlessly across Canada and border towns in America for the better part of 30 years. This band wasn’t like anything else I had heard as a teenager and they drew me in immediately. From my favourite song (Courage) to the first song I heard performed live (Grace, Too) to the song that always makes me weep (Long Time Running), the Hip has provided a soundtrack to my life.
Growing up in Niagara Falls, NY we had a complicated relationship with the border. Canadians were nice people when you were visiting them on their side of the river, but when they came over to shop at the outlets they turned into very different beings. As a teenager, I worked at the Factory Outlet and had to deal with the reality of bargain shopping Canadians on a weekly basis. But these Canadians were not who this post is about. Canadians, in a general way (from the perspective of a border town American), were kind and cool. They seemed liberal in a way that we could never be and they had really great music. The Hip wasn’t the only band that I listened to from Canada. The Lowest of the Low, the Watchmen, Sloan, Alanis Morissette, Sarah McLachlan, City and Colour, Metric, Broken Social Scene, Barenaked Ladies, The Tea Party, Sarah Harmer, Billy Talent, 54-40, Our Lady Peace, The Trews, Matthew Good Band, I Mother Earth, Sam Roberts, Big Sugar, Arcade Fire, The Sheepdogs, Arkells, Moist, July Talk, The New Pornographers, Teenage Head, Mother Mother, Spirit of the West, Bif Naked, Skinny Puppy, Alexisonfire, and Econoline Crush were all in heavy rotation on CFNY (102.1 the edge) during the 90s and 00s, but the Hip topped them all.
From Hockey to wars to Canadian geography and politics, Gord’s lyrics taught us, as Americans, the things that our history teachers never bothered to mention. A funny thing about the American educational system is that we don’t seem to care about the history of other countries. Sure – we have to take a world history section in junior high (middle school) and some of us go on to enjoy that and learn on our own, but in Canada they actually take courses in North American history that cover the United States and Mexico in a way that makes them experts in our history. Meanwhile, Americans only learn about America and form a skewed perspective of the world. We know nothing about Canadian or Mexican history, despite sharing a continent with those countries. In fact, we don’t even really know our own history since most of the textbooks we use are whitewashed to make us feel better about our country. This belief that America is the ‘greatest country in the world’ is supposed to lead us to be more patriotic, but, in the end, it is killing us. But I digress – this post is about music – and some pretty awesome music, at that. My point was to say that through the Tragically Hip, I learned a lot about Canadian history that I never would have learned had I just focused on American music in my teens and twenties.
October 17, 2018, was the 1 year anniversary of Gord Downie’s passing. The sadness of his loss is still palpable, but he left behind a wonderful canon of music that will be forever treasured by past and current fans, as well as those fans that are yet to discover Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip. I am sad to think that I will never get to hear him tell the shark story, live, on tour and to hear him riff during other Hip hits, but I am heartened by the beautiful music that he did put into the world. We will have those recordings forever. In the end, he was also extremely active in the aboriginal struggles in Canada, and in his last days, he dedicated himself fully to that cause. This is the legacy of Downie and the Hip. The music was just a soundtrack to the life that the band led together and background music for a country that still thrives in the face of the world’s ills. Canada Forever!
If you are one of the aforementioned music lovers that have yet to discover The Tragically Hip – please take this opportunity to head to your streaming music site of choice (or invest in an album or 6) and get to know them!
Peace and happy listening!
Punkgrrrl
Awesome reference regarding Canadian History and The Tragically Hip:
In case you thought that protest music was dead – take a look at this YouTube video for evidence that artists are working hard to protest the current administrations.
And for the history of protest music in America – take a look at this:
The video above leaves them out, for some reason, but here is a video of one of the greatest protest bands of all time. Yeah, I said it, all time:
And let us not forget Ani:
How often do you hear a song on the radio that can take you back to a specific place and time in your past? A song that is so indicative of a specific memory that you can, even if just for a moment, feel like you are instantly transported to a happier moment. This morning, on my way to work, the Billy Joel song “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” came on the radio and that feeling rushed over me. Most songs by Billy Joel, from his 1970s phase, will transport me through time, but this song has special meaning.
When I was a teenager I was obsessed with music from the 1960s and 70s. Billy Joel was one of my favorites because when I was a child my parents would play him, along with such greats as Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Supertramp, Yes, Carly Simon, Chaka Kahn, Jackson Browne, Chicago, Hall and Oates, Fleetwood Mac, Carole King, Queen, Jethro Tull, The Doobie Brothers, Stevie Wonder, and James Taylor, on heavy repeat. As you can tell from this list, which is just the tip of the iceberg, my parents loved music. My whole family was musical and that was one of the reasons I ended up eventually pursuing a degree in music, but that is for another post.
Getting back to Billy Joel, in 1999 I was living on Elmwood Avenue near Summer Street. At the time there was a Bakerman’s Donut Shoppe and a Wilson Farms directly across the street. Bakerman’s was not a good place to hang out at night. Things went down on that corner that most people in the neighborhood did not want to be involved in. At the time, I was working an overnight shift, so I was rarely at home during the nighttime hours, but on the weekends I would be off for 3-day stretches (working 4 by 10 is actually the best – I miss it) beginning at 10 am on Fridays and ending at 8 pm on Mondays. I would spend Friday trying to adjust back to a ‘normal person’ schedule and by Saturday evening realize that my adjustment had failed and simply return to the vampire life.
During this time I was driving a Toyota Corolla that I bought when I was in college (new!) and, by this time, had about 100K miles on it, easily. It was a huge upgrade from the 1985 Ford Escort that had a push button radio where the dial would shoot across to the set radio stations. Actually it was a 1985 and and a half (the 1/2 year changed over to flat headlights – hello Jeopardy – I’m ready for my appearance!)! Automatic locks, along with electric windows and cd players, were not yet standard in the 92 or 93 (my memory fails here) Corolla but I did, however, have a radio with a tape player!
I carried all my mixtapes around with me at all times, housed in one of those metal lunchboxes that many grrrls in the 1990s carried in place of purses. This one came with a CKOne set that I was given for Christmas one year so I just used it to store the tapes, never as a purse. It fit about 30 tapes at a time, so I had to place my tapes in a rotation from bedroom wall to silver lunchbox and back to the wall. The cassette player also had the flip feature, so when the tape got to the end it would flip over and start playing the other side. This was, truly, advanced technology for the time, which quickly became old news a few years after I bought my car.
One tape, in particular, was a favorite of mine and the Grunge Doctor‘s. And this, my dear readers, is what we now affectionately refer to as “the tape”. One night, after going out with the doctor (long before he became a doctor!) and his brother, I had dropped the brother off at home and returned to our apartment. This was a Saturday night and my plan was to park the car on Elmwood and not leave the apartment for the rest of the weekend. We had stocked up on the essentials from Wilson Farms and made sure that the beverages were filled to the appropriate levels. I arrived upstairs, threw off my shoes, sat on the couch and proceeded to loaf for 3 full days. (Ahh, my twenties were a wonderful and lazy time!)
Earlier in the year, my car was parked in the back parking lot at our building and it had been broken into. The drivers side window was shattered and the aforementioned silver lunchbox was stolen. I always believed that the people who stole it (they didn’t take anything else from my car) probably got super pissed when they got down the street and realized it was not a purse, but a box full of tapes. And MIXTAPES at that. Not even valuable outside of the sentimental value I had placed in them. Having had a break in happen to me already on this stretch of Elmwood Avenue, you would think that I would have been extra careful, but, this particular weekend I was more concerned with being off from work than worrying about my car. I left it parked on Elmwood for 3 straight days and never went out to check on it.
Little did I know, the brother had left the back passenger side door unlocked. He was already used to people having cars that locked automatically and did not know that he had to manually lock his door. Since he did not lock the door, it was available, on Elmwood, for 3 whole days and nights, to any passerby that decided to rifle through it. And rifle through it they did. When I returned to my car on Monday night to go to work, there was a distinct level of disarray that I noticed well before entering the car. The passenger side rear door was open, not just unlocked, but open. Everything that was formerly in my glove compartment was strewn across the front and back seat. Everything that was in my back seat was thrown all over. A blanket, 2 hats, a pair of gloves, a scarf, bottles from different beverages (maybe mine, maybe not), an umbrella, 2 ice scrapers, a snow brush, and various other bits of papers were scattered throughout the car. All of this was no big deal. Other than the violation of people rifling through my things, I had learned from the first break in to not leave anything valuable in the car, so I felt good about the fact that there were no broken windows and nothing major was missing.
Just as I was letting out a sigh of relief, I sat down in the driver’s seat, turned my head toward the center console, and saw it. My tape deck – my prized possession in the car – had the face ripped off. The person that was trying to steal the radio obviously didn’t realize that it was the manufacturer model, which meant that it was pretty securely in the dashboard, and really only the face was detachable with a great deal of force. I could tell that they had tried to pry the face off with my ice scraper and were unsuccessful. It was half off, so I ripped it the rest of the way. It was either that or leave it hanging there while I was driving and potentially have it fly off half way to work. I sighed again and started the car. After all, I had to go to work. As I started to head north up Elmwood to get to the 198 I noticed that the cassette tape that was in the player, prior to the break-in, was still there, in the player. And it was playing. This, I thought, was actually great. At least the cassette player still works. (Even though I was goth back then I still tried to look on the sunny side of these situations.)
After a few days of driving back and forth to work with “the tape” playing, it started to skip. Halfway through a song, it would stop and flip over and start playing the other side. In order to stop this from occurring, I shoved a matchbook above “the tape” to steady it, which appeared to work. After a week of listening to “the tape” over and over, I finally got bored with it and decided to eject it so I could listen to the radio. But, of course, that was not possible now since the face was missing from the cassette player and I had no way to get to a station. I also realized I could not put in another tape because the eject button was gone. “The tape” was the only thing I would ever be able to listen to in the car, ever again. It would be either “the tape” or silence in my Corolla henceforth. A break in that didn’t seem like that big of a deal became a really big deal in a matter of minutes in this realization. Now I would have to listen to my hits of the 1970s for eternity.
Oh right – I never told you what was actually on “the tape”! So, as you may have guessed, the first song on side A was “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” by Billy Joel. The first song on side B was “The Tide Is High” by Blondie. These two songs were the most frequently listened to due to the constant flipping. I went through a multitude of matchbooks to try and make the flipping stop, but in the end, the cassette player won that battle. Other songs that graced “the tape” were “Come Sail Away” by Styx, “Rhiannon” by Fleetwood Mac, “Aqualung” by Jethro Tull, “The End” by the Doors (of course) and many others that I cannot recall. I am sure that the doctor remembers more than I do, since he was my most frequent passenger during “the tape” years. Yes. Years. He actually got so annoyed with this situation that, for the holidays one season, he headed to The Stereo Advantage (now defunct) and bought me a new cassette player for my car.
Ah – sweet relief. I had the new player installed in January and the universe righted itself. When I went to pick up my car from the shop that installed it, the installer asked me if I wanted him to dislodge “the tape” so I could listen to it in my new player. I looked at him with a look of disgust that he probably thought was super rude and said: “um – no – I’m done with that.” And that was the end of “the tape”. But was it? I still love all the songs on that tape, individually, and I made a playlist that is a homage to “the tape” and my youth. So if you are looking for a fun trip down memory lane, instigated by “the tape”, check out the link below. You will NOT be disappointed.
Peace and happy listening,
Punkgrrrl
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