Homie G and the Time Machine

I'm exhausted. I spent yesterday trying to finish a paper while walking with a group of students around EMU campus. Every time they sat down for an orientation or presentation, my seventy pound laptop that is powered by candles and a thin rat on a wheel came out and I was picking away at a mere seven pager about the politics of recognition. All day it was up and down, in and out, unpacking the laptop, packing the laptop. Then I had to drive back from Ypsilanti to Detroit, get picked up by Suzanne, drive to Inkster, pick up the Escort from Livonia Auto, and then drive back to Detroit for class. I still had a paragraph or two to go by the time I made it to the WSU library at 5:30. By 6:10, I was in class with my paper in hand. Whew.

I'm not the young man I used to be. There was a time when I just would have stayed up all night writing the paper and would have had it done by morning but I don't have the stamina for that any more. Of course, those weren't exactly halcyon days either. Sure, I may have been able to stay up all night but I also would have fallen asleep in class or skipped work or just generally been a rude, crabby person to everyone I know. So it's a trade off, I guess.

Anyway, the great news is the Escort didn't have anything significant wrong with it. A spark plug wire had gotten burned and that was it. Now, a fresh wire is in its place and is clipped to the others so it won't fall onto the exhaust again and the car runs like a dream -- like a not-recently-cleaned dream from 1996. (Would that make it a dirty dream?) Anyway, it's a huge blessing to #1 have a car that runs, #2 to not have to pay with my various appendages (arms, legs) to have it fixed, and #3 to have found a mechanic that apparently is trustworthy and isn't out to leech my blood. Always a good thing.

And now for some time travel music!

Some songs take you back almost bodily to certain moments, certain eras. Here are a few songs that do the H.G. Wells thing to me:

Pearl Jam's Yield Album -- Jennifer Allen and I had just broken up for the last time and I was living in Pocatello in a bleak state of being. The music was loud and weird and even the photo on the cover looked appropriately washed out and empty for how I felt at the time.


John Denver's Greatest Hits Vol. 1 and Paul Simon's Negotiations and Love Songs -- These were the albums I listened to over and over again in Jackson Hole, WY while living in a windowless, basement room with water pipes for a ceiling. As cheesy and/or sentimental as they seem now, I'd still put Annie's Song and Hearts and Bones up against any other song written in the last 20 years. Plus, Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard? Hello? Does it get better? I think not.

The Indigo Girls' cover of Mark Knopfler's Romeo and Juliet -- I attended my first big concert at Park West (now Wolf Mountain) when I saw the IG on their Rites of Passage tour. I was eighteen, all on my own, and was completely enraptured. Amy Ray did her solo and played Romeo and Juliet. As she was performing the song, this gargantuan full moon started to rise behind her head and the audience was trying to get her to turn around and see it. It was rare, unplanned, and wonderful.


Coldplay's Trouble -- I'm not a fan of Coldplay but whenever I hear this song, I remember a weekend afternoon when we were living in Boise. We went for one of our "make the children sleep" drives and ended up in the desert somewhere between Melba and the Raptor Refuge. Both girls were asleep in their car seats and Suzanne had dozed off next to me. Trouble came on the radio and the mournful piano intro caught me. It was just this very still, kind of idyllic moment

Regina Spektor's Begin To Hope -- When I first moved to Michigan, I saw a dark haired young woman perform a song on Conan O'Brien. I liked the song and I remember noticing that Conan really seemed genuinely impressed with her instead of just the usual "thanks for coming" and a handshake. I didn't remember the woman's name or the name of the song but a couple of days later, I was listening to NPR while driving down Wayne Road and they were interviewing a singer named Regina Spektor. The more I listened, the more I realized it was the woman from Conan. They played bits of her various new songs and asked her about her upbringing in Russia. I was in love. I drove immediately to Best Buy and bought her CD. I played it non-stop for the first six months I was here. It will always call me back to that time.



By the way, on a completely random note, I was just rereading what I'd written so far and came across the line about H.G. Wells. I remembered that in late high school/early college, Madison H.S. alumni Jeremy Dressen had an a capella group called TIME. (Henry Luce would be so proud.) I think the group was Jeremy, Marsh Morford, Maren Stewart, and my Taming of the Shrew nemesis Amy Winkle. They were gonna tour, get in the studio and cut CDs, the whole deal, man, real world stuff. Jeremy was either managing or doing DJ work at the still-inexplicable Retrix dance club in Rexburg and went so far as to get a vanity plate for his sporty red car that read, of course, "TIME." My good friend Brad Barrett then dubbed Jeremy and his car, "Homie G Wells and the Time Machine." Fifteen years later and I still laugh.