pablo honey...

jesus! remember radiohead's first album? way back before anybody suspected what they'd become? well, i'm listening to that album now. and it's doing something to me...

something like putting me back to where i was when i was a teenager ("pablo honey" came out in 1993). something like reminding me that i'm still very much a work-in-progress. something like tugging on my sleeve to direct my attention to the feeling that i really do _love_ rock & roll. hell yeah.

i have this weird pack-ratty, magpie-like collector's obsession with music. i am well aware that i am in the era of the ipod and that actually owning cds is almost wasteful, but here's the thing...

when i was a teenager, one of the single most self-indulgently pleasurable ways to pass my time was going through my parents' records and playing them on the family stereo -- with the volume waaaaaaaaay up -- when nobody was home but me. in those records was a connection to my parents' youth, to chris and mary anne when they weren't yet grown-ups, when they were struggling and frustrated and operating out of some imposed sense of duty, you know, when they were adolescents.

and i had a profound sense of pride in the titles represented in my parents' record collections -- bob dylan, joni mitchell, simon & garfunkel, willie nelson, the beatles -- all contemporary, indicative of the time in which my parents grew up. yet, still representing a truth that my parents recognized or at least were in search of something real and poetic and ideal.

it worked this way for books, too. in my high school days i hoarded so many of my dad's books from his college days -- salinger, cheever, merton, emerson, joyce, shakespeare...

and so, incorporating this into my adulthood, i almost feel a responsibility to own all the albums that seem to be important or culturally significant (jesus, let's not even begin to count up the money i've spent on albums that i never listen to but own because i feel that i should own them!), in the time-capsule-of-my-life sort of way... i may never have any money or land to bequeath to my future interests (why are all the technical legal terms that i learned in property last year totally slipping my mind at the moment?), but goddamn i'll have some fantastic music for them to lose themselves in!

crazy cat lady comment of the day:
the little cat is intently staring at something out the window right now. the other morning she was mesmerized by her first sighting of snowflakes. she is truly her owner's animal -- crazy, entertaining, observant, easily distracted.