Just an old, sweet song...

I'm pretty burned out on politics, at least in my home life. I read and write enough about that stuff at work, so, at least for a while, my blog is going to be what it was supposed to be in the first place...truly random musings. I've got a few of these, so maybe I'll put together a little series...

It's really odd how, at least for me, hearing certain songs can take me back to a specific memory. Not just a general memory, but a very specific time and place, all the way down to how I felt and what the room smelled like. Maybe I'm weird, but when I hear one of these such songs, it's like I'm transported back in time and it's almost like I relive the memory.

One of these songs is 'Standing Outside a Broken Phonebooth with Money in my Hand' by Primitive Radio Gods. Most of you have either never heard that song, or don't remember it. But it was pretty big in the summer of 1996 or 97.

I was at my grandmother's house. It was late in the afternoon, because the sun was coming through the dining room window upstairs and casting long shadows that stretched across the entire floor so far that some inched their way back up the opposite wall. Everything in the room, but most noticeably the wall, was draped in a dull yellow-orange light. If like looked hard enough and focused my eyes just right I could see little pieces of dust and those little stringy looking things floating in the air.

I opened the door to the basement and flicked the old plastic light switch, and with a sharp clap it filled the stairway with 100 harsh watts of light. The bright white walls coupled with the abundant back light made this area ideal for shadow puppet shows. The stairs were hollow and made entirely too much noise when they were walked on. The bottom of the stairs was always an eerie place to be. The floor was cold, concrete, and uninviting. To the left of the stairs was an old fire hydrant. There were patches of bright red, but due to years of sitting in an infrequently used basement and general neglect, most of it was a dingy red and grey thanks to the impressive layer of dust.

Behind me was a semi-finished room with shag carpet...dirty, red and black flower shag carpet. An old table that no one wanted, an absolutely ancient television, a few black support poles, a weight bench, and an old pool table made up the rest of the room. The five ball was missing along with cue ball. For whatever reason there was an extra 12 ball that served as the cue ball, and we just ignored the missing 5 ball. We never kept score anyway.

There were two big closets with various old things in them -- newspapers, tax returns, and an old sign that simply said 'This is Maddox Country!'. Being the ripe old age of 12, I thought it was talking about baseball. It wasn't until a history class much later in life that I figured out who Lester Maddox was, and why I wasn't supposed to listen to my grandfather.

To my right was a substantially more-finished room that served as my uncle's bedroom before he got a place of his own. I could hear that the TV was on, no doubt tuned to MTV. I got a strange feeling in my stomach. It was a feeling of happy contentment. He was already here. I knew that the next week would consist of late nights, unhealthy food, and laughing til it hurt.