I’m indulging in a guilty pleasure as I write. I’m listening to Eddie Money’s album No Control. It reminds me of high school and hot summer nights filled with not much to do but watch a CBS late movie on the little black and white TV in my bedroom, or cruise the strip with my girlfriends (all the windows rolled down and blasting the radio, of course) and look up at the night sky and wonder if he liked me as much as I liked him.

I wouldn’t go back to being 16/17 for anything but I sometimes miss the feeling of discovery. It was that time that I discovered he did like me as much as I liked him, that the few decades that passed before I was born would always ignite a simmering nostalgia in my soul and that music was an important component to all the summer longing, musing, and silliness. 

It was a time that I volunteered to babysit my sisters so I could watch Night Flight and MTV on the cable TV in my parent’s bedroom. (I always hoped to see Duran Duran’s video for ‘Save A Prayer’ …or Mellencamp or Eddie Money or the Cure or Modern English or Greg Kihn or…)

I had dreams of being a photographer, an interpreter for the U.N., a curator, a historian.

25 years later I sit on another hot summer night, I think about those times and how life never takes you where you think you will go, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Music–good, bad, and guilty pleasure, has been woven into how I see my past and my future as long as I can remember and as long as I have it I can go anywhere I want to go in memory or possibility.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 12:07 am and is filed under Left of The Dial.