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mixtape
July 23, 2007
i'm going through the old and unpublished, maybe because, i guess, they're like me - old and unpublished...
i'm sitting and listening to the playlist i burned to a cd for you. i remember when i was younger, making a tape for someone was an effort in real-time. you heard the music you chose as you sat on the floor in front of your stereo, watching the tape deck, watching the orange marker spin around the spindle, trying to figure out if the peter gabriel song would fit onto this side of the cassette. you'd sit and listen and imagine her listening to it just as you were.
now, you still make the choices, but you point, click, drag, hit a virtual button, and go take a shower while the computer performs this now small, now potentially cheapened, labor of love.
but if you make the right choices, about the songs, and about the girl, then the girl and her heart are in the songs you chose as much as you are, as much as your heart is.
so i sit and listen, and hear the words and voices:
i'll stand in front of you, take the force of the blow...
questions of science, science and progress, do not speak as loud as my heart...
when they first arrived inthe eighties, we believed that compact discs would last forever. we know better now, but still, in our lifetimes, they hold up better than the cassettes ever did, the sound quality now held back only by the quality of the original recording. some memories, some feelings, are like that, but more seem to be like tape, degaussing slowly over time, losing the sound and information inexorably to the ether, the process only accelerated by repeated listenings.
too many heartaches in this lifetime ain't good for me...
my faith in love is like that. i've feared that my love is itself like that, when it's spent so much time on the shelf, waiting to be shared. but i find, very rarely, that it's still there, the sound still clear and warm.
and true love waits, in haunted attics.
occasionally, someone happens by, like a song you have to be quiet and listen to, and i pull love down, dust it off, and listen to it. i hear it resonate in the songs i hear, and i add them to this playlist.
i look into your eyes, and i am at the center of the sun, and i cannot be hurt by anything this wicked world has done...
i order the songs carefully, but ultimately, everything i have to say, everything i feel, is somewhere in every song here.
and all i have to do today is make you happy. the only thing you have to say, is "it's all lovely, baby..."
ultimately, it comes down to whether we hear the same music, if you hear your love and mine in the same songs.
i wish you could see it, too, i wish you could see it, too, baby how i see you.
and i know that i'm not so good from a distance but i tell you, i'm the one.
Posted by Rob at July 23, 2007 11:53 AM