always missing deadlines

Now, the last thing I want is for this to be a place where I tell you about things that I thought were awesome during my more impressionable years. I could go through all of the records I bought, I could discuss at incredible length the books I've enjoyed and movies that I thought could have been better. I'm not going to do that. What I am going to do is talk about that moment you have, the moment, that if you're really lucky, you'll have again and again. I've had a few, each one different and more illuminating than the last. But when I get them now, I'm not completely taken by surprise the way I was when that first one came along and spanked me.
In high school I was still behind the times musically. I was back in my comfort zone of oldies and classic rock. It was an easy place to be in. It's hard to stray too far from the herd when you say you really love The Beatles or Queen. I had drifted briefly into the world of hip hop and gangsta rap, and while it was eye-opening musically, it didn't really hit me in a fundamental way. I conformed to what I thought would make me more popular. That isn't to say I didn't enjoy my headphone sessions of Eminem and Ice Cube, but I wasn't changed underneath my baggy jeans and K-Swiss. The move back to classic rock also wasn't because I was in love with Led Zeppelin. It was safe. Weed was around (not that I took part in that), so long hair and repitive guitar riffs while an unmasculine voice sang about women still seemed cool. I wasn't at all geared up for the motor show that was to come from the Motor City.
If it weren't for friends far more adventurous than I, I'm not sure how much farther along I would have developed. That's just how those things go. During a hot summer day before the start of the school year, I was out on a football field along with the other fifty or whatever members of the music department. I was busy looking at girls in athletic shorts and putting on a bravado having seen my stock slowly rise over the previous year of high school. I had a burned cd (right around when they became cheap enough that your friends no longer charged you for them) dropped in my lap. On it, written in red sharpie was the word "Elephant", underneath, "The White Stripes". When I drove home I popped that bad boy in my cd player and felt very un-classic rock, very ungangster in my '91 Thunderbird.
I am not going to argue the artistic merits of "Elephant", you can draw your own conclusions. I listened to the now iconic "Seven Nation Army" probably a million times and then proceeded to make my way through the rest of the record endlessly before the next day so that I could bring something to the table. Back then, when you shared a song or a record with somebody, it wasn't unlike meeting your favorite athlete. The giddiness that took over, the comprehension that there were people out there doing these things and we were still young enough to think that it could one day be us. That record and I spent many afternoons together. Maybe the most compelling thing for me, at the time, was that this band wasn't a band so much as a partnership. It was a heart and head without the contraints of vestigial organs or even a body that could die and thereby destroy the magic that was created.
That same year, only a short couple of months later, another record came out that would ensure that I would never go back to the safety of music the way I had before. While I could enjoy the songs I used to love, and continue to actually love them, it did make me critical. A lot of the music I had thought I liked, I realized I really didn't. I figured out how juvenile and ridiculous so much of it was. It finally made sense that gangstas had never been people to admire because that kind of lifestyle was idiotic and childish. It made way more sense to wear only three colors, play the guitar as loud as possible and beat the shit out of drums. After that supplanted my thinking, I forgot about "Elephant". I absorbed records at such pace that only the music that really sparked my own creativity were able to stick around.
Because of the neglect, it only seemed appropriate to dig that burned cd out and give it a play again. The funniest part about it all was that it sounds just as crazy as it did when released, although were it to be released to the world for the first time today, I'm not sure it would have had the same impact on me. I'm not sure I could have even made it through the whole record, nor am I convinced that the public, as a whole, would have found the same missing piece that was delivered. In many ways, eye-opening is tied to time. We are not all ready at the same time, we are not all brought out of our lulls by the same thing. Maybe that's why they happen so infrequently. All I can say about it, really, is that I am glad for that moment, that realization. It has led to a great many other discoveries. I just sometimes wish I could have that moment over again.