Dear J-
There is something intrinsically personal with music to the point where you can’t be assured of getting the right stuff just by reading reviews. Sometimes the album will grow on you, while others may exhibit a decided nostalgia depending on your own experiences. Case in point: let’s say Journey’s Only the Young, which in its best objective evaluations garners praise as another Journey song that doesn’t deviate much from the typical formula: guitar & Steve Perry singing to burst his lungs. Yet for me because they play it over the opening credits in Vision Quest and its iconic scenes from downtown Spokane and Riverfront Park I can’t help but flash back to skywalks and skating.
It reinforces the notion I’ve been kicking around in my head lately, your experiences make you just as unique as your fingerprints would. Your media consumption is driven in a way that makes us mutualy unintelligible especially given that we’ve spent our adult lives in different orbits and with different people. Although we may always have the same shared memories from growing up we may see them in different ways and the same memory can be a source of shame for me and pride for you. I’m wondering if I should go to the twenty-year high school graduation reunion, which is coming up next year already.
Twenty years does count for a lot. I’m now closer to finishing up my second twenty and I can’t say with precision that I haven’t grown as much from twenty to forty as from zero to twenty. We have such long roads ahead as adults still though maybe the realization that our midlife crises will take mundane forms such as excessive materialism and distant travel makes me think that despite all the differences in the past twenty perhaps we’re all growing more similar than ever. There’s only so much that can be done differently (diffidently) and the limits on vision and experience are already fading into distant view.
Mike