musical time machine

[devi]

I'm up way too late. From my attic eyrie I can see the trees threshing in the wind, throwing shifting shadows across Colney Hatch Lane. Hardly anything is going by on the road except all-night delivery vans. It's sad that I won't be here much longer, so I'm enjoying it while I can. No school tomorrow, and I like the feeling of being awake while most of the city's asleep.

After ripping what I want off the CDs I'm selling, I've made a playlist, six hours long and counting, of music they used to play in Dublin at Fibbers and Dominion. Music for dancing and moshing and pogoing, squealing with glee and dashing off to the dancefloor on hearing the first bars of a favourite song, waking up on Sunday with a sore neck from too much headbangage. It's got The Smiths and Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine and Covenant and The Cure and the Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails and so much other stuff, and I have it on random. This is the sound of me before London, before most of the music I actually listen to now, before I'd written anything much, before I had a proper job, before I ever danced all night, before I had any politics, before a lot of things. God, what's left when you subtract all that? Still in the womb, like Douglas Coupland says.

Between that and the photos I was looking at earlier, I feel completely dislocated. I've remembered the name of the Man called Kate, finally. And I found a picture of the DJ I was infatuated with, and a picture of me on the same night. I can wonder now why I thought he was so out of my league, because I didn't look as crap as I thought. "Wise Up, Sucker" has just come on. That was my song of the time, because he loved PWEI and I was the sucker who needed to wise up.

Back then I always had a feeling that I hadn't really started living yet. At least that's gone away now.

Yeah, time for bed.

Comments

[the-elyan.livejournal.com]

"Music takes us back to a time before we were smart" - Garrison Keillor.

Yeah - there are times I miss that too...

Mind you, I remember what I was before I went to university and subsequently acquired all the accoutrements of adult living, and I wouldn't much want to be that again either...

[mr-wombat.livejournal.com]

No one forgets Kate, its sort of hard to forget a man that big and hairy.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he surfaced from a dark recess of my brain a short while after my first post. By god that sounds *dodgy*.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Amen.

[parallelgirl.livejournal.com]

I didn't look as crap as I thought.
That's my most frequent reflection on seeing old photos, too. I'm forever comparing my past self unfavourably with my present self. Oddly enough, the knowledge that I'll be doing the same thing in five years' time fails to cheer!