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9
Jan 23

The spring term begins, and here’s a lot of other stuff

A new semester began today. A new semester is underway. I am counting them on the access panel in my office. Each trident marks a semester. There’s a lot of memories and successful students in each. I wonder what sort of successes we’ll pack in the newest addition.

That’s a lot of semesters!

Had a nice bike ride on Saturday. One of our friends joined us on Zwift and that made us fast. Somehow I had 13 mile splits averaging 28+ mph. That’s just silly.

And while I was working hard trying to keep up, I had this idea …

Now I can capture videos of my virtual rides! Aren’t you thrilled?

Anyway, I got in 36 miles on Saturday. I didn’t ride yesterday, but I should have, so I did a quick 20 miles immediately after work, today.

More importantly, it is time for the most popular feature on the site. It’s time to check in with the kitties. (They had a busy day napping and cuddling yesterday, by the way.)

Here’s Phoebe, beating up one of her toys. Grab it in your front paws and kick it into submission by your back paws. Excellent strategy, for the most part. And it looks cute, but those little feet and claws will give you a beating!

It was a poor substitute for her favorite spring, which has been lost for a few days. I found it last night. She chased it around and under a chair. I rescued it for her. We started talking about mimicking it with other springs, maybe it has the right number of loops or something. While we wondering about that, she promptly lost it again. No idea where it is, as of this writing.

I know where it isn’t. Poseidon is, very helpfully, looking for it as well. He tells us it isn’t in the dryer.

Every day I open a thing — a closet, a cabinet, the refrigerator or some other appliance — and then close it. Then I open it and close it again, just to make sure that guy didn’t sneak in while I blinked.

It isn’t that I blink slow, but he moves fast.

I’m trying a new thing. I’m closing tabs. (I know! Crazy, right? Next you’ll find me cleaning out under sinks and vacuuming beneath bookcases … )

Anyway, there are a lot of tabs open in my browser(s). I bet you might have a similar problem. Some of them have been open for ages, and ages. Rather than lose them altogether, I am bookmarking some and closing them. (Novel!) And others should be shared, and then closed. So here we are. Today’s contenders.

The Deep Sea Is Filled with Treasure, but It Comes at a Price:

“We believe we see the world as it is,” she writes. “We don’t. We see the world as we need to see it to make our existence possible.”

The same goes for fish. Only the top layers of the oceans are illuminated. The “sunlight zone” extends down about seven hundred feet, the “twilight zone” down another twenty-six hundred feet. Below that — in the “midnight zone,” the “abyssal zone,” and the “hadal zone” — there’s only blackness, and the light created by life itself. In this vast darkness, so many species have mastered the art of bioluminescence that Widder estimates they constitute a “majority of the creatures on the planet.” The first time she descended into the deep in an armored diving suit called a wasp, she was overwhelmed by the display. “This was a light extravaganza unlike anything I could have imagined,” she writes. “Afterwards, when asked to describe what I had seen, I blurted, ‘It’s like the Fourth of July down there!'”

Bioluminescent creatures produce light via chemical reaction. They synthesize luciferins, compounds that, in the presence of certain enzymes, known as luciferases, oxidize and give off photons. The trick is useful enough that bioluminescence has evolved independently some fifty times. Eyes, too, have evolved independently about fifty times, in creatures as diverse as flies, flatworms, and frogs. But, Widder points out, “there is one remarkable distinction.” All animals’ eyes employ the same basic strategy to convert light to sensation, using proteins called opsins. In the case of bioluminescence, different groups of organisms produce very different luciferins, meaning that each has invented its own way to shine.

[…]

Scales, like Widder, worries that the bottom of the ocean will be wrecked before many of the most marvelous creatures living there are even identified. “The frontier story has always been one of destruction and loss,” she writes. “It is naïve to assume that the process would play out any differently in the deep.” Indeed, she argues, the depths are particularly ill-suited to disturbance because, owing to a scarcity of food, creatures tend to grow and reproduce extremely slowly. “Vital habitat is created by corals and sponges that live for millennia,” she writes.

And if we’re going to learn anything — we’re not, but if we were gonna — it ought to be that there’s an interconnectedness to all of this that is fragile, and important. Even among all of those different zones.

6 Ways to Keep Your Gmail Storage Free and Under 15GB:

Unlike some services (looking at you, iCloud), Gmail is pretty lenient with its free tier. You get 15GB of storage between Gmail and Google Drive, and for many people, it’s good enough. But a lot of people have been using Gmail for a decade or more now, and it’s not hard to accumulate 15GB of data over that kind of timespan.

Once you do hit the 15GB cap, you won’t be able to add files to Google Drive, and eventually, emails won’t hit your Gmail inbox. If you’ve been finding it harder and harder to avoid paying Google for more storage, here are some of the best ways to quickly free up space.

It is a slide show, but it is one of the more useful slideshows, if you’re in a space saving mode.

There. One of my phone browsers is now down to 43 tabs. It is good to make progress.

And we continue making progress in the Re-Listening project. I’m playing all of my CDs in my car. In order, that is. Not all at once. That’d be … noisy.

But some of it would sound good! That’s why I’m listening to them individually and, here, I’m just writing a few notes. These aren’t reviews, but just for fun and filler, he said 1,075 words into this post. Anyway, this installment is a greatest hits, and it seems weird, somehow, to go on and on about a record that was full of charting hits.

So let’s get to it quickly, then. Greatest Hits and their massive success aside, some of these Tears for Fears tracks were juuuuust a tiny bit before my time, initially. Oh, the big ones I know well, and you do too! But there was a sense of achievement in discovering new-to-me and thoughtful and quality Tears for Fears songs. “Woman in Chains” peaked at 36 on the Billboard Hot 100. Lovely song.

“Mad World” was not a hit in the 1980s, which was why I listened to it for the first time in 1996-or-so, but it did get some spins in 2004, reaching number 30 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart and topped the Adult Alternative Songs chart. Then it landed in a video game commercial, was the subject of a few successful covers and appeared on a game show. It’s become something of a standard filler, I guess?

“Laid So Low” was the single off the actual greatest hits. And, sure, it was released in 1992, but this is quintessential 1980s. It was a top 20 Euro hit, settled in the top 40 in Canada and elsewhere. The song was a top 20 hit in the UK, France, Italy and Poland; a top 40 hit in Canada, Germany and the Netherlands; and reached the top 10 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart.

Curt Smith wasn’t in the band at the time, so that song was a Roland Orzabal special. He kept the band name active during the rest of the 1990s, but 30 million unit sales means you get back together, eventually. After nine years of silence, they started talking, playing and writing together again.

“The Tipping Point” was a project that took seven years to produce, but it came out to good reviews in 2001 and made the top 10 in a lot of national charts, including the U.S. It also hit number one on the US Billboard’s Top Alternative Albums, Top Rock Albums and Top Album Sales charts.

Not bad for two guys climbing into their 60s, he said, hopefully, from halfway through his 40s.

cycling / music / Re-Listening / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
4
Jan 23

That’s embarrassing

It is remarkable to me how light things get when it is time to go back to work. It seems having a normal schedule prevents me from finding and doing fun things to tell you about here. The nerve of the real world, no?

So this is my day, today, be it ever so humble.

I did 16 miles in about 45 minutes and then quit. Everything was wrong. It was just immediately fast and hard and not at all what I was hoping for, which was a ride that would have lasted about twice as long. Instead, I had a bit of mild-to-medium nausea, there was no more energy, and I was threatening to overheat.

I bonked. Bonked like a rookie who knows nothing about nutrition, and did it in under an hour. Very weird. But, I guess, lunch had been some time back and maybe there hadn’t been enough carbs. There certainly wasn’t enough glycogen.

I felt a bit better after dinner, at least. But by then I was just … tired. So the rest of this isn’t terribly substantial, sorry.

But, hey, I set five PRs on Strava segments. And I finished 8th out of 460 on one of the sprints. I did the math and I managed to hold 30 mph through that segment with no virtual draft, or even a real awareness that I was about to enter a sprint. (Also, I am in no way a sprinter. Or anything else, really.)

Here’s a quick update to the Re-Listening project. I know, I just put two pieces in this same space yesterday. But those were to get caught up from before the holidays. Since I drove to two places in town yesterday to run errands I spent more time in the car. It’s an odd thing about temporal mechanics around here, but it takes 27 minutes to drive nine miles. Between that and waiting in line at the car wash, I managed to listen all the way through another CD.

I actually skipped one CD yesterday, because life is too short to listen to awful music. A record promoter gave me this disc, and I couldn’t get out of it. I should have tried harder, I know. I knew it then, too, when he compared the lead singer to “an off-key Kurt Cobain.” This was, mind you, a silly one-off conversation 26 years ago and I remember that comment. How out of place. How weird. How wrong. But at least the guy got to drop a name, I guess.

Anyway, the guy singing on that CD wasn’t Kurt Cobain, but closer to Chris Cornell. He didn’t have all of the tricks, and he sounds simultaneously bored and impressed with himself. The guitarist is noodling around, seemingly aware of the limitations by his chord structure or what he had to play around, gamely looking for something new and different. But there’s not much variation, and life is too short for awful music.

I wanted, here, to do the thing where I look all of those guys up and say they all went on to be successful restauranteur, fire fighters or boat charter captains. All four guys have incredibly common names, though. So one of them could be a judge. Another might be an auctioneer. One is probably just really good at D&D. The guy that did the cover photos has had a good run as a photojournalist. Seems to be in Florida now.

Anyway, after that came my 1996 cassettee-to-CD upgrade for the Hootie and the Blowfish debut. Probably you’ve heard of it. It finished seventh on Billboard’s 1990s pop list. Only Alanis Morissette, Whitney Houston, Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, the Titanic soundtrack and Celine Dion, respectively, fared better. They won a Grammy and were certified platinum 21 times in the United States. So, yeah, I needed to get an updated copy, I guess. Because you never heard this stuff on the radio.

(Aside: Lilly Haydn was, is, and likely always will be, incredible.)

Anyway, I really dug the band (last August their second album, Fairweather Johnson appeared on the Re-Listening project)
and I still do. Something about the Carolina yelling appeals to me.

Oh, there was a 25th anniversary edition released in 2019? Guess I should pick up a copy of that.

But, first, I’m going to sleep off the bleh feeling.

books / errands / music / Re-Listening / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
3
Jan 23

Don’t move anything: all the regular site elements are caught up

Today? Oh, back to the regular. I actually went to work. Did a few work things, saw some people. Thought I should start a list: People I’ve Asked About The Holidays. Over the next seven or eight days I will, no doubt, ask someone that same question twice. Three times if they are really unlucky.

I’d also like to develop an app for the phone that listens to all of my jokes and notes the phones around at the time. Then, the next time I start wind up for that same joke, it buzzes most annoyingly if it notes the same people around. We’ll name it Asa. Avoiding Social Awkwardness.

I even whipped up the logo.

It symbolizes the circular nature of one’s jokes, you see.

Because we tell our best material over and over.

Now, to just program the thing, and get around all of the many and considerable privacy issues with anonymity decryption protocols.

See, I’ve thought of everything. Except that I know not how to build it.

After work I went to the auto parts store. It is a building where they have parts. They are, generally, parts for your car. The interior of the store is helpfully organized in zones. And I went to the zone of the auto parts store that holds the light bulbs. Turns out the oil change guy last month was partly right. He said my blinker was out. My blinker is fine. My marker light, a term I learned only this afternoon, was the one that was out. The market light is the one behind the yellow lens. I thought that was the fog light, but, no, that’s different.

There are two light bulbs that seem similar to the busted marker light bulb I pulled out in the parking lot. And a guy that works in the point of sale zone of the store helped me find the right one. Online indices are wonderful things.

While he was doing that, though, someone walked out with a battery. Just carried it right out of the store. He’d been talking about it with them. made eye contact at the door, got into his truck and drove off. We all watched him leave the parking lot. The three guys working just shrugged.

I purchased my two marker light bulbs, walked outside, installed one in the socket, successfully tested the replacement and drove to the car wash.

My car needed it, but you don’t need 400 words on three days of dry weather, the long line at “Wash World” and those wonderful sounds the drive through wash makes as the machinery works its way around. Well, anyway, my car is cleaner, but my windshield was, for some reason, blurry after that.

You just can’t get good robotic help these days.

Let’s get back to the Re-Listening project — the one where I’m playing all of my old CDs, in the order I acquired them, and write about them here. These aren’t reviews, as such. Just memories and a fun excuse to put up too many videos. It’s a whimsy, as most music should be.

These, by the way, were things that got played just before the holiday break. I am, as ever, in arrears.

And first up is a maxi-single. What’s a maxi-single? So glad you asked. A maxi-single is a release with more than the usual two tracks of an A-side song and a B-side song. This is a Rusted Root maxi-single, and it has five tracks. I am sure this was a college station radio giveaway. Also, it is still good.

The title track is up first, a Santana cover that does the original a bit of justic.

And before you wonder, Rusted Root produced seven studio albums and a live record between 1992 and 2012. Four of them landed on the Billboard 200, and two of those in the top half of the chart. One is certified gold, the other is platinum. They’re not hardly a flash in the pan.

Rusted Root is one of those bands that have a lot of musicians come through the band over the years. And, I must confess, I am not always clear on who is where. But let me just say this. There are some talented front porch pickers playing on this thing, and that’s about as high a compliment I will offer a musician not paid to play orchestral music in formal wear.

Three of the songs on the maxi-single are live, including the one that was the point, one of the ones you definitely remember, and the one that still shows up in commercials and TV shows from time-to-time.

The band itself seems to be done, or on hiatus, but many of the former members are stilly playing music. (A lot of them have been in Hot Tuna, turns out.) The lead singer is still making music, and others, including the most prominent female vocalist and the original drummer, are dividing their time between their own music and things like teaching and entrepreneurial projects.

I was hoping one of them might be a software developer, someone that could help me with the Asa project.

The next CD is from Big Mountain, another freebie I picked up because, if you were a kid of a certain era you were issued at least one post-Marley reggae album as a matter of procedure.

And, honestly, unless you line things up just right, a little reggae goes a long way for me. I appreciate some of the historical elements of the form, and my lay ear respects the musicianship, and they’re still at it, but it isn’t mine.

Which is maybe why I have no real fixed memories of this CD in particular.

This is one of the later tracks on the record, and it’s a TV studio performance. This 1995 song is still topical, of course.

The previous year they’d released their cover of “Baby I Love Your Way,” which peaked at number six on the Billboard Hot 100. That was their biggest pop moment. This record, “Resistance” didn’t follow up with commercial success, but they did release three singles from this one, and recorded seven albums since then. They finished last year playing in India. They’ll be touring locally in California early this spring, their 34th year of making music.

I finished Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming tonight. I was wrong, where he leaves us. The book ends after the Battle of Princeton, and the maneuvering immediately after. These were the circumstances that set up the Forage War in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I wonder if that’ll appear in the next book of the trilogy. As I said yesterday, this is Tolstoy meets Burns, the two-time Pulitzer winner embracing completely the role as a popular historian.

And he’s got seven more years of the story to tell. The epilogue covered John the Painter, so, I assume, it’s going to get grim in a hurry, when the new installment is published.

The next line of his acknowledgements, which runs several pages after 564 pages of maps and another hundred-and-change of notes, thanks Queen Elizabeth II, but there’s nothing here telling me when the next book is coming out.

Maybe in 2024, just in time for my fake phone app, then.

cycling / music / photo / Re-Listening / Wednesday — Comments Off
14
Dec 22

Pretend I have a good title for the prosaic, the basic, the music

I visited another dollar store today, found nothing but cheap plastic and small containers of food stuffs. This search for silly Christmas presents is going to require an upgrade tomorrow.

Tonight I started doing the laundry. Thrilling stuff, I know. We also enjoyed a nice, mild tilapia for dinner, and figured out the final details of the rest of our holiday travels. These things did not all happen in that order.

No one in their right minds does the planning before the fish.

Earlier in the day I did the recycling. Anyone need 400 words on that? Loading the car is the trick, you see. I have to break down a bunch of cardboard boxes, because we aren’t always in the best habit of doing that as we go. The boxes fit into the truck. There are four large bins that take the trip, one each for plastics, aluminum, steel and glass. Over time I have developed a stacking system that allows me to get all of this in the car. There’s also the other stuff to work around in the car: my bag for work, my lunch, an umbrella, some sneakers I’m driving around for no discernible reason. I made it all fit because it wasn’t raining in my driveway. But by the time I had it loaded, and covered the short 2.1 mile distance to the recycling center I was in a drizzle. This was what I’d hoped to avoid: recycling in the rain.

If you’re going to save the earth, the least the earth could do is generate some ideal weather patterns. Be appreciative, Mother Nature.

We’re actually in a moderate drought just now, so the rain, such as it was, was welcome.

It didn’t rain much, but the day looks like this. Every day looks like this. These are the colors we will absorb between now and late March.

I stood on the loading dock, for no good reason as it turns out, for quite a long time. Might as well get a photo out of the deal.

Next time, I’ll do one so that we can’t tell where the limestone ends and the sky begins.

I went on a short bike ride last night. I’ve been trying late night bike rides, but this hasn’t been working well.

Sunday night my legs were sluggish and there was some sort of setting problem with the trainer. I did about a half hour and, discouraged, I called it quits. Last night I was trying to correct the trainer problems, and even made some progress with it. But, nevertheless, it wasn’t right, so, discouraged, I called it quits once again after 30 more minutes.

Last night I figured it out. Really got the trainer and the bike dialed in. Half an hour in, I got into a fast group and I was able to hang on. It was the fastest half hour I’ve ever ridden. And then, at 59 minutes, I got a flat tire.

An actual flat tire on my virtual, video game ride.

My tube burst because my wheel wore out on the trainer drum and, you don’t care about this.

Tomorrow, new tires arrive, and I’ll get back to it. This is the final push toward breaking my personal milage record. (I suspect I’ll meet this underwhelming achievement on December 30th.)

Today in the Re-Listening Project we’re going to learn some things. And, the most important thing you’re going to learn about is Vic Chesnutt. He was from Athens, Georgia. He released 17 records, but his moment was around that fifth or sixth record. See, Chesnutt was in a wheelchair and was partially paralyzed from a car accident he had when he was a young man. He played guitar, but had limited use of his hands. The medical bills piled up, but so did the accolades among his peers. In 1996, a cover album, “Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation” was released.

Chesnutt’s perspective of Americana, which was funny and pointed and gothic and lovely and frightful and pretty much every other emotion, was finally in front of broad audience. R.E.M., Nanci Griffith and Hootie and the Blowfish, Indigo Girls, Joe Henry and Madonna and more showed him off to the world. Here are a few from the and more column.

I’m not saying it’s not the best Garbage song. What I’m saying is it’s the best Garbage song.

And here’s a Soul Asylum performance worth actually listening to.

The undisputed best thing Cracker ever recorded.

And, finally, Vic Chesnutt appears on the last track, alongside the great Victoria Williams.

He died in 2009. He was described by one critic as “a neo-hippie, an ex-drunk, an ex–garage rocker turned earthy Southern songcrafter.” Don’t let the grime get in the way of the myth, though, especially when the myth grew better. The myth also obscures the complicated, and that seems as reasonable an approach as any when considering a songwriter that copped to the conceit of, ya know, writing songs. There’s equal parts misery and faith in most of his work, and whatever precipitate the two yield should be in there in abundance, too. It’s overdone, to be sure, but the writing is something to admire.

Today there’s a songwriting seminar in his name, and a songwriter of the year award is given out in his honor. I suspect he might have differing opinions of the virtue of those two things.

Next we have Primitive Radio Gods, which I picked up as a radio station freebie, and only because of that one song. And, until this very moment, had always thought this was a one-person band. (Sorry, fellas.) This is actually a three-piece. Guess I never read the liner notes. Anyway, they got to the very top of the Billboard Alternative Songs chart with the unthreatening, catchy “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand.” You remember it, easy hip hop beats and a lot of samples, including B.B. King and gonging of distant church bells.

The whole of the album is like that. Modern alt rock, one important chord and a lot, a lot of samples used as fills. At the time this was impressive. Not avant garde, but mildly thoughtful. Looking back, it was technically impressive. Without thinking about it, I can reel off three different ways, we could pull down any sound, archived or contemporary that we wanted if we were to make a song like these today. But, mid-1990s? It was on a format you had on the shelf or you made it yourself, and the options of just searching through a database to find something that fit your meter were limited, to say the least.

These guys got caught up in a few years of record label difficulties. Drops, mergers, re-acquisitions, and so on. I haven’t picked up any of their later stuff, but they’ve released seven studio albums, or 11, depending on how you count. The latest was in 2020.

But on this, the debut, the one with the big and only hit there are 10 tracks. The one you might recall if you had a radio in 1996, this one, which has the distinction of sounding distinctly different from most of the record …

The title track, “Rocket,” is the best song on the thing.

For reasons I don’t remember, and mysterious knowing the timeline doesn’t easily and obviously overlap, I dubbed a friend Rocket. Maybe she was over at my apartment when this was on one day. Anyway, she knows that single and then she knew this song because I assigned it to her, for some reason. She’s married to one of my best friends and though I don’t talk with her directly on a highly regular basis, that nickname has basically replaced her given name in my brain for a few decades now. Weird how you tie one thing to another, for no reason at all. No telling why that happens.

If this feels brief or rushed today, I’d agree! And there’s not a good ending, either. I’ve almost finished the next album for the Re-Listening Project. I’m sure that’ll wind up here tomorrow.

memories / music / Re-Listening / Thursday — Comments Off
8
Dec 22

More from the Re-Listening Project

We return to the Re-Listening Project, where I am forever trying to keep up with what is in my car’s CD player. What’s in my car’s CD player is the entirety of my CD collection. Well, not all at once, that’d be a spectacular device. We’re surely decades away from having the technology to put hundred and hundreds and a few more hundred CDs on one simple machine.

But I can load several at a time in my car, and what I’m currently doing is listening to all of these old circles of plastic, in order. It’s a fun thing to do. And some of it is fun to write about. These aren’t reviews, but fun of memories, and a few good licks.

And this is the first record that, on this go around of the Re-Listening Project, that I’ve listened to twice. It got dismissed as mediocre at the time, but “Friction, Baby” has aged well as Better Than Ezra’s sophomore effort.

I listen to Tom Drummond’s bass line as much as anything.

But, first, Kevin Griffin’s post-alternative lyrics. This is 1996. I was 19 and, true to pop form, there’s a little something in there for most everyone or most any mood.

But that rhythm section, man, that still demands your attention a quarter century later.

I worked with someone during high school and college and the album title became a salutation and a closing because we both liked the record. She was from Vestavia, and, yes, this album is that suburban. I don’t know if I ever asked her what her favorite song on this was.

Do you ever wonder when the last time someone listened to something was? And how, after a long time away from it, if their impression had gone in some different way than your own? Perceptions are funny, inconsistent and perfectly valid that way. Anyway, there’s a nice mandolin on here, too. As I said, a little something for every mood.

Perhaps, in the long reach of life, you wonder why you did a thing, or spent so much time around a person or people. Maybe that’s why she’s unfriended me. (A fate worse than meh!) Maybe that’s why you stopped listening to a record you used to enjoy. That and other albums and other priorities. But it’s nice to go back and see what still works, and what you hear differently. Somewhere in all of that you get to decide what to lean into, and what deserves a cringe.

Anyway, we used this track on my college radio morning show. (Speaking of cringe!) Open mics, talking to the post and signing off for the day.

Top of the world, I guess.

I’m certain that I picked up this next album as a station giveaway. Probably it was the cover art that intrigued me. If anything, I’d heard one song on the thing. Probably something we played at the campus station. I don’t remember this getting a lot of commercial airplay, but as another sophomore album it got a lot of play from me in late 1996 and definitely 1997.

It’s Melissa Ferrick’s “Willing to Wait.” Ferrick is still touring. Still making music, and also teaching the craft, these days at Northeastern University. And while this is Ferrick’s second record, consider this. This is a career that started as a 21-year-old woman, opening for Morrisey. That’s ridiculous, but none too big for the Cracker Jack Kid. It’s honest, simple, complex, ragged, truthful, vulnerable, aggressive, and not at all a radio-friendly record. Which is probably how I came to see it on the giveaway table. But critics, and Ferrick’s fans, liked it. If any of those adjectives appeal to you, there’s something for you here.

This is the “Cracker Jack Kid” song, for the reference above.

I had this idea, listening to this record this time: what would this song, and it’s specific themes, feel like if a male did it?

Oh, and we didn’t cover this, but this album is full of intriguing instrumentation.

And some yodeling, or at least a fun little run of scat.

There was a girl — I was in college, so of course there was a girl — and this isn’t the song that I attached to that breakup, but this record was in heavy rotation at the time, and there’s this lyric here, about remembering the color of a doorknob, it sticks with you.

I lived in a two-floor apartment during the time I was listening to this a lot and also feeling that particular breakup. (I was the wrong religion, basically.) The downstairs was a cinderblock building. But the upstairs was simply two sheets of wood paneling. I could hear when my neighbor signed on to AOL. I could hear when she had mail. And, perhaps worse, when she didn’t.

Only now, thinking of how I sat on my stairs and learned one of the louder songs on this CD, have I thought about what music my neighbor heard for three years on her side of the wall.

Oh, look! A live version of one of the songs!

Someone played the stripped down version of their work is always so interesting.

And, just for perspective, that girl? The cheerleader grew into a woman who became a teacher, pretty perfect for her, I think. Her oldest kid is older, today, than we were back then. The last song on Ferrick’s record is titled “Time Flies.”

No kidding.

It was a bronze-colored doorknob, by the way.