Different...

I was listening to an album of mine today that might be the oddest album I own. Not like "oh I wouldn't expect you to listen to that" but like truly the music is odd. I looked it up and it's described as avant-garde which I would have said surreal so that works.

One of the songs on the album is a spoken word piece (most of the songs are spoken word) and it's a story about a man going on an adventure through a desert with a woman who just shows up at his cabin one day. Oh yeah, the adventure to the desert starts from a trap door in his living room. And the bookended line for the story is "There is no such thing as dusk in the city." There is another song about a man meeting a woman in a bar, spending four hours talking to her without ever getting her name and then going home to find that someone has swapped his furniture for someone else's, changed the locks on his door and oh yeah, there's a dead body in the backyard.

I love it so much.

Now, it's an 80s album and so there are some things on it that I'm like, oh that isn't a word we use now. But it's also an album from the 80s so I don't hold it against it that the words are there. As Katie said this past weekend when we were talking about some common bullying things, "The 80s were such a different time" and yes, yes, my dear, they were.

Now, listening to the album today after not hearing it for maybe 10 years or so I could sit back and say, "Well this is kind of terrible." Like musically, it's kind of terrible. I couldn't ever recommend it to someone to listen to. The music and the lyrics and the overall vibe of some of the songs. None of that is stuff I would actually be able to say, "Oh you should try this out!" No, probably you shouldn't.

But I still sort of love it. Or I guess more so I love the idea of it now. I love some of the pieces of it. I love the just flat out bizarreness of it. I love that there are things I say in day to day life that came from this album and for some of them I had forgotten that's where I got them from.

It will probably be another 10 years before I listen to the whole thing again, but that's okay. There is space in my head for things that were of a certain time in my life, that meant something to me in a way that they probably (almost absolutely) didn't to anyone else, that I can remember the fun or good parts and wash away the not so great parts with a haze of nostalgia.

The 80s were a different time...