Confessions of a Nailbiter

I've bitten my fingernails for as long as I can remember. I don’t know what it is about the process, but there’s something weirdly satisfying about it. But I’m finding, judging by how hard it is to start writing about it, that I don’t even properly know the words to describe what it’s like. More importantly, I wanted to write this entry to figure out exactly *why* I bite my nails. I mean, it's a pretty gross habit when I look at it objectively. Sticking your fingers in your mouth and ripping off your nails with your teeth? Ugh. But I do it quite often. So I want to see if I can dig into the reasons and find out why.

I’ve always suspected that I’ve had some sort of oral fixation from early childhood that I never got rid of. In fact, the look and feel of my last pacifier is one of the few memories I have from before the age of five. I’m also from the generation whose doctors were actively discouraging mothers from breastfeeding their children, so whether this is a predisposition or a replacement behavior is kind of up in the air.

Then again, I’m realizing that it goes beyond just fingernails. Looking back at my childhood, it seems like I would bite/chew on just about anything. My pencils (all wood back in those days, dagnabbit) were all ragged pieces of splintery wood before they were sharpened down even halfway, and I specifically remember a set of colored pens with concave rounded caps that I chewed on while I drew, so that by the time I was done with them they all looked like parasols. I even remember gnawing on the plastic earpieces of my glasses until they were jagged enough to scrape the skin behind my ears.

There was more discomfort to be had than that, as well. I bit my nails so much, and pushed the nail bed back so many times, that my fingers never actually bled. I was just left with a raw edge that, once it sits for a while, got really sore. I remember back in the worst times, when I hated having to put my hands in my pockets for any reason, because the tips of my fingers would hurt so badly. You would think that the pain of having my fingernails continuously bitten down to the quick and beyond would deter me, but it didn’t.

Part of the reason, I think, is that I was a nervous kid, which is something that I haven't fully admitted to myself yet. My penchant for daydreaming, along with the fact that my parents moved us to different schools every few years, made me always feel like the "new kid", and also instilled in me the sense that everyone knew what they were doing more than I did. I was also quiet and shy, more likely to sit and read by myself than interact with others. It wasn't that I didn't have friends, but I felt like I knew them less than the other kids knew each other. I felt like I was always playing catch-up, socially. And the fact that I was somewhat ahead in learning (I was one of only three kids who were reading the highest level classroom readers, and in second grade me and one other student studied math separately with the principal) just made me a little more awkward around the other kids.

My parents also had me see a psychologist because I had frequent "stress headaches", so that's another clue to my mindset. So as much as I don't want to pigeonhole myself Freudally, I must have been reverting to my oral fixation stage until it just became habitual. But that doesn't explain what I enjoy about it. There's just something unquantifiably satisfying about chewing something into shape, manipulating it. And I've never fully grown out of the habit of touching things to my lips. They're the most sensitive part of a person's body, so it makes sense to me that in order to fully get the sense of something, you need to press it to your lips. Babies do it constantly, and it seems like it’s carried over into my adult life.

My biting seems to come in phases. I'll bite them all off over the course of a few days, and then not feel the urge to bite them at all for a few weeks. Which is nice when they all grow out at the same rate... I'm usually running at an average of six or seven nails with whites on the tips at one time. But when they start getting a little long, I find myself starting to run them along the edges of my teeth, as if daring myself to bite them. And it doesn't take much... once I get a frayed edge along one of the nails, I find myself trying to trim it, to smooth off that rough edge by biting it. Of course, in the back of my mind I know that's never going to happen. I'm just going to end up with a shorter nail that's still ragged. And when I try to smooth the edges off, the nail's just going to get shorter and shorter until I'm back at the quick again.

It's not that I bite my nails when I'm nervous, though, although I do it more when I am. I also do it when I'm bored, or reading. I don't know why, but slowly nibbling away at my nails while I'm working my way through a book seems like a natural pairing. But as long as I've been doing it, I've also been trying to quit. I remember telling my third grade teacher to give me a heads-up when she noticed that I was doing it, but I wasn't expecting to see the normally-sweet woman glare at me and solemnly ask, "What am I seeing you do?" every time she would catch me. My parents tried to help too... One summer, they said that if I could finish the summer with fingernails they'd give me fifty dollars. That was an *immense* amount of money for me back then, and my brother and I literally spent days debating how we would spend it. I suppose all the intense speculation actually distracted me from biting, because I made it through to the goal date with fingers intact. My parents coughed up the money, I bought an Atari cartridge (as we had decided upon), and I went right back to biting my nails. Even scare tactics didn’t work; my fourth-grade teacher claimed that she knew a woman who had an appendectomy, and the doctors found that the removed gland was full of fingernails she had swallowed. Even back then, I thought this story had a whiff of bull to it, and I now I know that it was a blatant lie. It makes me wonder what else the average elementary teacher just pulls out of their ass.

Appendixes aside, I know there's a health issue here, because constantly putting your fingers in your mouth is a great way to expose yourself to all manner of germs. However, I have never really been a person who spends much of their time being sick. In fact, there have been times in my life when I've actually noticed how little time I've recently spent laid low by illnesses. In this modern world, where people say that the influx of children and adults with allergies is a by-product of our increasingly antibacterial world, I wonder if it’s possible that I've actually strengthened my immune system by exposing myself to so much disease. There's a study to be made there, measuring the relative strength of immune systems in thumb-suckers and nail-biters as compared to the general population.

Right now I'm in a latent phase, where my fingernails all have whites on them. And it's clearly not just because I'm in a low-stress period, either. It's all a matter of knowing my own psychology... I've taken to using an emery board to keep the edges smooth. I've found that when the edges are smooth, I'm much less likely to be tempted to bite them off. So I'm hoping that this time will stick. But I've thought this countless times before, only to find myself a few weeks later, fingertips aching and unable to pick up coins or open Ziploc bags. I suppose I'll be waging this war with myself for a long time to come, although I know how disgusting and unattractive a habit it is. Or maybe I've just got to put enough time between phases that I eventually forget why I do it in the first place.

Investigative Report #1: Lou Rawls

I'm one of those folks who is constantly checking snopes.com to see if the many random facts that are strewn about and shared on the Internets are true or not. And I’m always amazed at how in this age of information, we seem more inclined to spread disinformation than anything else. It kinds of ties into my recent blog post "Why We What We Believe", but I've got a short list of things that I recall or have heard about that I'm not able to find much internet information on. Most of them come from the great mystery zone that exists before 1995, which apparently is when people really started logging everything that happened online. But here's my first stab at doing some online sleuthing of my own...

The year was 1988. I was in my junior year of high school, and suddenly I started hearing the word "Lou" getting kicked around the school halls. It would always be couched in insulting phrases, mostly "Man, you got Lou!" Of course, it wasn't long until someone enlightened me with the origin of the phrase, and the story went like this: During the televised United Negro College Fund telethon that year, Lou Rawls came out to perform -- most likely his ubiquitous hit "You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine" -- and, during the performance, he passed gas loudly enough to be picked up by his handheld microphone.

Depending on which version of the story you heard, Lou was either visibly physically uncomfortable both before and after the incident, or he started laughing and could barely finish the song, well aware of what sound he had unintentionally added to his repertoire. Either way, the phrase "you got Lou" was almost immediately picked up by the youth of America to mean something akin to "you've just embarrassed yourself".

Years later, I thought it would be easy enough to look it up and see if this incident really happened. And to my surprise, there's no concrete evidence that it did. There's no YouTube video dubbed from an old VHS tape from back in the day of his performance, nor is there anything listed on various urban-myth sites debunking it. So I decided to dig a little deeper, and found that there are elements both supporting and refuting that Mr. Rawl's unfortunate digestive issues really ever got any airplay...

Supporting the allegation is the timing of the incident. That it sprung into existence so quickly and specifically certainly makes it sound plausible. Lou Rawls really was the host of the 1988 UNCF telethon, in fact it was officially called the "Lou Rawls Parade of Stars", and ended up raising over $9 million over the course of seven hours. It's quite reasonable that Mr. Rawls might have been near exhaustion or even physically ill from hosting such an event by the time it was over. If it really did happen, the students at my school started using the phrase immediately, lending it some legitimacy. And the fact that it seemed to originate with the black students at my school -- who, I assume, would be more likely to have watched the telecast -- makes it even more so.

Against it, though, is an incident that occurred at the 1976 Grammy awards, at which Lou also performed. No surprise there, since it was that year that "You Will Never Find..." actually hit the charts. However, in that performance, it's reported that Lou started coughing and could barely finish his performance, still coughing and laughing at the fact that he was coughing. Now, either both instances (the Grammys and the UNCF incident) both happened and got locked together, or people are getting the two confused.

Some people report seeing (and when they speak, they're talking about something they remember seeing at least 10 years previous, so you should take it with a grain of salt) Lou coming down some stairs at the 1988 telethon as he opened his song, then stopping singing and looking mortified. The band either stopped or continued to play. Lou either came back in to finish the song or didn't. The thing is, if you look you can find someone who remembers each possible scenario, so there's no definitive answer as far as I can tell.

Lou certainly didn't help his own case when, in the early 90s, he appeared on the sketch comedy show In Living Color, he came on to perform live soothing music for a man about to have a proctological exam. Since that time, some version of the phrase "having Lou" is listed in just about every online slang dictionary you can find.

To sum up, I'm still not sure whether the incident really happened or not. But I'll continue to check every now and then to see if someone has photographic evidence (with audio, of course). In a way, I kind of miss the days when you were unable to just look up things like this and find out immediately if there's any truth to them, and maybe that's why I've latched onto this urban fart myth so readily. True, I didn't find the information I was looking for, but it makes me think about how in the future, there will be no such mysteries as this.

What Does Enlightenment Get You?

Last summer, I had a job for two months that was in a small office building in an industrial park. I was a temp worker, and had a mandatory lunch hour to fill. I quickly got into the habit of eating for half an hour, then taking a half hour walk around the mile-long sidewalk loop that ringed the industrial park. It was summer, and it was often a hot but quick walk -- the park was young enough that there were no trees tall enough to offer any shade.

One of the places I would pass, aside from the offices of All Music Guide, my go-to website for music info, was Jewel Heart, a center for Tibetan Buddhism. Since I would often have at least fifteen minutes of walking left when I passed it, it almost always got me thinking about eastern meditation, and the quest for enlightenment. I know that Jewel Heart is not a Buddhist temple, and instead strives to find ways to incorporate the wisdom of Buddhism into everyday life, but my mind got churning anyway.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of "enlightenment". I know that it's the goal of eastern philosophy, but what exactly does it mean? What would it feel like to be enlightened? In my mind, it must be the ability to see the world from a universal perspective, to completely understand that one person's life is both insignificant and profoundly connected to all other living things, and to live mindfully in that state at all times.

My second thought would be wondering who would want to live like this. I like to think of myself as having a somewhat global perspective on things... I'm always trying to think of things in the long-term. I'm not the sort of person who will get bent out of shape because things are taking longer than they should to come into effect. I believe (and explain it further in my post "How to Live Forever") that for the sake of sanity people should in general concentrate on the long term. It's the best way to keep from being stressed, and also to focus on staying "in the moment". However, when I think of the Buddhist monks who shut themselves away from the world in monasteries on the top of mountains, spending their lives contemplating their place in the universe and constantly meditating to try to comprehend it, I think they may be taking it too far.

Because shutting yourself off from the stresses and instability of life isn't the same as living. To dedicate oneself to being celibate, childless, and sheltered kind of exempts you from actually having experienced life, doesn't it? What's left when all the things that really define participation in the human race are consciously taken out of the equation? If "peace" is all you're looking for, sure, you're probably going to find it, but death is an even easier way to achieve the same end. I don't mean to sound harsh, and I know that there is value in regular meditation, fasts, retreats, etc. But if these periods of introspection don't take place in the context of the usual stresses and trials of life, then don't they become meaningless?

As I understand it, one of the goals of Buddhism is to remove desire from one's life. Desire, it teaches, is the basis of all evil and unhappiness. If you want something, anything at all, then any choices you make from that point are in the interest of you getting that thing, not in the interest of living in a way that benefits all. But isn't desire the thing that defines us as human beings? We're the only living things on the planet that aren't at the whim of our desire for things 24/7. The entire animal kingdom has been fueled for billions of years solely by the drive to obtain food and sex. So why are we, the only beings on the planet who are able to realize this fact, trying to pry ourselves away from it? If our goal is to establish and be mindful of our connectedness with all things, I don't see how striving to make ourselves separate from the rest of it is a reasonable goal.

I could have it all wrong. I might be totally misreading the intentions of Buddhist enlightenment. And I'm usually of the mind that if a belief system makes you happy and doesn't infringe on any else's beliefs or rights, then good luck and more power to you, because you’re already ahead of a lot of people. In that, Buddhist monastic life is the perfect lifestyle. But in the end, I don't really know what enlightenment will get you if you don't also live life as the rest of us do.

Why We Believe What We Believe

I've been thinking a lot lately about worldviews. Particularly about how a person's worldview can change over the course of their life, and how it *should* change, if you're really thinking and growing as a person. The easiest thing to do with one's life is at one point, paraphrasing Stephen King, to "slap a coat of paint on it and call it good". What he meant is to establish your mental boundaries and refuse to change, to set your beliefs in stone, to think you know all there is all there is to know and not let anything change your mind, no matter how compelling. This paralysis can happen when you're twenty, or forty, or eighty. But if you really want to engage with the world, to really get to the center of your own mind and figure out who really lives there, then your task is to never stop evolving, or thinking, or trying to be better.

What I'm thinking about these days is why we believe what we believe. Why do some people stick with the belief system that they've had since they were children, while others strike out on their own? Why do we feel comforted by the familiarity of ritual and stability, while at the same time yearning for newness and the perils of uncertainty? I think that it all comes down to believing what we *need* to believe at a particular time in our lives. If that means believing what your parents believe when you first start out, then maybe that's the best way to begin. But if you're really looking, really paying attention to the world around you and engaging in it, then those beliefs are going to change. There's no belief system in the world, religious, political, or scientific, that isn't going to evolve and transmogrify itself between your youth and your adulthood. At least, that's the way it should be.

There are lots of folks, I think, who have firmly set up the boundaries of what they and what they don't believe (or have had the boundaries set up for them), what is right and what is wrong, and will never consider, even for a moment, that they might need to think about it a slightly different way. These people are the obstacles that others -- those whose ideas and feelings about the world and the people in it are flexible, and are always searching for better answers -- need to stumble over and around, as we all try to find that elegant solution to the mysteries of everything. Many people believe what only they see. I've been one of these people for a long time. But I recently read a book by Rob Reid, a satirical sci-fi novel called Year Zero, that made a point that really stuck with me. He pointed out that, even though humans insist on believing only what they see, our visual perception is severely limited to a narrow cone directly in front of our eyes, across a stupefyingly slim band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Why, then, do we even pretend that we can experience even a fraction of what's really going on around us?

So that leaves room for us to construct a worldview that involves a lot of the unseen. The strangest thing, though, is the way that our minds can actually make us see and experience parts of our worldview that aren't really there. My main man Carl Sagan once brought up an interesting point: if UFOs, medieval saints, and Greek gods are really real, why do/did they only appear in visions to people who believed in them? If Zeus and Dionysus truly existed, they would still be appearing to people today like they did in acient Greece. And UFOs should have been appearing to humanity over and over again since the beginning of recorded history – not just since WWII, when flying military craft first became prominent in peoples’ minds.

My point, though, is that the human mind is surprisingly selective in determining and reinforcing its own truth. I'm reminded of the Fox sisters, three siblings in the mid-nineteenth century who basically founded the modern Spiritualist movement by claiming to be mediums. The catch, though, is that after they became famous for holding séances to commune with the beyond, and convincing thousands in the truth of what they were doing, they confessed that it was all a hoax. They held demonstrations to show exactly how they perpetrated the lie, and people *still* *believed* that the sisters really were talking to ghosts. Of course, the controversy still rages, but the fact remains that even if you consider the evidence both for and against the Fox sisters really having clairvoyant abilities as being equal, many people still choose to believe the vastly more unlikely of the two options, belief over skepticism.

A more modern interpretation of this schism is the US moon landing in 1969. There is still a very vocal faction of the US population (strangely, it seems that the only significant group that doubts we landed on the moon is here within the US itself) that thinks it was all an elaborate hoax, possibly under the direction of Stanley Kubrick, whose film 2001 had wowed audiences with its near-perfect outer space effects the year before. This group has continually argued the finer points of the photographic evidence, from the angle of certain shadows to photo exposure that blots out stars, to the way astronauts will bounce and flags will sway in micro-gravity. Despite the simple explanations that seem to discount all of these claims -- not to mention the fact that the 1969 moons landing was the first of *six* televised landings that would have had to be similarly faked -- some still insist that it was all a ruse... another belief that overwhelming evidence against it refuses to dissolve, and in most cases even seems to intensify the skeptic's faith.

So why do we believe what we believe? What makes the most logical, rational people have utter faith in something they cannot experience for themselves, whether it be a particular religion, or a particular science? I think the answer, elegantly enough, comes down to our feelings of comfort and aesthetics.

If life sometimes feels utterly random, with words and deeds having little to no effect on its fairness or rightness, that's because it *is* random, for the most part. Illness and misfortune have no regard for what we want or how good a person we are. The only ability that matters is how to deal with the random things that happen to us, and persevere and adapt to circumstances as they arise. Being as intelligent as we are, and with the curse of "memento mori" being, like it or not, the biggest single factor in human psychology, we search for order out of chaos. It's the reason we've been able to construct civilizations and everything in them. We strive to understand, we figure out how to manipulate what we've learned, and build knowledge upon knowledge. It's how a person who completely distrusts the scientific establishment can still routinely use *quantum tunneling* (a phenomenon that we can use only because we kind of understand the inherent weirdness of atomic structure) every time they use their smartphone. We look for patterns, even when we don't think we are. The randomness of the universe continually works against that. But remember these two mottos I came up with:

"Simplicity is chaos seen at a distance."
-Aaron Drummond

"Chaos is simplicity seen at a distance."
-Aaron Drummond

Aesthetics is the other part of this equation. We believe what we believe, in large part, because it *feels* right. Think about string theory, for example. Whether you believe it, and whether it turns out to be right or not, string theory is *beautiful* in its main idea, which is that all matter is merely super-tiny loops of energy, vibrating like the strings of a violin. Different kinds of matter vibrates at different frequencies, turning the entire universe into a vast symphony of "notes" colliding, interacting, harmonizing with itself in eleven-dimensional space. Now, that's an elegant idea (science author Brian Greene didn't call one of his books on the subject "The Elegant Universe" for nothing), regardless of the fact that when it was thought up, there was virtually no way for anything about it to be tested. The entire basis of the scientific method is creating a theory to match physical evidence, and this idea of the most basic structure of the universe started out with no way to test it! But it gained traction anyway. And why? Because it taps into a deep emotional well that all humans have, which is our attachment to music. The idea of string theory is so welded to the idea of music that we can't help but romanticize it. I'm not saying if the theory is right or wrong, but however it turns out, it gained its initial power through that connection already present in our minds. Of course, if it proves to be right, the question will be whether it seemed right and elegant to us because we are intrinsically wired for sound, so to speak, so steeped in music from even before our birth that it was all but inevitable.

It's this powerful cocktail, the need for comfort, order, and beauty that drive us to believe what we believe. Who can blame us if, sometimes, we head down wrong paths of belief, looking for a solution that feels right at the time? I think as long as we keep looking, letting our experiences point us in the right direction but not to entirely close our minds to other possibilities, we can't help but to continue learning and growing our entire lives.

Lilycraft

Some kids can sit in front of a TV for hours, watching the same shows and Disney movies over and over and over AND OVER AND OVER again. My kid doesn’t seem to have that predilection; she’s much more into make-believe at this point. She does seem to have a bent toward video games, which frankly I’d rather she play than passively watching a screen. Even more, I’m glad that we have one game in particular that we can share. I had always hoped that my child and I would bond in some capacity over video games. They are, after all (or so I've heard), replacing TV and movies as the pre-eminent entertainment form of the 21st century. Check the opening-week sales for games from the Halo or Mass Effect series if you question this. But Lily's penchant for a particular game has me excited and thankful all at the same time. Because what she loves isn't a shoot-'em-up, or a mindless busy-finger game (although she does dabble in Fruit Ninja and Office Jerk too). No, when we sit down to play something together, nine times of ten what she wants to play is Minecraft.

For those of you who don't know, Minecraft is what they call a "sandbox" game, where you play a character in a virtual world with a set of ground rules, and then you're left to do whatever you like. Minecraft takes place in a blocky, lo-res landscape, which you're looking at in first person, through the eyes of an explorer. You can wander the landscape collecting resources, building tools, and digging into the earth to look for treasure in caves. There's no real set goal, just a method of doing whatever it is you like.

Lily loves to build in this world. When you set the game to "creative" mode, you can call up all kinds of building materials at will (instead of having to “mine” and then "craft" them, as the game's name implies) and create whatever kind of structure you want -- gravity is somewhat flexible when it comes to building things. Oh, and you can fly, which is always helpful. We started out playing this game a year ago with her on my lap, watching me move around and build little houses, her serving more as creative director ("Let's put a house made of cheese there! Let's build a zoo!"), but now she's at the point where she knows how to get around, how to pick out new materials to build with, and can whip up a building completely unaided.

Like I said, she's been picking the game up with amazing dexterity for someone who's just learning to write. The controls for the game are a combination of keystrokes and mouse, and she's gotten really adept at getting the game to do what she wants. One time I left her alone with the game for a half an hour, and when I came back she had constructed a three-room jail out of wood and iron bars, complete with doors inside and out. Then another time she asked me to build a tower, and after I did she flew up, built a large box of glass on the top, filled it with glowing lava and declared that she had just made a lighthouse. Of course, that's exactly what she had done!

Now she's moving on to building entire structures on her own routinely. One time I found her trying to make a "store" by making shelves out of small stone slabs attached to a wall, and trying to throw various food items onto them. She did this with no instruction from me, she had never seen it done anywhere else, she just came up with the idea herself. She's impressing me nearly every day with things like this.

She's even helped me figure out some aspects of the game I didn't understand before. We sort of work our way through things in tandem... I mentioned recently that there's actually an end to the "game" portion of Minecraft, and she wanted to see what it was like, so we looked up on the Minecraft online wiki (yes, it has one, what doesn’t these days) how to build something called an "end portal". We made it according to the specifications and were transported to a dark, floating island where you can battle a huge black Ender Dragon and see the end credits of the game. We were in "creative" mode, so we couldn’t be hurt in the fight; it was really just a matter of persistence, but I loved her curiosity about what that part of it was like, and her enthusiasm for figuring out how to do different things in the game.

There's a lot of things you can learn about the real world in Minecraft, as well. Aside from using all kinds of different building materials (I don’t think there are many four-year-olds out there who know what “lapid lazuli” is) and figuring out how to put them together in a way that makes sense, the game comes pre-loaded with different types of "biomes", which means that there are parts of the game where everything's covered in snow and the rivers have frozen over, there are deserts where everything is shifting sand and cactus will prick you if you bump into it. There are also large swaths of inland seas surrounded by beaches, swamps and huge jungles. So she's actually learning about the different kinds of environments there are on Earth through this game.

She's also learning about perseverance and thinking ahead. It's one thing to say that you want to build a hotel with a hundred rooms on the top of a hill, quite another to actually lay out the walls, add doors and windows, etc. At this point, there's only one place where we have actually stuck around long enough to build a complete structure with any kind of complexity, and it's a hotel (Lily is fascinated by the concept of hotels, for some reason) with a library, a restaurant, and a water slide that, before it froze over, ran from the top of the roof down the side and into a small pool we had constructed. Of course, there are some things that are just too much for her to accomplish on her own, and I'm always ready to step in and help, but she's very much the creative force when we play. I know there will be a day when she'll be manufacturing elaborate palaces without any help from me, but for now I'm just fascinated to help her build whatever she can come up with. I try not to shoot down too many ideas; I know that if she comes up with something completely bizarre, she'll probably lose interest once she realizes how hard it's going to be to execute. But her mental stamina is increasing, and every time we play she comes up with some way of putting elements together that I wouldn't have thought of myself.

She's just coming off a phase of building "treasure chests", where she'll plunk storage chests down everywhere she can, and then go about filling them with random inventory items. I'm not sure what it is about the process that she enjoys so much, but I'll definitely let her run with it until she tires of it. We’ve got plenty of time, and there are many more worlds out there for the two of us to build. Earlier this evening, she was talking about going through the End Portal again and digging a bunch of caves in the domain of the (now defeated) Ender Dragon. Sounds like fun!

The First Time I Heard… Level 42

Everyone has a band that they have followed near-obsessively over the years, even though 99% of the general population has never heard of them, or was only ever aware of one song they did. Such is the case with me (and, as you'll see, my brother and wife) regarding Level 42.

Who was Level 42, you ask? Well, for most of their career, they were a four-piece jazz/pop/fusion combo that specialized in English lite-FM funk with a pop edge. They were led by frontman Mark King, who is still considered one of the best bass guitarists in the world, and backup vocalist/keyboard wizard Mike Lindup. Rounding out the group were brothers Philip and Boon Gould, who played the guitars and drums respectively.

Now, if you didn't grow up in England, you probably have only heard their first single, "Something about You", which made somewhat of a splash on the radio in the grand old year of 1985. But not many folks knew that it was the lead single from their fifth out of a career total of ten albums. I certainly didn't know that the first time I heard them...

It was the summer of '85, and I was spending the summer afternoon doing what I pretty much always did, which was to hole up in the spare room where my typewriter was and try to hammer out the great American fantasy novel. As usual, the proceedings were going poorly. My brother stuck his head in the door (he had been in our shared bedroom next door) and said, "Hey, you should come listen to this new song on the radio." He had just weathered a long bout of mononucleosis, and spent nearly the whole time on the downstairs couch, watching MTV, the fledgling Weather Channel, and Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting. He had seen this particular song’s video, and was just now hearing it played on the radio.

I was a little reluctant to go -- because, frankly, the most boring music in the world is the kind you haven't heard yet -- but I eventually followed him and heard "Something about You" for the first time. It was such a breezy song, I remember, with an arpeggiated slap-bass line, syncopated keyboards, and soaring falsetto vocals. It was one of those rare instances where a song just grabs you on the first listen. I spent the next few weeks continuing to hunt for it on the radio, or even see if it was still in rotation on MTV.

I think, musically, this was a turning point for my brother and I, having not been indoctrinated into the world of pop music until MTV hung out its shingle in 1981. I jumped in right away, and basically never turned the channel off until around 1992, so in '85 I was heavily in its thrall. It was the beginning and end of modern music, as far as I was concerned. I wasn't even aware of college radio at the time, and wouldn't be for a few more years. But here was something that I liked that wasn't firmly designed to be part of the mainstream, something that I kind of felt like I discovered -- well, that my brother discovered...

From this point, let me digress into another facet of the power of music in one's life. I'm sure that everyone has songs or albums that they can listen to and suddenly be pulled back into a youthful time in their lives. Every song is loaded with sense memories of where you were, what you were doing, who you were with, what it all felt like. I think the reason Level 42 has stuck with me through all these years, and I why I always enjoy listening to them, is that, starting with World Machine, the album that "Something about You" came from, Level 42 had three consecutive albums that are strongly welded to my teenage years by these sense-memory ties.

Like I said, World Machine came out in the summer of 1985, the year I was first beginning to evolve into the music-purchasing juggernaut that I would later become. So although we bought the 45-rpm single (oh yes, those were the days), neither my brother nor I really considered buying the whole album yet. It wasn't until that summer, while we were on vacation at our grandparents' house in St. Mary's, Ohio, that we happened to hear the album’s second single, "Hot Water", on Nick Rocks (my grandparents were not in a section of the country that had called their cable company and told them that they wanted their MTV yet). Shortly after, we actually made the mile-roundtrip walk to the nearest retail outlet (a K-Mart, I believe), and bought the cassette.

We listened to it constantly for several weeks after that. Since "Something about You" was the first song on the first side, and "Hot Water" was the first song on the second, we spent a lot of time fast-forwarding from one end of the tape to the other, until we realized that there was a lot of good material in between too, and then the whole thing became the soundtrack of what remained of our summer. The album closer, "Lying Still", epitomizes that summer for me. It's a chilly song, I can't think of any other way to say it, and it still brings back many warm summer nights with its ending hum, punctuated by an icy cymbal chime.

One of the most exhilarating periods of falling in love is learning your new paramour's background, immersing yourself in the whys, hows, wheres and whens, piecing together what got them to where they were when you finally caught up and realized they were awesome. I hadn't yet done that with my wife-to-be, so I had to settle for the musical equivalent, purchasing Level 42's entire back catalog, which then consisted of four studio albums and a double-live. It was fun delving into all that music, from the somewhat low-fi, unsteady jazz of their self-titled debut, through the hits that England had already enjoyed a few years before, hearing the whole evolution.

Then came the dry spell, which lasted until the fall of 1987, when World Machine's follow-up, Running the Family, was released. I was excited to see some attention paid to it on MTV, which aired the video for the lead single, "Lessons in Love", several times. It was a bigger sound this time around, less jazz, and more fusion-y pop, aimed at filling stadiums instead of arenas. While there was still little interest in America, the band did produce a concert video, which MTV aired as part of their late-Saturday-night concert series, and which I videotaped. It’s still the benchmark for how a rock concert should be performed, seeming both intimate and epic at the same time. There are still versions of some songs from that concert that I prefer to the album version. Plus, there was an extended bass solo piece that showcases Mark King slapping the heck out of his bass, but not after strumming chords and plucking it like a virtuoso.

While World Machine epitomized summer for me, Running in the Family was fall. I was just starting my junior year of high school, had met my wife (although I didn't know it yet), and my brother and I were starting a tandem venture into social lives. We ran with the same crowd – thankfully, music and drama geeks tend not to discriminate when it comes to age or what school year you're in -- and this was the album we always played while getting ready to go out with friends or to an evening rehearsal. The opening synth chords of "Lessons in Love" still sound like a heraldic call to me, raising the curtain of an evening of possibility and guaranteed fun.

Things had changed a lot by the time the third album of this personal trilogy came out. Staring At the Sun didn't make it to America until October of 1988, and by that time Amy and I had worked on the school musical together, started dating, spent the summer watching movies, and then made a half-hearted preemptive breakup as she went to college in Florida, while I stayed behind and started my senior year. I was still with the majority of my friends, and taking on more responsibility in the extra-curricular groups I was in, but it almost seemed like a backwards step, just because she wasn't there.

That's the frame of mind I was in when my family drove to New England to visit my uncles. While Michigan was still mostly warm, autumn was well underway in Connecticut. I became acquainted with Staring At the Sun during the drive, and as a result to me it still feels just like that trip, overcast, chilly, drizzly, but with pockets of familial warmth. The album, like my mood, was joyous and hopeful, but still tinted with regret. For every "Heaven in My Hands", which opens its go-for-it call with a literal blast of trumpets (well, synthesized trumpets anyway), there are songs like the title track, a melancholy wash of regret at love missed. But songs such as "Silence", with its refrain "Don't be afraid/Love will always come your way", kept me optimistic. One song in particular, "Tracie", seemed to speak to my current situation, because its lyrics are aimed at a former love and basically asks, "I forget, why did we break up anyway?"

When Amy came back from college after a semester away, Staring at the Sun became an unofficial soundtrack for us, flipping around the meanings of all the songs -- the sad songs became the past, the upbeat ones embodied the future. I still love listening to it now, and vividly remember the songs in both emotional states, both in that New England fall, and that holiday season when everything I thought was lost came back to me. Of course, Level 42 didn't stop there. They went through some restructuring after Staring at the Sun, and went on to release three more albums (so far), which I’ll at least summarize:

Guaranteed: Nice work, some of it appropriately epic-sounding, but it also seemed like it could have been made by a dozen other bands. I credit this to the departure of the Gould brothers, who were replaced by what seems like a gaggle of other musicians, songwriters, and producers. It should probably be complimented on how it was able to stay true to their original sound given the situation.

Forever Now: Much better. Stripped down to just two of the original members, Mark King and Mike Lindup, with songwriting assists from Boon Gould, this felt like a return to form. Level 42 is great at setting up a groove and just riding it out, and this album glides effortlessly along for almost 75 minutes.

(Honorable mention: Mark King's solo album One Man. A solo album really in name only, it's very much in the Forever Now vein, although a little sadder in tone. But that just makes it especially nice when the closer "Changing of the Guard" comes along, which asks the musical question "Is this the end of the old guard?/I wouldn't count on it!"

Retroglide: The "reunion" album that lacks a lot of the punch that the previous nine albums had. I've listened to it a handful of times since it came out in 2006, and it hasn't really made an impact yet. I could name some of the tracks, but I'll be damned if I can recall what any of them sound like.

One thing I forgot to mention was the part of being a music fan that has really ceased to exist in the 21st century, that of hunting for rare b-sides and import releases. In the case of Level 42, I managed to snag a single compilation, a remix album, and an "early tapes" collection while I was over in Germany in 1992. Wandering through record stores is something that I really miss from growing up.

So, now that I've waxed poetic about them for a few thousands words, aren't you interested to hear Level 42 for real? I'd have you start where I did 28 years ago, with "Something About You". And then I'd ask you to think about what music vividly takes *you* back to when you were young, and go listen to it. Try to capture some of that magic and energy again, even if all the memories aren't all good. Because that's what makes us who we are.

The Goldenest Age

Last summer I took a solo trip to the gas station to fill up my mother-in-law’s car while she was here visiting. Since I didn’t have any cassette tapes with me, I ended up scanning the radio stations and ended up listening to the tail end of “Prairie Home Companion”, which I’d never heard before, aside from sitting through the movie, which most people will agree doesn’t count. One thing in particular struck me about Garrison Keiller’s monologue, which happened to be about strawberries, and that was the sound of his live audience. I’m guessing that most of the people who attend his shows are well over 50, and if that’s the case, then I have to report that you can’t determine the age of a person by the sound of their laughter. It could very well have been a crowd of (admittedly, low-key) twentysomethings listening to him, judging by their collective sound.

It got me thinking about external versus internal age, and as I creep further into the territory where it’s more and more common for me to clearly recall things that happened thirty years ago(!), I’ve decided that where I am, here just over forty, is actually a great place to be. There are spectrums of attitude that we move along as we get older, and they all seem to progress from being in a “collective” state to being in a “reflective” state. By this, I mean that we start out primed to accumulate experiences, while the older we get, we tend to get just as much – if not more -- enjoyment from remembering and assimilating those experiences.

What comes to mind when I say that is a writing project that my cousin and I undertook when we were in our twenties. We traded off writing short chapters of a weird fantasy novel, and a pattern quickly developed… my cousin would add these wildly, seemingly tangential plot twists into the mix, and I would then spend the next chapter figuring out how to fold it into the canon of what we had already written. Clearly, he loved the freedom of taking whatever creative idea his mind latched onto and lobbing it to me, and I loved making it fit into the existing story. It tells a lot about our personalities, I think, and also illustrates the difference between the “collective” and “reflective” states that I mentioned. Oh, and by the way, we’re starting to undertake this experiment again, now in our forties.

We’re definitely most collective when we’re young. At fifteen, the only thing that matters is what’s new, what’s got buzz, what can we be the first to experience. That feeling comes at a time when we’re still restricted in where we can go and what we can do -- and rightly so, since we still think we’re invincible. This fact might be ironic, or it might even be fuel for the fire. At the other end, late in life, is the reflective state, something that I’ve seen in older people. It’s the familiar warmth of cloaking yourself in a cloud of nostalgia, where you can sit back and reminisce, editing your own life for clarity and content, figuring out where later developments originated from, where your most formulative moments occurred. While there’s a danger to being too adventurous when you’re young, there’s also a danger in old age. Sometimes that web of recollection gets so thick that not even a hint of anything new comes in. I doubt that a typical person of eighty-five lives in a world that has changed more than marginally since they were seventy-five, no matter how much the world has moved on in the interim. In these cases, there’s such an accumulation of life, things and places and people to love and sift through at will, that there’s hardly any room for more.

At forty, I’m realizing that I’m poised on the tipping point between these two states, able to appreciate the value of nostalgia, but also still itching to see what the next thing coming around the corner is. Music, for example. I’ve got a long YouTube “watch it later” assortment of new music that I want to give a listen, but at the same time I’m also happy to spend an afternoon letting an 80s playlist randomize on my music player.

There are other spectra of experience I started thinking about too, and the longer I look at them, the more they all seem to converge right around this spot where I stand. For another example, I’m just as likely to enjoy travel and action over staying at home relaxing... I probably naturally passed that point back when I was twenty-five, but it’s been revitalized thanks to a four-year-old who makes it almost impossible to sit for an extended period of time. Now there’s a reason to head to the park, or the pool, or the zoo, which just makes me remember how much fun it is to go out and be collective again.

Relationships are yet another vector. Youth is full of passion, the headlong rush to get to Whatever’s Going to Happen Next, a relentless exploration of everything love has to offer, quiet moments of intimacy interspersed among days and evenings full of raucous adventure and uncertainty. Later on, though, it’s the slower shared moments that matter, the ease of being who you truly are with the person you love, without the pressure of having to be anyone else other than who you are, even that means sitting and not having to say anything. From where I stand, I can feel the pull of both, being both beckoned forward and eased back in equal measure.

Of course, I don’t know whether the vantage point I have is unique, or if everyone feels this way at some particular point in their lives. I suppose the ideal thing would be to stay in this state as long as possible. There must be some people who out there who spend the majority of their lives in it. I’m resolved to do just that, to stay in it as long as I can. It’s really having the best of both worlds, isn’t it, the constant process of accumulating and assimilating all at once?