“Just hearing a single note can transport us back to a moment we thought we had forgotten.”
– John Mayer
A quick post after the indulgence of a few minutes scanning the headlines. It's no wonder there's so little quality parody these days--how does a comedy writer compete with the reality of 2023?
For instance, consider the fight out on Huntington Beach between a Furry and some guy recording the bizarre spectacle on his phone.
I wouldn't have been able to tell you what a "furry" was, but for one of my sons explaining the fetish when we still spoke regularly. I'm not sure I quite understand the hydraulics of it, but that's probably best.
Or there's the public mental breakdown of a certain billionaire threatening to drive his electric car to another eccentric billionaire's house in Palo Alto for an impromptu cage fight in the front yard.
If you or I engaged in this sort of behavior, an involuntary commitment might follow. Sending tweets about his testicles? Really? But we don't have the protective power of absurd wealth to shield us from our excesses. Too bad he lacks that exposure, which perhaps would be for his own good.
Or, finally, I offer America's favorite cranky old veteran uncle, explaining to a room full of religious zealots that Jewish parents should have fought harder to keep their kids out of Auschwitz, because there were more Jews headed for the crematoriums than guards herding them there.
No, there's not much room for parody in the spaces between our daily headlines. No wonder I gave up trying to be funny sometime in 2017.
Moving on then, I've lately found in my regular Facebook feed a page devoted to what comprised the Billboard Top 20, or sometimes the Bottom 20, for this week in 198X. The page captures me every time, I have to admit. Sometimes it's because the titles are mostly familiar to me, and I'm transported back to the moment in time they represent.
For instance, there's this list from this week in 1981.
Eighteen of the twenty start playing through my head as soon as I read the title. We'd just reported for Hell Week, the beginning of strength and endurance training ahead of the 1981 football season for the Hemet Bulldogs. I was a returning letterman, against all odds given my objective incompetence as a ballplayer. I had also undermined my performance that week by focusing on strength and weight gain over cardio, gaining 46 pounds in seven months but rendering myself a puking disaster as we sprinted up the hillsides on the south side of the Hemet Valley, over and over.
But, oddly, I can feel a little of the old sap rise as those old tunes course through my noggin, old synapses flickering for the first time in a very long time. Remember that old Journey album? I do, and those songs were the soundtrack of a senior year that was, in retrospect, pretty great.
Other lists are mostly devoid of familiar melodies, a reminder of just how busy I was at that moment in time. For instance, here's the list for this week in 1989:
Four out of twenty. That's it. On this particular August, thirty-four years ago, I'd just started FLUG, or Flight Lead Upgrade Training. I arrived there in record time, amassing my three hundred hours required to start the program in barely a year, hanging around the ops desk of the 27th Tactical Fighter Squadron every day just in case someone couldn't clear his ears and the schedulers needed a pilot to fill a line on the schedule at the last minute. I'd just turned twenty-five the month before; a year later I'd find myself at twenty-six the youngest flight lead in the squadron on the other side of the planet, flying our first patrols along the Saudi-Kuwait border as part of the initial deployment for Operation Desert Shield.
Although we're talking about a measly four songs that ring familiar, at least one of those four brings a time and place into sharp focus. That summer of 1989 I flew in my first Red Flag at Nellis AFB, Nevada. This was the old Air Force, and we acted like a bunch of twenty-somethings with two weeks in Las Vegas and a pocket full of TDY money. One day I actually watched a pilot pause his preflight walkaround to vomit all over the main landing gear of his F-15, barely able to stand from the previous night's debauch. It was that kind of trip.
Making the most of our two weeks in Vegas, Kedds, Bobo, Master, and I managed to finagle a guest gym membership from my cool uncle John, an orthopedic surgeon there in Las Vegas and, back in those days, the ringleader of late night fun for his nephew and friends. The gym was right next to the Circus Circus casino on the Strip, and during the day was filled with what I'm pretty sure were showgirls getting their workouts before returning to their jobs dancing in pasties.
Of course we showed up in our flight suits, against all regs.
And the song for that moment: Great White's "Once Bitten Twice Shy". Just hearing the first few bars of guitar and piano drops me into the backseat of a rented Pontiac Grand Am, blazing down I-15 from the base into town, music thundering and feeling about as alive as a young man can feel.
Ah, but now it's back to the business of a nearly sixty-year-old lawyer in the age of Zoom. In two hours I'll join via computer that rarest of events for me these days, a substantive hearing on a series of difficult legal issues, this time in front of a judge I've never met down in south Florida. These hearings used to make my palms sweat, but lately don't much make my heart beat any faster. I'm prepared, I'll do my best. It'll be what it'll be. As I sometimes remind panicked paralegals or young lawyers in those nervous moments at counsel table before we're told to "All Rise" as the judge enters, at least nobody's shooting at us.
Selah.
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