26 September 1997: Why Not Sit Back And Relax?

Friday, 26 September 1997:

Why Not Sit Back And Relax?

So on my walk back from the coffee shop tonight (where I made a dent in Walter Miller's A Canticle For Leibowitz) I got a hankering to listen to my old Styx CDs.

Yes, I'm a closet Styx fan - or maybe a not-so-closeted former Styx fan. Styx was the group that truly got me "into" rock music, back in my early college days (nearly ten years ago!). Although lightweight for the most part, they made a fine transitional group from the days I listened to Duran Duran and The Go-Gos to more musically interesting groups like The Who, Jethro Tull and Nanci Griffith.

They're not entirely without merit, though: Tommy Shaw has a great voice and is a good acoustic guitarist. He also released three fairly interesting solo albums which appealed to some of my young-adult angst at the time. And band also had a very good drummer, who I understand died a few years ago. And, okay, for all the cheese he brought with him with his over-the-top synth melodies and rampant melodrama, Dennis De Young has a great voice.

I don't think I've listened to any of their albums in about three years. Right now I've got Pieces of Eight and Cornerstone in the player. Today's title, above, is a lyric from "Lights" from Cornerstone. The main drawback to those selections is that I have to sit through the interminable "Babe" (well, I guess I wouldn't have to if I weren't too lazy to get up and hit the "forward" button).

On the walk down to the coffee shop, I ran into a couple of old grad school friends whom I haven't seen in quite a while, Kevin Beyer and Jonathon Goldstein, as well as Kevin's wife. Kevin and I were pretty good friends in grad school, and he even invited me and my then-girlfriend over for dinner a few months after I left (I still remember the yummy applesauce they made). We've pretty much fallen out of touch for the last few years, but I suggested that we should get together and game sometime.

As I usually am when I walk downtown, I was in a trance and they had to shake me out of my reverie when they recognized me, but soon I was nattering on about Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman and other topics.

Actually, I remember a couple of years ago when I was heading downtown on a Friday evening, and a congregation of friends from work and from grad school rapped on the window of the ice cream shop where they were relaxing after going to a concert of Anonymous Four. Boy, I was pretty much in a daze through that conversation; when I head downtown to do some reading, I'm not in much of a frame of mind to be social.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)