Phthursday Musings: Are you listening to a high-quality rip of the "Machinehead" cassette single like I am?

Over the courses of our precious lives on this beautiful planet we will encounter many extraordinary things. We will glimpse astonishing vistas, we will meet exceptional people, we will experience so many things great and small that we may very well not be able to comprehend. And then the day will come when your dear friend asks you the essential question of the age:

Are you listening to a high-quality rip of the "Machinehead" cassette single like I am?

And the question will hit you like one of those Star Trek sonic showers, the waves peeling away all terrestrial doubts from your integumentary system, providing you with a previously unknowable clarity about what is what.

The clarity, admittedly, is blinding, which you didn’t know clarity could be. But the thing here is that you’re beyond mere senses. You can just kind of curl back, take a deep breath, and say to yourself: I don’t get it, but I got it.

This evening a suggestion was offered, second-hand, that even some Millennials simply do not understand the idea that a song might be suffocatingly present in your life even if you made no attempt to listen to it. And I have been thinking about this, because I think it is possible that this makes sense for a 12 year old today, but the idea that it might also make sense for a 32 year old today utterly baffles me. It implies that in 2006, we were already somehow so media-culturally fractured that the radio and the speakers at the grocery store and cable television didn’t really unite people, or at least people of similar demographics.

I remember one morning in 1996 when I worked at Best Buy and before the store opened, the store manager did the Macarena, and… I guess that wouldn’t happen?

The only thing around to suffocate the masses with, apparently, is meme culture, and I think this might be why adults got so bent out of shape about SIX SEVEN!, because secretly a lot of us miss being able to talk about things like what the hell was with Brenda last night on 90210 or whatever even though we never actually cared about those things. We just like the idea that there’s some sort of coherent cultural familiarity, maybe even if it’s aggrvating as hell.

Today? You drive down the interstate in Indiana and I swear two-thirds of all billboards are for personal injury lawyers. Half of the Super Bowl commercials aren’t even for things you can purchase, let alone physical products. It’s not that we’re not inundated - we’re clearly inundated - but hearing the same full song as my neighbor feels like an impossibility.

Where I’m going with this, of course, is that I spent a chunk of time yesterday listening to, for the first time in my life, the entirety of Dio’s legendary 1983 album Holy Diver.

There are a lot of really silly things out there in pop culture, but when something feels a little scary, the scariness kind of overwhelms the silliness, right? But I think back to when this album came out and I think about some of the things my government was doing at the time and… let’s just say a lot of us were taught to be scared of the wrong things.

Can you really say that you’re scared of this:

As I get older and I think about things differently I seem to increasingly fall back on what Kurt said: we’re here to fart around. Now we’re still supposed to take care of one another - farting around doesn’t mean that we neglect our basic humanity - but it does mean that we’re supposed to run and jump and skip and frolic and listen to a high-quality rip of “Machinehead”, or you know, whatever else you might choose to do with your farting around time.

Closer to home for many of us, your Phthursday Flag is that of Oregon, Illinois:

This is of course an image of Lorado Taft’s famous statue The Eternal Indian, more commonly known as the Black Hawk statue. Taft started working on the statue in 1908 and completed it in 1911. It is 48 feet high, atop a 77 foot bluff overlooking the Rock River:

Many municipalities have flags which have been formally adopted but which aren’t in common use, and it’s kind of a stretch to call the flag a symbol of the city, when there are only two or three being flown anywhere. These flags often just have the city’s name on them and don’t really have a lot of additional thought behind them.

The Oregon flag though… you see it, you know what it is. It should be all over Oregon! It’s not like they don’t use statue imagery everywhere else.

I can’t find anything explaining the color choices, but I think it’s pretty clearly the sky and the sun represented (though if so, why the additional white band around the circle?)

In the fall, the Rock River around Oregon truly is wonderful, as reflected in the photo above. But you needn’t take my word for it. Allow me to recommend to you the thin book Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 by Margaret Fuller, available from Project Gutenberg. It’s a really intriguing read of Fuller’s travels which took her through such places as Geneva and Oregon when there were not a lot of people around. Fuller herself is a particularly interesting study; among other things, she is credited with writing the first major American feminist work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Lorado Taft is also an interesting study. The location of the Eternal Indian is where Taft founded the Eagle’s Nest Art Colony in 1898. The colony included such luminaries as Hamlin Garland and Henry Fuller. Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads is something every good Midwestern should read.

All of this strays a lot from the flag. But see, that’s the thing: flags should encourage considertion and conversation. They should reflect and inspire! And while it’s kind of an obvious choice for Oregon to fall back upon the most famous thing in town, give them credit for actually doing it.

Alas, the last time I was in Oregon proper - at least I think the last time - my friend Droopsy and I were ejected from the town park for being on the jungle gym after dark. If only there had been a rainbow.

You know, it’s likely that I wound up writing things this week that would have been interesting to some readers, except they couldn’t get past how dumb the first couple paragraphs were.

Ah, but what else can a guy do but follow the orders of the lunatic that used to call the radio station frequently late on Saturday nights?