Basic Life Skills, Circa 1978

I was just a few posts back there revealing how I have maintained a thin layer of tapes insulating my apartment from all the blustery changes in the music-listening-industry outside.

I made a tape from the Gillian Welch and Freakwater CDs of my oh-so-more-modern friend La (I should say, more technologically advanced, since her cyborgian accoutrements have included personal organizer devices that you wear on your hip, and which have steady red blinking lights like the eye of HAL, and that call you at home when she sits down on them-- but for the main she is known in the world as an Old Time banjoist, not a cyborg).

Well, I keep that tape in my car, and it sort of lives there, as back-up to my 12-CD changer full of bellydance music, girl-power rock, and the upbeat-for-Russians music of Linda and Zemfira. My personal failsafe: In Case of Need to Cry, Hit CASSETTE. Well, this morning I needed to cry. Not Freakwater cry, just Gillian Welch "Orphan Girl" cry. I had been listening to the radio, and the Beatles "Across the Universe" had come on, and I had just gotten out of therapy where I was talking about my dad who yesterday got on the other side of a 2nd-in-the-last-six-months brush with death. On rainy Saturdays my sister and I used to play all his Beatles on vinyl. He even took us to see Yellow Submarine in a real theater when I was really too small to understand. So after that song brought me to the tears that I'd been bottling up, I needed to hear some really good cry music.

I pressed play, and it was on the Freakwater end of things. Suddenly, reloading an obscure 1978 setting in my brain, I thought "I need to flip it." You know. Like vinyl. I took out the tape and flipped it. It was still playing Freakwater. I stopped it. Tried changing sides again. Freakwater. I turned it off. I was staring at the dashboard, about to just have a silent frustration cry instead of a good sad-singing-person cry when I remembered you have to fast forward through the half you don't want to hear.

That's right, I

(1) forgot how a cassette works,
(2) actually thought it worked like a record, and, more amazingly,
(3) still don't have EITHER of these two albums, or anything by Gillian Welch or Freakwater, on CD.