As I write this I'm revisiting OK Computer, an album I don't listen to nearly enough. Well, I probably listen to it as often as I need to without inadvertently growing tired of it. I was supposed to be listening to Kid A because I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's "Killing Yourself to Live" and there's a good part of a chapter dedicated to his feelings about that album. For him, Kid A is the official soundtrack of September 11, 2001, even though the album was released almost a year prior to that day. And if you read this book--or this part of it anyway--and you feel as I do that the man is on to something, then it's not unlike the way you may have felt when you watched Wizard of Oz and listened to Dark Side of the Moon for the first time (assuming you were able to synchronize the start time on the CD player with the third lion's roar on the DVD)--but not in a "hey cool, are we stoned or what?" kind of way; it's more along the lines of "holy shit, that's really fucked up because that's so right." Maybe you'd have to read his book to understand the context of what I'm currently blathering about. In any case, I'm listening to OK Computer right now because for me this is the soundtrack of the first ten days of that September which in my experience were something like sleep-walking through the end of summer without my contacts in, and if you know me at all then you know that I can't see shit without my contacts.
I bought my copy at "Tunes on the Dunes," just off the boardwalk in Ocean City, NJ. It was probably Saturday, September 8. My sister had rented a house in the O.C. (ha) for the week and was staying there with her then-husband and their two kids. I came down for the weekend to visit them. Little Danny had just celebrated his 1st bday on the 7th. Anthony was 3 years old. I was 25 and still very much lost in a parallel universe following the previous weekend's chemically-induced euphoria which, of course, I couldn't speak to them about (and since I have no idea who would be reading this blog, I'm not about to get into that here either!). So I spent good chunks of time during my visit running off on my own to:
a. actually to run for exercise-sake
b. perhaps to observe/meet/seduce young unsuspecting ladies passing by
c. figure out what the hell was going on in my head (these were, it seems in retrospect, heavier times... the days of soul-searching before we gave up looking for our souls and realized it made about as much sense as a dog chasing his tail)
d. escape the annoying sounds of my nephews crying, running, falling, crying again, yelling and screaming, and the never-ending chatterbox who was my brother-in-law
So yes. Running through the streets of Ocean City with Radiohead in my head. Followed by boarding a bus to take me back to New York that Sunday night. The buses from the Jersey Shore that shuttle back and forth to Port Authority in NY are packed with the most random characters. One guy a couple rows up from me had a bad case of Tourette's, though I'm not sure what a good case of it would look like. Most of the riders on that bus had the defeated look of people who had lost their lunchmoney on the slots in Atlantic City. I tried to tune them out, so this was really the pivotal moment... or at least, the one I remember, where I'm riding this bus listening to OK Computer, feeling as if I've just escaped from the city, from the summer, from my life, remembering every weird bus ride I was ever on, feeling emotionally hungover and nostalgic for the high, and feeling very much outside of myself, if that makes any sense. You know the way the beach smells at low-tide, how the air feels, and the way it sounds? Maybe it was the music, but it seemed to sync with exactly where I was in that space and time. It stretched back into the last days of August and the first days of September and blurred everything else into a sweeping epic sound.
