Okay, let’s go over the ground rules.
You can’t leave first until you chug a beer.
Any man scoring has to chug a beer.
You have to chug a beer at the top of all odd-numbered innings.
Oh, and the fourth inning is the beer inning.

I’ve been thinking about 8F13 lately because there’s been some discussion of setting up a softball tournament in the semi-near future, and it would be really nice if it were to be played according to Springfield rules. But in re-watching 8F13, it occurred to me that it’s perhaps my favorite piece of baseball popular culture ever. Sure, every baseball movie ever made has its defenders: My father gets all weepy at The Natural, I’m quite fond of the dialogue and the feel of Bull Durham, and you can even find fans of silly movies like It Happens Every Spring (like, say, me). The best baseball movie, for my money, is one that hilariously few people have ever seen, probably because it ran on HBO and nowhere else — 61*.

But how I love 8F13! It’s truly a thing of beauty, and I smile every time it comes up in syndication because I know it (like so many other Simpsons episodes) so well. And because it was so clearly a product of the writers’ love of baseball, and takes such joy in the game, and the things that are glorious about the game (the personalities, for the most part). And the players — how good were they when they were recruited to play on Mr. Burns’ team?

(Sadly, I’m reduced to using the triple crown stats and stupid countings, because Baseball Reference doesn’t feature EqA or other more useful metrics.)

1B Don Mattingly was a Yankee in 1992 (and in every other year of his career). He hit .288/.327/.416/, 184 H, 86 RBI, 14 HR.

2B Steve Sax spent 1992 with the Chicago White Sox, putting up a season line of .236/.290/.317 in 567 AB. 134 H, 47 RBI, 4 HR.

3B Wade Boggs was lured away from the Red Sox in a season where he hit .259/.353/.358 in 514 AB with 133 H, 50 RBI, and 7 HR.

SS Ozzie Smith played for St. Louis that year (duh), putting up a .295/.367/.342 line in 518 AB, good for 153 H and 31 RBI. Don’t ask about his home runs in 1992, or any other year for that matter.

LF Jose Canseco was traded halfway through 1992, splitting time between Oakland and Texas; his season line was .244/.344/.456 with 107 H, 26 HR, and 87 RBI. There’s no word in the official history of the nuclear plant team whether Jose injected the other players with steroids (though I can’t imagine the nerve tonic did anyone any good).

CF Ken Griffey, Jr. was, of course, playing for Seattle in 1992 and having an excellent year. .308/.361/.535. I look at that SLG and just gape — Griffey’s been injured so much lately, I tend to forget what an amazing ballplayer he was at his peak, and mourn what could have been. Should have been. 174 H, 27 HR, 103 RBI.

Our nemesis in RF, Darryl Strawberry, had a short season in 1992, playing for the Dodgers. In spite of his nine home run performance, which does not show up in official histories, Strawberry put up at .237/.322/.385 line; 37 H and 5 HR, with 25 RBI.

I’m still kind of amazed that Mike Scioscia was tapped to be Burns’ starting catcher. In what would be his final season as a player, he put up a .221/.286/.282 line with 77 H, 24 RBI, 3 HR. I think his career as a manager is more distinguished than his career as a catcher.

And then there’s Roger Clemens. In 1992, pitching for Boston, he put up an 18-11 record with a 2.41 ERA in 246.7 IP and striking out 208. Clemens and Griffey are the only two players still actually playing baseball — Griffey is unquestionably worse, but Clemens.. might actually have been better in 2004 than he was in 1992.

So what would a contemporary Burns team look like today? You could debate this at lengths, but if I were Burns and out to beat Ari, I’d say..

1B Albert Pujols
2B Mark Loretta
3B Adrian Beltre
SS Alex Rodriguez
LF Barry Bonds
CF Carlos Beltran
RF Ichiro!
C Ivan Rodriguez
DH Edgar Martinez
RHP Randy Johnson

I pick Edgar not because 2004 was a great season for him, but because.. damnit, it’s Edgar. And we love him. I note that the other Mariners on this team are not there solely because they’re Mariners, but because they actually are the best at their position in the league right now. Which is kind of a neat feeling, knowing we’ve got a killer RF and a kick-ass 3B.

26 days to opening day.

It was pointed out to me in e-mail that I came awfully close to sounding like a warblogger there in my last post. This was entirely accidental. I would like to state for the record that I do not in any way, shape, or form endorse that kind of language use. Moreover, I would like to publicly decry the tendency of contemporary discussions to devolve into something resembling the expository passages of a bad Tom Clancy novel with the requisite use of indecipherable acronyms and annoying jargon. RAMCC! AMRAAM! CENTCOM! Ick.

Sorry for the confusion. I think I was just amused at the discovery of a highly useful tool for aviation nerds who are too cheap to buy the civilian versions from the FAA or Jepp (that would be, uh, me).

I’m not sure why I’m surprised by this, but it turns out the Department of Defense’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has a collection of terminal instrument procedures for Baghdad International, among other airfields in that part of the world. A surprisingly large number of these airports have TACAN approaches — TACAN being a particularly military type of navigational aid (and a temporary one, at that). “The security situation,” DoD says, “is such that the only radio navigational aid in Iraq that has been flight inspected for civil use is the Baghdad VOR. All current radio navigational aids are temporary military assets.” The moral is, apparently, “get a GPS and hope your airport of choice has a published GPS approach.” Or, alternatively, “don’t fly in Iraq. Still.”

If you poke around the site for a little while, you get a little disappointed at how, uh, blandly repetitive some of the documents are. The planning file for Iraq, for instance, does not contain any information labeled “DANGER: DO NOT FLY HERE UNDER PENALTY OF AMRAAM,” nor does it say “LANDINGS AT THIS AIRPORT AT OWN RISK” or even “YOU MUST HAVE PERMISSION FROM CENTCOM OR SOMEBODY SPECIAL TO FLY HERE.” Instead, the most prohibitive it gets is a warning that you can’t fly VFR in Iraq if you’re not military; you have to file and fly IFR if you’re going to be operating commercial or civil (!) aircraft in the country. Somehow, I doubt Iraq’s GA lobby is going to be too bent out of shape over this. (Does Iraq even have a general aviation constituency?)

To get that kind of warning, you have to visit the Regional Air Movement Coordination Center that deals with the airspace in and around both Afghanistan and Iraq. And there, they come right out and tell you: “All operators are warned that there are ongoing military operations in Iraq and non-military flight operations could be at significant risk. There are continuing reports of indiscriminate missile and small arms attacks on aircraft operating in Iraq. Operators undertake flights within the BAGHDAD FIR at their own risk.” The RAMCC publishes their own airspace information guide, which is a 229-page guide that is at once ridiculously dull and hilariously frightening. I think the funniest thing you’ll find in the guide is a requirement to sign and file a waiver form before operating aircraft in Iraq, forever releasing a whole host of agencies of liability should one of Moqtada’s boys shove a SAM up your exhaust pipe. It’s kind of interesting, actually, that the RAMCC exists at all — DoD came up with the idea during that whole Balkan thing to coordinate aircraft movement in a small area, and then to provide interm guidance and stability while the involved countries rebuilt their air navigation capabilities. ATS might seem like a fairly trivial kind of infrastructure, but it’s still important, and one that no one seems to think about.

(Also, I learned that Iraq’s aviation authority is called the General Establishment of Civil Aviation. How cool izzat? Great name, guys.)

Also of note — unrelated to this, but still fun to read — is the official participants guide for the US Antarctic Program, most of which will be redundant if you’ve spent any sort of quality time over at Big Dead Place.

Back when the world was young and the Internet still held lots of promise, and I was still stupid enough to read Wired (this would have been about 1994 or so, for those of you keeping track of these things), I stumbled on a Backlash column that said, basically, the information superhighway (gag me with a fork) was a big fat joke:

All the headlines about the digital, interactive, 500-channel, multi-megamedia blow-your-socks-off future are pure hype. Yes, all the wild Wall Street, through-the-roof, Crazy Eddie, cornucopia, shout-it-out-loud promo jobs are pure greed. It’s all a joke.

It’s now official. I’m announcing the beginning of convergence backlash. There will be no convergence. There will be no 500-channel future. There will be no US$3 trillion mother of all industries. There will be no virtual sex. There will be no infobahn. None of it – at least not the way you’ve been reading about it.

Sure the technologies are real. Digital compression and digi-tal phone lines are real. Those 100-MIPS micros are real. Multimedia and high-speed networks are real. In fact, the technology is so real that it’s almost obvious. Unfortunately, the businesses to exploit these technologies are anything but obvious.

The item itself is more about the topological and technological realities of cable vs. POTS as a method of driving bandwidth into the home, and it was more or less accurate in 1994. What’s weird is that it’s still accurate today — Telus still isn’t in the business of providing video on demand, and Shaw isn’t really in the business of providing dial tone (notwithstanding recent forays into that particular biz-ness^*). While both are manifestly in the business of providing ridiculously cheap loss-leading consumer-grade bandwidth, the convergence we all expected to happen hasn’t happened yet. And it’s a decade later! Moreover, there’s no sign it’s going to happen anytime soon; I think most people have figured that out. Every time I hear someone talk about VoD or streaming HDTV or whatever delivered over broadband, and about how the technology to make this work is “just around the corner,” I think to myself: It was just around the corner in 1994, in 1997, in 2001…

(We did up with the 200+ channel universe, but what no one had predicted was that most of those 200 channels would suck. Hard.)

Apparently, “turning the corner” means the same thing for fans of convergence as it does for fans of questionable foreign policy adventures. And you plan to have that insurgency under control when, precisely? Right around the time the OC-192 lands on my doorstep, and doesn’t cost more than $80/month. Got it. I’ll get right on holding my breath. And really, how reliable is your Internet connection? Mine’s pretty good, but I freely admit that while Shaw periodically goes down on me (on average, once or twice a month that I notice, for fairly long periods (like, more than 2 hours)), I’ve yet to pick up my phone and not get a dial tone^**. Ever. I mean, in my entire life. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, because I know it does, but really, when was the last time your landline phone didn’t work?

Nothing ever really changes. And it seems like we’re doomed to repeat the last decade over and over again. Remember the Communications Decency Act, and the other unconstitutional legislative piles of crud that were foisted onna Innernet by Congress and well-meaning politicians pandering to a paranoid and hysterical electorate? Guess what! It’s back:

The Utah governor is deciding whether to sign a bill that would require Internet providers to block Web sites deemed pornographic and that could also target e-mail providers and search engines.

Late Wednesday night, the Utah Senate approved controversial legislation that would create an official list of Web sites with publicly available material found to be “harmful to minors.” Internet providers in Utah must offer their customers a way to disable access to sites on the list or face felony charges.

No word on whether “unplug your cable” counts as an approved method of blocking sites deemed pornographic. There’s also no word on whether this is Yet Another Opening Battle in the Looming War on Obscenity, now prosecuted by those brilliant guys who brought you the war on terrah. Jesus, my head hurts.

How can we make 2005 more like 1994? We’ve already got a pundit class announcing the end of something as we know it (back then: broadcasting and telephones; today: journalism). We’ve got scary government regulators lurking provocatively in the shadows, like the Russian army, waiting to pounce and kick the shit out of everyone (back then: porn and privacy; today: porn, privacy, and political speech). We’ve got piles of people crowding onto the network at a seemingly exponential rate (which is confusing, because you’d think we’d eventually run out of morons), each of them convinced they’re doing something revolutionary and dramatic and life-changing. What else do we need to turn back the clock and really re-live Internet hype once more? Oh! Oh! I know! Let’s fight the crypto wars all over again! It’ll be so retro, and cool, and we can all feel like a persecuted minority once more, and shout “cyber rights NOW!” like it means something, and.. oh, never mind. I don’t have the energy^***.

And here I was, naive enough to think that we’d reached the point where the network might just be a tool, no more, no less. Bah.

* I freely admit to being intrigued by this service and would like to know more about it, assuming they ever get it out of Calgary. Unlimited long distance and my phone system for $55/month on top of my existing cable bills? w00t, baby, w00t.

** Assuming, of course, that I’ve paid my bill.

*** My tentative list of names for the blog that will inevitably follow Under a Blackened Sky: “Wanker With a Weblog,” “Digital Curmudgeon,” and “Get the Fuck Offa My Network, You Arriviste Punks.”

The latest news from Arizona in the neonatal baseball season is John Hickey’s profile piece on Adrian Beltre, the new starting third baseman for Your 2005 Seattle Mariners. I look at this article, I look at his career and 2004 statistics, and I look at his 2005 PECOTA projection and comparables (.279/.337/.486 weighted mean, and this is probably hilariously conservative), and I think to myself: Holy shit, I can’t believe we actually got this guy playing for our team.

Adrian freakin’ Beltre. It still brings a smile to my face, two and a half months later. I can’t believe this actually happened. Whoo.

I can’t get at my e-mail at the moment — my mailhost has decided to stick its fingers into port 22 and sing “la la la I can’t hear you!” as loudly as it can. (And POP’s been broken since before Christmas — I can LIST just fine, but RETR sends the mail headers and then hangs up. Any ideas?) As a result, any urgent e-mail you’re trying to send to me… won’t actually make it anywhere near me until this gets resolved.

Highly frustrating, but what can you do?

But extra special congratulations go out to my font wizard pal for his big win at work, and mad props go out to other people who know who they are for reasons they already understand.

I see (mostly by way of this) that the Terri Schiavo case is back in the news, thanks to the trial being finished, and the judge having rendered a decision, with implementation of the decision to begin soon-ish. Everything I want to say about Schiavo I’ve already said before, but there’s at least two things that bear repeating.

First of all, the comment in the Shotgun about death by dehydration is curious. Some quick Googling reveals that the quote by Dr. William Burke comes from a book by Wesley J. Smith entitled Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder, and you don’t have to spend any sort of quality time with Google or Amazon to figure out what kind of agenda that book is trying to push. (Indeed, most of the examples of Smith’s writing has struck me as deeply, um, hysterical, and his comments about the “death culture” within medicine leave me scratching my head: How come nobody told me about this?) Dr. Burke is a professor of neurology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine where he spends at least a chunk of his time dealing with Alzheimer’s patients, which means he’s probably got at least some familiarity with palliative and end-of-life issues, so I have to accord his perspective at least some respect.

Unfortunately, his position — that dehydration is a “bad death” — doesn’t seem to be supported by the evidence. Ganzini et al, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that it ain’t necessarily so: “Nurses reported that patients chose to stop eating and drinking because they were ready to die, saw continued existence as pointless, and considered their quality of life poor. The survey showed that 85 percent of patients died within 15 days after stopping food and fluids. On a scale from 0 (a very bad death) to 9 (a very good death), the median score for the quality of these deaths, as rated by the nurses, was 8.” I know a lot of nurses, and I don’t think any of them would rate a death that involved seizures, extensive bleeding from mucosal membranes, and repeated vomiting episodes as a “good death.” It seems odd that the only article I’ve been able to find on the topic very nearly directly refutes Dr. Burke’s position (which has bounced around the echo chamber, almost without citation, since this whole mess resurfaced).

There’s an interesting interview with Dr. Ganzini over at Medscape (I’ve linked to Google’s cache, so you don’t have to register) where she talks about some of the meta-issues involved in her 2003 study. One point she made caught my eye:

[Voluntary dehydration] has been going on long before our study, but it hasn’t really been discussed. I hope this study will put it out on the table to increase discussions about it. The healthcare profession has always allowed terminally ill patients to refuse food or fluids for comfort reasons, such as anorexia or nausea, but now we need to talk about it in those patients who do it to hasten death. It needs to bring about a broader discussion of how we can improve palliative care and meet unmet needs.

Yeah. What she said.

Secondly.. well, I hate quoting myself, and think it’s the height of arrogance, but I already said this once and doubt I could ever put it again so well..

Here’s something to think about: If you believe that a competent adult has the right to decide to die, and to refuse particular forms of medical care to further his goal of dying,

.. meaning that if Terri Schiavo could have made this decision for herself (never mind if she would have, let’s work with the decisions she could have made)…

is it appropriate to prevent a decision-maker for that individual from making the same choice for him in the event he is born incompetent or becomes incompetent at a later point in life? Is there a difference? The activists would have you believe that of course there’s a difference, that the difference is critical, but is it really? The argument is framed in the context of promoting equal protection and equal rights, but it’s really just a special pleading: Equal protection and equal rights would necessarily require a proxy be capable of making those choices for an incompetent individual, because otherwise said individual would not be equal. Options that would be open to them were they competent would be closed solely by virtue of their incompetency, and that’s (say it with me) discrimination.

Even if the [activists] are right, and the criteria we use for basing decisions about life and death for incompetent individuals are biased in favor of the able (they frequently use the awful word “ableist”), so what? We’re in this mess because congenitally incompetent individuals do not possess value systems, and so we must find some system into which we can place these individuals; we look, under these circumstances, to society at large. And we ask the questions that we would ask of ourselves were we in the same place; we use “reasonable person” standards of judgment. For those individuals who become incompetent later in life, we use the values of the society to which the individual was raised and lived and is (arguably) still a part of. If you don’t like this, you need to come up with a system that allows for a different values system to be imposed upon the incompetent that do not place them at a disadvantage compared to the rest of us — unless you’re willing to be inconsistent and argue for accomodation and no special treatment when it suits you, and very special treatment when it doesn’t. …

In the absence of clear, compelling evidence to the contrary, one can only attribute to an incompetent person those values that would be possessed by a reasonable member of the society in which that person lives. This does not mean opinion polls. This does not mean “what the church thinks.” This does not mean 95% of what people think it does when they talk about societal values. It also doesn’t mean “what does society think a proxy decision maker should be able to do.” It does mean “what does society think an individual person should be able to do for themselves” — a very different question, and one that has been repeatedly missed.

This point gets missed, repeatedly. The point is free to be argued or rejected, of course, but it is truly aggravating that it isn’t even considered most of the time.

I think a lot of the heat and light over this issue probably has something to do with the reflex revulsion we have to it. But that’s not a good foundation for public policy, and not a good foundation for medical decision-making. We don’t like thinking about end-of-life issues, and although most of us know we’re going to die, I suspect most of us don’t actually believe it, and that drives a lot of our popular thinking about death and dying. (Personally, I’m not afraid of death. I am, however, very afraid of dying. It’s not the same thing.) We’re not doing ourselves any favors by talking about these issues in hyperbolic terms, throwing the “murder” label around, and arguing in favor of a wholly imaginary conspiracy against incompetent individuals and a culture of death.

There are those who think all deliberate death — whether by an individual’s own hand, or by someone else’s, whatever the circumstances — is a sin, immoral, and an unconscionable act. I can accept that. But I don’t believe that’s true by any objective standard, or that it’s useful as a starting point for discussions about death. And I also believe that there is such a thing as a good death, and that it is not only appropriate by required for physicians, nurses, and other health care providers to say, “That’s enough,” and let nature take its course. These choices were easy when people died at age 40 from disease we laugh at today, and were simpler when we didn’t have ICUs and ventilators and invasive feeding tubes, but people don’t die at age 40, and we do have intensivists who can keep shockingly sick people alive far longer than they ever would have lived at any point in the past. Does this constitute progress? I don’t know — it depends on the person and it depends on the disease. And it also depends on the prognosis, and the expected clinical course.

As I’ve said before, I have no real opinion one way or the other about what should happen to Terri Schiavo. It sounds a lot like I’m arguing in favor of discontinuing her feeding and perhaps I am, but that’s not the position I’ve carved out in my head. The positions I’ve taken in all my writing on the subject are generally in opposition to those held by people who want her kept alive, mostly because they’re using arguments that I find truly repugnant (or stupid, or just plain wrong) to justify their own positions. I’m sure that, if I spent enough time, I could construct equally valid criticisms for the other side, but as they say, this is my Web page, and the other side’s arguments don’t piss me off nearly as much. Even that’s saying something — the fact that this case is seen by many as having sides is highly irritating. It’s not about what side you’re on, or what you believe is morally right or wrong, or what you think the role of the state is, or whether you’re a life-loving conservative or a death-worshipping liberal.

It’s about what’s right for one specific person, and who gets to decide what’s right for that person.

And in their haste to score points in the ever-escalating rhetorical war against the demons of The Other Side, it seems as though politically-oriented commentators forget that a lot.

The Vancouver Police Department is soliciting recommendations for a new cruiser decal and paint scheme. It’s kind of a nifty idea. This sort of thing is always fraught with peril, because you can end up with some truly hideous schemes, and it’s nice to see that the VPD actually cares what its citizens think. Or maybe not, since Chief Constable Jamie Graham will consider the suggestions and then make up his own mind. No one has ever accused the VPD — or any police department, for that matter — of being anything less than a democratic dictatorship.

There’s a form you can use to select among one of four pre-approved designs (or suggest your own changes). Though I’m not participating — it’s not my tax money at work, after all — I think all four schemes are ugly as sin. #3, in particular, has the disgusting look of a suburban American police department paint job.

Who did this stuff? Yecch.

A couple of months ago, I made mention of Doug Coupland’s new book, jPod — a sequel, of sorts, to Microserfs, quite possibly one of the most beloved books in my life, if not the most beloved. When you find a book that so accurately captures many facets of your personality, and of the personalities of your friends, you tend to hold on to it (or reject it outright, simply because it frightens you). I’ve told a number of people that if they really want to understand how it feels to be me on some days, Microserfs is the book to read — even if it’s ten years out of date and I don’t work in that field anymore. This is me and my friends; I saw myself, and I saw people I knew, and I saw the culture that I considered myself a part of (and still do, to some extent).

Over the years I’ve encountered people who’ve read Coupland and had all kinds of reactions to his work; rarely, if ever, do I find someone who is ambivalent about his writing. You seem to either find him fascinatingly perceptive (to the point of frightening, sometimes) or maddeningly tedious; there’s not a lot in between, and I think where you fall depends largely on whether you find the characters appealing or not. Doug creates these great characters, builds a universe for them, and turns them loose, and while you can complain that his books lack plots, that’s a feature for me, not a bug. I can’t think of a single instance in a Doug Coupland novel where a character has done something that wasn’t wholly within their clearly-defined personality. I love that kind of stuff.

It doesn’t hurt that he sometimes nails things so well that it can be almost heartbreaking. “Love was frightening and it hurt,” he once wrote (in the passage that made me realize I’d be a Coupland fan for life), “not only during, but afterward — when I fell out of love. But that is another story. I’d like to fall in love again, but my only hope is that love doesn’t happen to me too often after this. I don’t want to get so used to falling in love that I get curious to experience something more extreme — whatever that might be.” Tell me that doesn’t sound like someone you know.

Anyway.

I’ve been dying to know how he was planning to follow up on Microserfs, and now I know. Sort of:

Could you tell us a little about jPod, the novel you’re currently working on?
It’s about people who work in game design, which is a lot of my friends here in Vancouver. It’s a sequel to Microserfs but different. Tech is such a different place ten years later.

Sweet!

What I want to know is this: Is there going to be a character in there who, unlike the bright lights who get their names in the credits at the end of the game, toils away in obscurity on the core technology behind the game, and maybe fights with shitty font rendering software the company picked for a bunch of potentially spurious reasons? ’cause that would kick ass if there were. (I don’t know anyone like this at all, can you tell?) I also expect some bitter coders, young pimply QA testers, art institute graduates who don’t know squat about programming but can design the shit out of anything, slave-driving managers, pissed off spouses with LiveJournals (with 5,000 comment threads), some cast-offs from the dot-com glory days, and people who went into the business not out of passion but out of a belief that you could make assloads of cash.

I can’t wait for it.

I was poking through my CD collection tonight looking for a few specific tracks (three versions of “Solsbury Hill” — album, live, and cover by Sarah McLachlan) and wondering why it was that I own all these discs but don’t actually listen to them on nearly as regular a basis as I should. Possibly I need to sit down and systematically rip them all; I found albums I hadn’t heard in years, but loved fiercely at the time — familiar names, like Sue Medley, Annie Lennox, Faith No More, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Alice in Chains, Melanie Doane, frickin’ Enya.. but names that I’ve forgotten in recent years, much to my sorrow. Why does this happen? Last night I heard Jann Arden’s Happy? all the way through for the first time since 2001 or so — probably since I saw her play live in support of that album — and was reminded of how her stuff used to blow me away. And I wondered why it was I hadn’t pulled it out and listened to it in four or five years.

It’s always interesting to remember the most poignant moments of your relationship with music from certain artists — I was in San Antonio, for instance, when I discovered Shawn Colvin (in a duet with Bruce Hornsby), and I recall the “holy shit” moment with stark clarity, lying in the dark of my hotel room listening to the disc by myself. Many of these “holy shit” moments seem to involve travel and being away from home, which may magnify and heighten the feeling of discovery; I knew I liked Fumbling Towards Ecstasy from the pre-release tracks I’d heard on the radio ahead of its release, but I didn’t fall in love with it until I listened to “Wait” with my headphones partially plugged in, in a hotel room in Vancouver. These moments, and hundreds more like them, are seared into my memory — as I suspect they are for most people who love music and build soundtracks for their lives, one day and one track at a time. You almost never do it on purpose, but inevitably, it happens.

It was in Montreal that I bought Time For Mercy back in the late fall of 1993. I’d heard “Will You Remember Me?” on the radio a week or so earlier, and it happened that I was in Quebec on the day the disc was released, so I ambled over to the record store and bought a copy. And then I sat in bright October sunshine, in the concrete plaza in front of the IBM tower in downtown Montreal, and listened to the whole thing twice, trying to focus on reading something I don’t remember anymore but being thoroughly distracted, and thinking that it was the most amazing stuff I’d heard in years. I played that disc so much over the next few months that looking at it now, I’m amazed it still plays — a testament, I suppose, to the error-correcting power of the CD format, and the flexibility of new CD players. And then I moved on to other things. But I can’t shake the feeling that forgetting about these artists, discarding these albums, is somehow wrong, regardless of whether I can actually find them again and have the joy of re-discovering something so treasured once upon a time.

There’s an element of sadness associated with this rediscovery, especially if it turns out there were other memories associated with the music. It’s hard for me to listen to Paula Cole’s Harbriger, for instance, since it came into my life during a moment of great stress and sorrow. But when I do, I remember the misery and how much it hurt… and I remember that whatever I felt then, I don’t feel now. The hurt is gone now, and I’m better. It’s a good feeling. Happy? I dunno. But not sad. Not that at all.