2525

S: alright, Bottle, we've all done this plenty of times, what wackadoodle curve ball of an album is next on this little adventure?

B: who you calling little? It's a totally average sized meander of some might say excessive girth. I don't know, there's two possibilities. Nirvana was sort of the elephant in the room version of RFZSSM and i'm being bombarded by all sorts of nonsense, so it would be logical to properly Document the ending the world as we know it with REM, but that's not my first inclination. Wanna go with my 5:42am epiphany? 

E: do we actually get a choice? 

B: well, yes and no. It's what i'm going to listen to next, but if you guys absolutely don't want to revisit a late 60s acoustic rock album we last listened to several years ago, i can just veer this bus over to the shoulder and make this exordium of an interlude a "choose your own adventure" postludic terminous... 

... nothing, just glassy eyed stares and gecko style blinking? Egos, bigotry, [Mr. Mackie voice] ideologies are bad, m'kay?... 

C: oh, like the guys, with the world ending. 

E: who? 

C: you know, the every few centuries humans face a metacrisis and we wonder if they'll actually survive to see the next one. Sorry, all my browser history got deleted. My memory doesn't work like a trapper keeper like Bottle's. 

B: i called them a slightly less neurotic Simon and Garfunkle. Rhymes with Yeager and Blevins? Still nothing? Fine Zager and Evans, 2525. 

Chorus: oooooh yeah. 

S: that seems fine, go ahead a write about it. 

B: great! It might take me a minute to find it though. I'm good but it's getting to the point where even i have to consider alphabetizing this monstrosity of a collection. On the plus side, the shelf sag is developing nicely so maybe later this real spring when i buy a bunch of overpriced tree scraps for other projects i can just build proper shelving and reorganize all in one go. 

Funny day shift story about that. So you're in a warehouse with thousands of things and you rely on a computer to tell you where everything is. What happens when say we have to wipe all the locations for a complete data migration? I'll tell you, nobody but Bottle has systematically memorized and catalogued their warehouse like the kid from 5 Years. First you memorize what things are called, then you memorize the general group it belongs to, then you have a mental google maps you can walk around in your own head and you can just know where things should be, where they might be, and where someone might mistakenly put them if they didn't know what kind of thing they were. Not saying my way is better than anybody else's, just saying my way is impervious to the kinds of completely normal reality snafus everyone constantly bitches and moans about. Computers are awesome at being computers, but man do they suck at replacing a human brain trained on decades of mundane reality. I don't have a secret blend of any herbs and spices, i memorize things the hard way like anybody else: repetition, rehearsal, improvisation, and focusing on what's actually important for succeeding at a particular task. I'm better at telling myself what to think than most other people because i constantly practice. That's not ego, that's demonstrable fact. 

What frustrates me out in the real world is when everybody is thrilled with the end result of the way i do it, but absolutely nobody is willing to go through the process of learning to do it themselves. 

I only bring it up because even though my preferred thing is yammering on about albums, it's not secretly all about why i keep telling you not to listen to all that garbage. People get really upset when their brain is full of half thruths and they're wrong half the time. Why not at least try to fill in the missing pieces? Sometimes the earth's core stops swirling and starts back up in the opposite direction. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but it is a conveniently useful metaphor. Regardless, stay frosty my friends. Whatever it is i'll get to it when i get to it. 

2525: 

Oh yeah, just fantastic. This thing has it all, a dystopian future, random peoples' names, machines doing everything, circling back around and finding a million years from now happens to be yesterday and the whole song actually starts again. There's a danger you're gonna miss how humorous the song is supposed to be. They're actually making fun of the whole doomsday approach to everything, and the rest of the album is concerned with looking at what is and isn't actually important. 

Everybody's all in a rush to get married only to find out it sucks and then they get divorced. 

Fine, go ahead and break up with me Bayoan, give me back all my stuff. Then again, i wish you'd tell me not to leave. 

I remember back when Heidi used to love me. 

Fred was born and everybody had such high hopes, but he grew up to torture animals, robbed a bank, joined the military, came back home and killed a guy, but mostly his dad was embarrased about what his friends would think. 

You thought Cary Linn Javes was dumb, but then you loved her, and now you're an old man and it's your birthday and she told you she believed birthday wishes came true but you wish she was there and she isn't. 

The moral of all these stories seems pretty straighforward to me. These are all examples of regretting not loving all the people and the world around you right now. Nobody's perfect, some things don't work out, sometimes we're sad and hurt or offended, that's part of life, but mindlessly living the same old cycles of hate and fear and intolerance can't possibly be anything but a recipe for more hate and fear and intolerance. 

I can't stop you from giving the Joe Rogans and Donald Trumps and Jordan Petersons and Brendan Walshes and Rush Limbaughs and Ben Shapiros and Fox Newses of the world way more attention and authority than they deserve, but i can lead by example and show you that when it comes to brain food you are what you eat. They are all by and large as nutritionally vacant as iceberg lettuce; you can survive a while because it has a little water and fiber, but in the long run you'll metaphorically have scurvy and your internal organs will rot and your teeth will fall out and you'll just be crying into your sad lonely birthday cake thinking where did i go wrong, must be other peoples' fault. Especially if you don't actually believe the stuff they say but imagine mindlessly and hypocritically regurgitating it is somehow a great thing. 

Be here now, love the one you're with, don't go chasing waterfalls, it's all just a little bit of history repeating, i don't know. Figure out what might actually be at the other end of the hallway and bring along the appropriate helmet. 

Now, what i hope you'll notice is that none of these songs actually tell you how you're supposed to interpret them. It's all just the facts and everything else is totally you the listener. Quite a lot of those facts are men regretfully remembering women who are no longer a part of their lives. Ask youself "self, does how i interpret these songs have any relation to why Zager and Evans might have written and performed them in the first place?" I can't answer that one for you, i can only describe my answering that question for myself. I could be right, i could be wrong, but either way it amounts to nothing more than my own interpretation. Perhaps, seing as the men represent 50% of the parties involved in these relationships, and women are fully and capably autonomous humans, the cause of their present absence in your life does not in fact lie fully or even mostly upon their shoulders. Perhaps, and believe me i wouldn't quote Jimmy Buffett if there was any more suitable alternative, it's your own damned fault. 

Or maybe they're just 2 jackwagons from Nebraska for whom nobody really knows what point the were trying to get across. Again, how you interpret anything is totally up to you.

All aboard