#31 / Don't Forget To Vote, Part 2
I always knew two-day weekends were short, but they feel a lot shorter when your last “weekend” was 16 days long.
Minnesota Northwoods Trip, Day 3
Tuesday was our first day waking up in our tiny house/cabin. The woods were right outside our door, surrounding us.
After a leisurely morning of reading and eating breakfast on the porch, we headed off to Grand Rapids, where Ashley’s grandma has been recuperating from a leg injury in a skilled nursing facility. It was her 90th birthday.
Originally, we envisioned renting out the town hall of Effie, where she lives, for a large, boisterous celebration. Covid changed that, of course, so we settled on a much smaller party with just a few relatives and friends in Grandma’s backyard. We soon decided that even that was too risky.
Since Ashley and I would be vacationing nearby, though, we still wanted to take part of a day to visit her at home, and bring presents and a cake. Then she had a fall. She’s doing okay, but because of a positive test at the nearest facility, she was transferred to Grand Rapids, an hour’s drive from home, and had to quarantine.
So we had our visit through the window of her room—we asked around until we got permission to remove the screen. The presents and “cake” were much more modest: a card, a flip phone, and a long john with two precariously-inserted candles. When we tried to blow out the candles, the wax just melted straight into the long john. It wasn't ideal.
But after we sang happy birthday, Grandma said it was the best birthday party she’d ever had. And she’s been telling everyone how amazing her “cake” was.
After the visit, we drove up to the other facility to talk to the social worker about getting her transferred back there, and also stopped at Grandma’s house to drop off some more presents—a gnome that each of the grandchildren had taken photos with, and a ViewClix for easy video calling—and play with her cat (that latter part was a direct order!).
Normally driving around on these country roads all day gets kind of boring. Not only did we take some different routes this time, but every time we turned a corner, we were gobsmacked by some incredible view of the brightly colored forest, and sometimes we could see for miles. We also saw plenty of reminders that we were in the Iron Range.
And to close out the day, we took a scenic bypass and stopped at one of the many roadside lakes to watch the sun go down.
Mood
Ozma — “Maybe in an Alternate Dimension"
At Wash U., there was a campus-wide peer-to-peer file-sharing network that my friends and I connected to via a software client called DC++. This was after the Napster craze peaked, but still well within the heyday of these networks. It felt like using Spotify does today, with a few key differences. It took a lot longer to download files (and of course you couldn’t stream them), and you had to assemble your own collection of material, instead of choosing music in the moment from an incomprehensibly huge library that is always at your fingertips.
Rarer stuff was harder find, but I’ve always been a collector, and I enjoyed the sport of it. One thing we lose with ubiquitous services like Spotify, and which is the reason people are buying vinyl records again, is that our collections no longer have much meaning. We don’t expend any effort to assemble them. Back in the day, though, with my trusty 120 GB external hard drive (so massive!) and my curiosity to explore all the new stuff I was hearing about from friends, I amassed a solid slate of music (and TV shows and movies) to share over the network with my fellow students. I got a lot of downloads, which was a mark of respect.
The gap between hearing about a new band and tracking down the music was larger than today, but it was short enough to feel almost magical, much shorter than it had been when you had to go to the record store or to Best Buy and hope they had your request in stock. Having spent most of high school listening to pop punk and radio-friendly alternative rock, there was a whole world waiting for me in college: classics from the 60s and 70s, actual punk and post-punk, 80s and 90s indie rock, jazz, and so much more.
Eventually, the incompetent university network administrators finally discovered what was consuming such enormous amounts of bandwidth across their systems, and they shut our access down. It was a good run, though.
And not before I discovered Ozma! I believe it was my freshman floor mate Cody who first told me about them. The easy way to describe them is as Weezer-lite, and in fact they opened for Weezer on a tour (famously pointed out to me from the stage by Titus Andronicus front man Patrick Stickles, who spied me in my Ozma T-shirt), but that sells them short. Ozma brings an even nerdier, more whimsical vibe, but their guitars are just as crunchy and their harmonies almost as sweet.
This song combines their video game obsession with the kind of pining romanticism that is pretty typical of the genre. I was all about the latter as an unlucky-in-love college freshman, and a lot of this stuff has aged poorly, but I still think this one is pretty charming.
Deep in the hills
There is a hideaway
That I built with Zack, the Lego maniac
I'm never ever gonna turn backMaybe in Legoland you're mine
Stop pause record fast-forward rewind
To the beginning frame
When I heard your nameWe've tunneled through
To the outside world
The front guard is Link, the Zelda warrior
I'm never ever gonna turn homeMaybe in Legoland you're mine
Stop pause record fast-forward rewindv To the beginning frame
When I heard your name
https://open.spotify.com/track/7eZIqV0d5AvOTRstekKXfJ?si=ZGeoWyehSWi1DaZZJJy7pQ
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Thanks for reading. Please take care, and write back if you can!
Love,
Aaron