Old Tapes

I was just watching a movie with Mike tonight and an ad came on for that Notorious movie about Biggie Smalls aka Big Poppa the fat rapper guy that was shot dead and it inspired me to pull out my old cassette tapes. Mike was astound that a) I've kept and moved with my hella old tapes for a over a decade and b) the sheer number of them fill two old boxes full. I found a couple of recorded and re-recorded tapes from back in the day. You know, when you buy a cassette, say Boyz II Men's Cooleyhighharmony, and record over that (after you put scotch tape over the two little anti-record holes on the top) with some awesome Power 96.3 Jodeci song or in later years song after song from KXGO - primarily he Rolling Stones then re-record over that with your own personal musings, but leave a few spaces between re-recordings so you can still dig on the Stones.

Sophomore year my best friend Shaunna and I went to a yard sale and bought a small (for the time) tape recorder with built-in microphone. The following month (May 1997 to be exact) was audibly covered - from my weekend stays at their house in Eureka to our evenings out with the friends and instruments and cigarettes and music and pot and the occasional six pack of beer shared amongst at least 10 friends. The recorder wasn't allowed at school, and honestly it probably wouldn't have fit in Shaunna's backpack. We talked about teen angst, taking huge trucker shits that clog up the toilet, endless strings of quotes from Beavis and Butthead to Forrest Gump to Dirty Dancing and the fact that one of the boys didn't like us recording because "what if the cops found this, man?!?" Not like we were doing anything remotely bad or illegal, except for that random sixer, the toke everyone had in their pockets and the walks around the neighborhood late at night past curfew. I wonder if other people did this - before ipods, cell phones, even daily use of the internet. How cumbersome it all seems now compared to the current days of fast fast fast information, yet so much more innocent. I'm nostalgic now after hearing those tapes of the end of that sophomore year, before Shaunna moved to Arizona, and before we all grew up. I don't want to go back, that's for sure, but I do enjoy listening down memory lane. I wish I had a picture scanned in from those days that I could post here now, but I don't because I'm still not that techie. Perhaps I'm trying to preserve a teeny bit of that sophomore innocence by not adapting completely. Like my dad, who refuses to own a cell phone and who still doesn't log into the home computer. Ever. Will I be one of those old ladies who doesn't understand a thing 'young kids do these days?'