.
I need the van today, so I rode in with Joe. I was jumpy, ready to go, so I started radio-surfing for something fast and heavy. I found Miley Cyrus singing her little teenage heart out. Not heavy, okay, but the song has a great 80′s beat and what woman among us didn’t live through this at least ten times in adolescence:
The last time I freaked out,
I just kept looking down,
I st-st-stuttered when
You asked me what I’m thinkin’ bout…
Okay, I still live through that more often than I’d like to admit. I’ve overcome lots of introvertist habits, enough that people who don’t know me well say, “Really, you’re an introvert?” Ha! I have some of ‘em fooled.
Miley finished her song and Joe got us some Thousand Foot Krutch going. Mara and I were head banging. I have no idea what they were singing about.
We dropped Joe at work and I scanned the stations. I bopped along with the last half of Taylor Swift singing happily about girl-power and burning pictures. Then came Dwight Yoakum singing one of my favorites. There’s a lot of country music that I just can’t stand listening to, but Dwight is different. Dwight is classic. Dwight’s legs are skinnier than mine, but I still like his music.
Then I remembered why I avoid country stations most of the time: the “float trip song” parody of the Miley Cyrus song I’d been singing just half an hour earlier. I don’t have a problem with spoofs, in general, but the country ones, with requisite mentions of beer, bare feet, and a**, just annoy me.
I hit the button and heard, from our local Christian station, a voice croon, “This could be your defining moment.”
I sure hope not.
I satisfied my music crave with some mindless alternative rock until we got home. You know what I realized? Country and teenage pop music are happy. They’re bouncy and trite, maybe, but they make me feel good. Standard fare from altie rock, on the other hand, is almost always melodramatic and suicidal even when it doesn’t mean to be.
I was topped out at 55mph in our almost-200k-miles, iffy-transmission van when a pair of grandparents in a Buick passed me. I don’t know what song was playing then, because all I could hear was that silky-sly voice, “This could be, this could be your defining moment.”