This week my husband found an old tape of mine, so yesterday I was listening to Aerosmith while I cleaned house, and it brought back a lot of memories. Aside from remembering how extremely obsessed with sex that Aerosmith was, and the memories of riding in the back of a green 1968 Camaro in an unusually precious window of time, it reminded me of tapes. You know, tapes. The kind that were our lifeblood when we were young and we had so much more time and mental energy to spend on music. I mean, they were ubiquitous, because they were so portable and adaptable and versatile. I remember seeing shiny brown nests of ratted tape innards strewn on roadsides or in trees and thinking, man, someone either really hated that tape or they are missing it right now. You know, that sort of thing. The kind of thing that makes the 80s seem so much more far away. At any rate, that started a train of thought, as those things often do. I remembered what a pain tapes were. How, if you didn’t like a song, you had to either fast forward, timing it perfectly to the end of the song, or (as I usually did) you had to suffer through it. How you usually had to physically be there to turn the tape over when you reached the end of the side. And how they got grainy or tangled in your machine when you had listened to them just a couple of dozen times. And all this got me thinking about how nice technology is today, with CDs and MP3s and computers. No rewinding, no fast forwarding, no turning over, no suffering through songs you’re not real keen on. Which got me thinking about how kids today never have to learn patience and long-suffering and things like that, that we learned from suffering through cassette tapes. Darn spoiled kids. Get off my lawn. đŸ˜›