The Opera I Was Too Lazy To Write

 Just to the left of me is a pile of cassette tapes. Audio tapes, almost all of the ninety-minute variety. They tell the story, or part of the story, of a relationship which I entered into some forty-five years ago. These were the mix tapes I made to chronicle the love affair I embarked up on in my senior year of high school. 

Spoiler alert: I ended up marrying someone else.

Spoiler alert part deux: I am still good friends with my high school sweetheart in spite of the overarching incredulity of those tearful sentiments like "we'll always be good friends." 

Always has yet to arrive, but the decades during which we have traversed the ups and downs of our now separate lives stand as a testament to the healing and staying power of music. At least from the standpoint of documentation. These tapes provided a soundtrack of sorts to the fluctuating rhythms of our time. Initially there was a pressing need to gather all the disparate music and comedy cues from our courtship and related endeavors. Not content to merely have "our song," I felt compelled to try and squeeze all those memories into an hour and a half. 

Then I made another. 

And another. 

I kept making them through the eighties and the nineties right up until the moment that I ended up getting married to someone else. 

Along the way there were echoes of past and sentimental refrains of possible futures. The stack of cassettes has shifted over time as I have worked to digitize all the noises that have been dormant since the advent of compact discs, and streaming services. The ability to simply type Flying Lizards in a search box allows me to return abruptly to that land of yesteryear. Zipping back and forth pushing the rewind and fast forward buttons on a tape player to zero in on that one song isn't actually the point. These were little operas I put together in hopes of making an impression. 

In this way, the tapes presaged the coming of this blog. A seemingly endless stream of consciousness, with plenty of stops to reflect, remind and return to those things that I hold most dear. The woman I ended up being married to thought enough of these musings to bind them together in collections. Someday they may end up being copied to whatever media seems appropriate to the era in which they are commended to the anecdotal history of my travels through space and time. 

And I suppose it's a good thing that there will be plenty of music to go along with it.