Half A Circle Away – A Daily Prompt Post

robyn-hitchcock-in-rachel-getting-married

 

This Daily Prompt post wants to know:

Tell us about a time you did a 180 — changed your views on something, reversed a decision, or acted in a way you ordinarily don’t.

I remember a phenomenon that happened a long time ago, before I discovered a law. I was in a car with a friend, and he was listening to Bowie, back before I acquired my current attitude towards music (i.e., stopped being a douche canoe). I said something like ‘Bowie, he looks like a woman. What are you doing, man?” He stared at me. A year later, this guy purchases ChangesOneBowie. Not that guy. Me.

Later, I am in college living in a dorm, and I see these guys who look kind of weird. In my dorm room is an enormous poster of Iron Maiden. I had just heard of The Cult. They have an album. I ask them if it was The Cult. They inform me that no, in fact it was the Cure. Hey, easy mistake, right? Both start with ‘the Cu’. They are disgusted. One year later, I buy Standing On The Beach: The Singles, Head On The Door, Kiss Me^3, and Boys Don’t Cry. Three years after that, I am at a concert, white shirt untucked, black pants, eyeliner, lipstick, and hair teased up to heaven, seeing the Cure. Since my hair was more brown than black, I am informed that I look more like Ian McCulloch than Robert Smith, but that’s okay.

Unfortunately, I hate smoking, but one not-so-fine day, I find a pack of smokes in the back of a car and, being of drunk mind and body, proceed to smoke for 13 years, off and on. I still hated it, but I did it. Until I didn’t, about 12 years ago.

In the late 1980s, we listened to a 6-CD changer, played euchre and drank Keystone Light. The 6 CDs were actually 8, but we could only do 6 at a time. Eponymous and Document by R.E.M., Book of Days by Psych Furs, Deep by Peter Murphy, Love and Rockets by Love and Rockets, Electric by The Cult, and Box of Frogs and Queen Elvis by Robyn Hitchcock. Put 6 of them in, hit random, and off to the races. On Queen Elvis, in one of the songs, The Devil’s Coachman, was the following line:

Everything you say you won’t is what you will eventually.

Which I began referring to as Hitchcock’s Law

To me, it basically means that quite often, we become the very thing we rail against, or like the things we thought we hated. In other words, experience changes your perspective.

Edward Hotspur

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22 thoughts on “Half A Circle Away – A Daily Prompt Post

  1. Pingback: It May Have Saved My Life | So I Went Undercover

  2. Pingback: Daily Prompt: 180 Degrees | Joe's Musings

  3. I remember seeing the Cure in 92, and the ‘it’ next to me kept touching me..I had settled into mostly normal by then

  4. I must admit that your taste in music is one aspect of you that I can’t always agree with. Not that some of what you like isn’t okay… You just have a much more open mind than me.

  5. The music industry lives to make money and they will mash up any of their properties in any configuration to make money. They will also use every physiological trick in the book to digitally master and re-master music so that it appeals to people on such a deep level that they “have to have it” and don’t even realize why they are so attached to it. We are hardwired for rythem.

    Guys in makeup never floated my boat. If you can make guys in makeup look glamorous and cool you can sell makeup to a whole lot more people. If you are very into movie and/or music who’s life are you living? There is no real law that whatever we say we are not going to do – we will do at some later point or what we say we don’t like we will like at some later point – that is just marketing paradise. You don’t have to buy into it.

    If I had the money back that I spent on music that I never listened to after the concert “magic” wore off (or I sobered up) and all the makeup I’ve purchased when just a few things will do it I’d be typing this from a nice little patio home instead of an apartment.

    http://pamkelso.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/in-the-light-of-wisdom/

  6. Oh, well you know … I feel a whole ‘nother post about what one does while being of drunk mind and body :) Anyhoo, I’m a little late in this topic but wanted to throw my two bits all the same – hope you can stop by my place soon. cheers!

    • Snoz – change is good if it suits you. I had one very drunken experience with another woman in my early twenties (I am now in my 60′s). Seems like in the past 15 or so years I have had so many people who seem to think that I should adopt a lesbian lifestyle based in that one experience. I wonder how many other people have experienced others trying to redirect their lives based on one insignificant experience when they were very young?

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