It's oh so quiet.
I'm writing this from the new digs. What strikes me most, aside from the obvious, hit you on the head nature of moving, is the quiet. In the last five years I became quite accustomed to the sound of drunken howling, passing ambulances and car horns. The general ambiance of Uptown, in short. Escaping to the farther rings of the city offers something that I used to associate with living in my parent's house as a teenager - total silence. A quiet night like this one, totally bereft of noise, sneaking into the kitchen so as not to wake anyone sleeping with my footsteps and opening of cupboard doors...suddenly I"m 17 again, living in my parent's basement.
Not all was silent, though. Through out the winter I spent my share of quiet, late nights playing PS2 games with the volume at the audible threshold. Between GTA3, Silent Hill 2 and Tony Hawk 3 I was a content Midwestern recluse. No matter the depths of a blizzard or quiet solitude of a Sunday night, I was happy to sit in the quiet and vid out. A night like this makes me think of a favorite lost song I should be hearing. If I still had my PS2 still hooked up (somewhere, packed away in a box with our shared systems - Atari, Nes, Snes, Sega, N64, PS2, Xbox, GameCube and a Wii) I would get all nostalgic and play Tony Hawk 3 with 'Not The Same' by Bodyjar on a loop.
The Tony Hawk video games weren't just frenetic, addictive fun. They had killer soundtracks, too. As a Midwestern recluse I heard a fair amount of good, fresh music from these games. I can attest that among my friends more than a share of us had memorized lyrics due to marathon gaming sessions. We all had our favorites. Mine was the melodic punk offering of the (now defunct) Australian band Bodyjar. Countless sessions of fevered two-minute rounds were played to the strains of blasting guitars and snide, rounded vocals only half discerned. The only thing missing from tonight that would complete the recollection is a PS2 controller and about three feet of snow, which, being the end of November, should be here by now.
Hearing the song now, I still dig it, even if my tastes have slowed down slightly. While I listen to more down-tempo instrumental and ambient music, I still have an affinity for the unresolved tension of the main riff to 'Not The Same'. The pre-chorus, with its not-quite-out-of-key chord progression, still sounds great. If you're at all near my age bracket (which you can figure out via context clues) you might be familiar with this song. Give it a spin or hey - bust out the PS2. It's about 10 years on from that sweet spot with all those great games. On a quiet night like this, I'm quite tempted, myself.
