It's sort of like being a fishmonger
In Which A Struggling Author Listens To Music Of Poor Quality And Pretends To Be Inspired, Though In Reality The Power Was Inside Him The Whole Time
I paid five dollars for that radio. It does AM. FM. Cassette tapes. Only one speaker, but stereo is for pussies anyway, right? Anyway, no iPod. No shiny white plastic ear-things. Just me, my radio/cassette player that was made on the backs of starving Asian children of some description, and my bed, and my nineteen ninety-seven IBM ThinkPad notebook computer running Notepad and, since I'm listing, my clothing, in a beat-up foot locker, and a broken TV and a flask with nothing in it because I don't drink but I like the image. That is, the image of the alchoholic writer. Hemingway, Poe, all those famous fuckers drank or did opium or something like that.
If this were a movie, I would have already guaranteed a PG-13 for that one epithet. Were it practical, I'd toss another one out for the R, but then I'd feel obligated to have a set of tits because you can do that in an R but frankly, there just aren't any in my life. Excepting the computer. It has rather a lot. Well, my two fifty-six memory stick does. The computer is a tad overloaded as is, what with all the writing and stuff I do. See how I used "stuff" instead of the s-word there? Someday someone's going to buy the movie rights to pretty much everything I write, see, and I don't want to give them an excuse to butcher my work. Damn Hollywood. I can say damn, though. DamnDamnDamn.
Anyway, my radio. See, I was feeling pretty dull this one time: uninspired, y'know? So I figured, every artist a cannibal and so on. I could pop in some music for inspiration. One of my characters was doing pretty good and I needed some angsty stuff to put him through and all, so music was good for taking ideas from. All I had was this tape, though.
There's a story behind that tape. Me and it go way back. See, I was hanging with this friend of mine and we were in a dorm at the end of a year, right? People were throwing stuff out left and right. Good stuff, too. Anyway, this friend of mine, a chick, is all laughing, and she says she found some funny music in a garbage can. Now, this music stinks metaphorically and literally, and she decides it's not funny anymore and gives it to me.
So I pop in Millenium by the Backstreet Boys.
From the beginning, the first few song are all singles. I know this because I listened to the radio a lot before I discovered indie, y'know, stuff like Neutral Milk Hoteland Modest Mouse before they got on the radio. Anyway, so I'm like halfway through "Larger Than Life" when i get some good ideas and I write a whole bunch of stuff and kill off a character and wrap up a plot and then the side of the tape ends and I realize that it's really bad. I take it out and put it away and don't throw it out though because the girl that gave it to me was really hot. It wasn't helping me write anyway, it was just making me angry. Fuck.