Wading in the Velvet Sea

The majority of the day I got married was benignly boring. I mean, Mrs. Me had stayed in the hotel the night before, leaving me alone with my thoughts and my pajamas. I was still in this pajamas as of 1 pm, I believe. Just a weirdly calm, dull day. Until 2:45 pm, at which point she called me, telling me our travel agent had just called HER, saying something like, “Oh, were you ever going to pick up this travel packet sitting on my desk?” Nevermind at this point, I’m less than T-minus 4 hours to getting hitched, and the travel agent is in downtown Boston, and it’s a Friday afternoon. Mrs. Me insists the agent will FedEx the packet overnight, but this isn’t good enough for me. I freak out, which freaks her out, which freaks everyone around her out, and I take off for downtown Boston like Mr. Wolf in “Pulp Fiction”. So the day went from “dull” to “holy crap, I just almost left the car running with the keys in it in my rush to get into the travel office”. Weird juxtaposition.

Near the end of our honeymoon, we booked a 5-hour cruise on a sailboat. Two things warrant mentioning about the trip. Firstly, our shuttle bus driver was late in picking us up. Turns out, we were the first of three pickups, which explained why he was hauling ass throughout the island to hit the other hotels. In addition, he kept honking his horn, swerving through traffic, and avoiding construction. I closed my eyes and felt right back in Boston.

Secondly, the boat itself played music throughout the trip. Mostly it was raggae, which you’d expect on a tourist trap of a boat. Weirdly enough, though, about three hours into the cruise, the music changed. And out of nowhere, Tesla’s epic “Love Song” came over the loudspeakers. Freakin’ Tesla! I freaked out, and started singing along in joy. Mrs. Me could not have been less pleased, but I really didn’t care about offending a boatload of smoking, mealy-skinned Dutch people, to be honest. During the guitar solo, I told Mrs. Me, “If it weren’t for the fact that I married you a week ago today, this would be the highlight of my week.”

For those of you who don’t know this song, watch and learn, people. Watch and learn. I’ve always said that Telsa was the best band ever named after an electrical engineer, and I stand by that statement today.

Also, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I miss the old “let’s put random crowd noise into the mix and pretend like the band’s actually playing live in the video” technique that ran rampant back in the day, when you know, MTV actually played videos. I used to sit there as a pre-teen going, “Jesus, these guys sound JUST like they do on the album! Amazing!” Course, I was also thinking things like, “Wow, that girl got pulled up on onstage to dance with Bruce Springsteen, that’s amazing!”, not knowing it was an actress in a video playing a part. I was a gullible, gullible kid.

Still amazes me, thinking back to last night, that MTV had the gaul to essentially show only one song all night start to finish, and that was the Britney song. Even if they stayed with a performance start-to-finish, that performance was just a medly of hits for an ADD generation (Chris Brown, Alicia Keys, Timbaland/Timberlake/Furtado). Music companies want to know why no one’s buying albums anymore: it’s because consumers are conditioned not to be able to make it through an entire SONG, nevermind an entire ALBUM. That’s why.