Flashbacks in Time

While I was on my early morning drive to work one day last week, I was listening to one of my Pandora stations, as I do every now and then when I’m not going through my rotation of podcasts.  And lo and behold a song came on that I hadn’t heard in a loooong time.  Probably not since I was a teen or maybe even younger than that. Listening to it now as an adult, it was probably something that was inappropriate for someone my age, but hey, how many of those types of songs were out when we were growing up. I wasn’t listening to lyrics really as a kid anyway, pretty much just singing along with whatever was on the radio. Believe me, I got in trouble a time or two for some of that singing along when my Dad heard me.. (i.e. Color Me Badd’s “I Wanna Sex you Up, Mtume’s Juicy Fruit). But that was the thing about music back then (not including I Wanna Sex you Up of course), many times you’d have no idea what it was about until you really sat down to listen to the lyrics.

Anyway, the song I heard recently was Love You Down, by Ready for the World.  So of course, I had to go check out YouTube to see if the video was available there.  And it was. And it was a trip.  All of the jheri curls, big teased hair, and eighties outfits.  But it was nice going back in time for a few minutes with that song.

 And it made me think.  Hmmm, maybe Napoleon’s uncle in the movie Napoleon Dynamite wasn’t so far off with wanting to go back in time to 1982 when he was in his heyday.

​ Yeah it’s funny to laugh at that old guy trying to re-live the one time in his life where he felt important, but would it be so bad if we could find a time machine to take us to whatever year we wanted every now and then, just for fun?  I’d be down for it.  But I’d want to go back to the early to mid eighties, but as the age I am now or maybe ten years younger, so I could actually enjoy it more than I could as a young child.  I’d be at concerts and house parties, living it up with the cabbage patch and snake all day.  (Okay, maybe I wouldn’t be doing all of that, but you never know.  A time machine and the ability to do anything you want, pfft, who knows. :-)  )

No, but joking aside, listening to the song did inspire the beginnings of what I figured could be a quick cougar tale.  They weren’t called cougars back then, but whatever woman he was singing about would definitely be classified as one now.  And then I was thinking about movies like The Graduate, and I was like, how about another version, but instead of her being married and a neighbor and named Mrs.Robinson, she could be single, someone met in a random, chance meeting and  named Ms. Jackson.  So, the cover on the left is what I was thinking of using for this quick read that I now want to write thanks to that song.  I’m considering using Wattpad, Amazon’s Write On platform and/or my website to allow readers to read the story.  It will likely be short and readers can check it out, in the early unrevised phases as I am writing it. Stay tuned for more details.