You can't jump a jet plane like you can a freight train

It's Wednesday, and I think I've come to accept that I sleep freakish hours now. Some days I'm exhausted for hours and hours, and then when I try to sleep, I can't. Other days I fall asleep while sitting up. It's bizarre.

In any case, the small hours of the morning seem to be my time lately. I'm up by 4 trying to find something to do. I like the very early morning because even my street is quiet. There's nobody driving home to Maryland at 4 in the morning. I don't really have anything against people wanting to get home, I just hate it that I happen to live on a street that's a direct route there.

So I've come late to the P2P music thing. I downloaded one product looking for a specific song, which I haven't been able to find yet: Torch Song, "Don't Look Now." It was part of the best mixed tape I ever made, which was stolen from my car when somebody ripped the stereo out of the dash, back in the days before detatchable faceplates and CDs in the car.

I heard the song at Starck (does anybody else even remember Starck?)late one night, probably in 1986, and spent months trying to find out what it was. When I found out, I bought the album.

Before I moved to DC, right after college, I sold most of my record collection to a DJ friend. I had an enviable bunch of import 12" singles, plus a lot of things from working in a record store.

To make a long story short, Torch Song was William Orbit's first project. Wish Thing is hideously out of print, and on a defunct label. It was vinyl only, and I don't have a turntable, so I am holding out the hope of finding an MP3.

However, I did find a fairly obscure Aimee Mann song that I had liked a number of years ago. I was really happy to hear it again.

I think I'll kill the early morning hours by making mixed CDs, because it will be fun. I always liked making the tapes.

As I said, it's quiet now, just the drone of the machinery. I know I could turn it off, but a friend of mine remarked once that he found the white noise reassuring, that as long as the computers were still running and the power grid was up, we were still all right.

Maybe it was the way he said it, but I found that very comforting.

before - after