Guy With a Guitar Under a Tree

For some time--years totalling four or five in number, perhaps--I have been avoiding the radio.

I don't listen to it. I just keep it off.

I use the CD player. I use the aux input to connect a friend's I-pod. I put a tape in once to listen to a demo I had recorded at 15. It was a gem! Lost for almost 10 years only to resurface at the top of Rolling Stone lists around #20 or #21 in my mind.

What, then, do I do? I keep five or six CDs hidden in my car. Here's the secret. Thery are in this black cloth thing trapped between the sagging cloth ceiling of my ride and the passenger's side sun visor. The passengers try to block the sun and five or six CDs rain on their lap like silvery large tear drops.

They are, in no particular order: Essential Johnny Cash, Discs 1 and 2. The Beatles, Revolver. Kanye West, Late Registration. Radiohead, OK Computer. Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited. Norma Jean, Bless the Martyr and Kiss the Child, Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run.

Once my car was broken into and the thief stole the face off my CD player, but left the actual unit in the dashboard. Then they pulled my CDs down from their hiding place, looked through them, and left them on the passenger's seat. Thank you, kind thief.

He or she was probably a fan of radio.

The thing is--and I'm a snob, and a jerk, and am better than you--radio music is terrible.

Hey There Delilah is the perfect example of a terrible radio song that I never tried to listen to but was forced into my memory because of radio. I know this not because I heard it on the radio, but because my roommates heard this song on the radio and then learned how to play it on their guitars and then I would see them, literally or in my mind, sitting beneath a tree with their scratched up pick-guardless acoustics picking away and singing this terrible song. It drives me crazy. What is that song? I asked the first time. "It's the Plain White T's," they said, "You haven't heard it?"

"No," thank Jesus. I don't listen to the radio.

But radio and television and internet are so ubiquitious that I do hear it even though I really try to avoid it. And everytime, there's that picture and that sound. My roommate beneath a tree singing to the Biblically-referenced temptress. And my mind and memory is becoming increasingly stuffed with things I wish would explode out the top but won't.

This is possibly the sole criteria for a song to get radio play. Itmust come pre-wired for easy induction to antagonistic memories.