The Notorious E.P.C. Recommends Buying Your First Album

Since I’ve already bragged around here about my first concert experience, I thought I’d reflect on the first tape I ever bought.  I’m just young enough to have missed my first purchase being vinyl (though I do recall having a Mousercize record) and just old enough to have missed the CD format (Remember that one?) for that all-important cherry-popping.  Nope – I’m a tape man in that sense and my first time involved two albums I still listen to on a regular basis: Run D.M.C.’s King of Rock and Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin (IV).  And, frankly, both of them were rather edgy purchases around my house.

The Totally Awesome Largesse Recommends Rad

I suppose I had a lot of delusions as a kid – that I could write a rap song, that I would some day play the sax like Clarence Clemons, that I was an elf named Jaws Jackson in a previous life (true story), that wrestling was real, and on a related note that I could tear off my t-shirt just like Hulk Hogan.  Oh yeah, I also thought that BMX tricks were the coolest things in the world.  Shit, I even owned a neon-lime green Mongoose BMX bike with white tires.  Looking back on it now, the thing was hideous, absolutely hideous – but it was the first bike I ever had with pegs on it and I was convinced that I could do some sick tricks on it.  Of course, I couldn’t do a goddamn thing on it, and the day-glo monstrosity was stolen one summer night before I ever overcame my fear of homemade “ramps” in driveways or learned how to ollie.  Really, I had no business riding that thing when all the cool kids in my beachside town rolled around on cruisers, but, see, I had it in my mind that the life of a BMXer was glamorous and full of adventure, possibly even danger.  I fully expected to stop a crime ring with my buddies as we communicated via walkie-talkie like in BMX Bandits (featuring a very young Nicole Kidman) or, at the very least, to win a crucial hometown BMX race that involved a super-sized cereal bowl for no discernable reason, just like in Rad – the Citizen Kane of the BMX world.

The Color-Coded Sweatshirt-Wearing Largesse Recommends Midnight Madness

I think it’s safe to say that television has played a pretty big role in my life.  It started pretty early – I can remember being lured out of the house by my sister for a trip to the mall by a promise that we’d be back by the end of the commercials during Batman.  I’m still pissed about falling for that.  Fighting for an extra ten minutes to be able to see the beginning of Cheers and then arguing that I’d already gotten into it and had to see the end, a family meeting over the appropriateness of my watching Bosom Buddies (I couldn’t have been older than six.  My dad thought it might adversely affect my sexuality.  It didn’t.), falling asleep watching Cinemax on a Friday night and pretending to my mother the next morning that I must have hit the remote in my sleep since the last thing I remembered watching was American Gladiators – many of my most vivid memories involve the television in one way or another.  Do you remember the day your family got rid of the brown remote that was always attached to the cable box via a telephone cord of sorts?  I do.  I also remember my mother tripping over it at least once a day.  And I kind of miss it.