Real Estate LEADER Magazine (Summer 2004) - Mississippi ...

THE LAST WORD
BY SCOTT BRUNNER ©
The Internet, Floyd Cramer…and me
How technology fueled my (first) mid-life crisis
Idon’t really know what possessed me, there on
the cusp of my fortieth birthday, to develop an
addiction.
Nostalgia, probably – that wistful yearning for
my spent youth, for days when prospects had been
as abundant as hairs on my head (an unfortunate
simile, under the circumstances).
It is a rite of passage that at 40 –
upon realizing that this ride may well
be half-done, statistically speaking –
we guys go both vain and melancholy,
begin to suck in our guts
and trim our ears and pine
away for those irrecoverable
feelings of our pre-marriage,
pre-mortgage, prekidney-stone
adolescence.
It’s enough to make a
fellow a little crazy for a little
while, drives him to do foolish
things – a new car or a new job or a
new wife, or even…a habit-forming
pastime.
Which brings me back to…well, me…and my
internet addiction.
I know what you’re thinking: Pornography.
Websites with names like Lady Eve’s Feet.com.
Cleverly disguised monthly charges to the
MasterCard. Online purchases of Viagra and libidoenhancing
herbs. Well get your mind out of the gutter.
You won’t find any of that stuff on iTunes.com,
the habit-forming, deceptively inexpensive music
website that saw me through my first mid-life crisis.
At iTunes.com one can download his youth to
the tune of 99-cents-a-song. Needless to say, it’s
downright amazing how quickly one can run up a tab.
It started innocently enough: I’m fiddling one
evening with my new laptop, a Macintosh
PowerBook G4; I click on an icon that looks like a
music note, and voila! There I am, listening to a
beastly group, the Beastie Boys, singing a beastly song
– I use the term loosely – called Ch-Check It Out.
Undaunted, I began to explore,
and within seconds…Nirvana!
And not the band Nirvana, mind
you. I’m talking real music: Floyd
Cramer, originator of the “Nashville
sound,” plugging away on that greatest of
his songs, Last Date – from The Essential
Floyd Cramer, the album on which my father
wore out many a needle playing again and
again in the early 1970s.
Suddenly, I’m a kid again, and
searching for more: Top of the World by
The Carpenters. B. J. Thomas and
Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. Glen
Campbell with Rhinestone Cowboy. Mac
Davis singing the
one that to this
day makes my
mother cry:
W atchin’
Scotty Grow.
Merle Haggard wailing,
“Daddy Frank
played the guitar and
the French harp….”
Barry Manilow, writing
the songs that make the
whole world sing. The
Captain & Tenille and
Love Will Keep Us
Together. And my personal,
all-time favorite,
Marty Robbins, “Out in
the West Texas town of
El Paso, I fell in love
with a Mexican girl…”
It had to be the sappiest,
happiest musical
evening I’d spent in
years – demonstrating
once again the power of
nostalgia to make the
ridiculous – in this case, those kitschy songs – seem
sublime, if only for a moment
Seventy-five dollars in charges and a stern
rebuke from my wife later (who, I should point out,
did ask me to download Kung Fu Fighting and No
Parking on the Dance Floor especially for her), my
melancholy was gone and a new addiction born of
the confluence of nostalgia and technology, and
enabled by MasterCard.
Like they say on those commercials: Priceless. n
Scott Brunner is MAR’s Executive Vice President
and the author of two books, Due South and
Carryin’ On…and Other Strange Things
Southerners Do.
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25 / MISSISSIPPI REAL ESTATE LEADER / Summer 2004