Strange Days

I finally got the last of my CDs loaded onto my iPod a couple of weeks ago, and since then I've basically hit "Shuffle Songs" the vast majority of the time I listen to it.

With somewhere in the realm of 1600 songs currently on there, I hear something I haven't heard in awhile every day. Some songs I haven't heard in YEARS since I haven't played the CD in so long, and they make me wonder what kind of wacky place my head was in when I was a teenager. I mean, I listen to wide array of music; anything from the harsher tones of Tool and Isis to the more mellow sounds of Sigur Ros and Guided By Voices (pre-Rick Okasic) is cool with me, but some of the stuff I used to listen to on a regular basis when I was 16 sounds really distressing to me now.

As an example, I can remember my two absolute favorite bands when I was a teenager were Therapy? (the question mark is not a typo) and Ministry. Therapy? was/is this hard Irish band that sang a lot of songs about breaking things and hurting people, while Ministry was just loud and difficult to understand and had charming album titles like "The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste" and "The Land of Rape and Honey".

Could I really have been that angry back then? And if so, what the heck was I angry about?

Please understand that I'm not trying to imply that people who listen to this stuff are by necessity angry... I'm just saying that *I* was.

I wonder if people who remember childhood as an idyllic time were ever actually children...