or, I’m not pomo. I’m just drawn out that way.

So it’s a warm sum­mer night. We’ve had a very salty, but not too bad din­ner out on the west side at the new(ish) Car­lyle restau­rant, and we’re dri­ving back into Ann Arbor along Jackson.

At each stop­light, another late-​​stage Boomer is dri­ving another well-​​used mini­van, win­dows down, radio blar­ing. Boomer #1: “Born to Run”. Boomer #2: Johnny Cash.

This pro­vokes the sort of con­ver­sa­tion we nor­mally reserve for Muzak: “Well, crap. Now that’ll be stuck in my head for days.”

We muse a bit, about the sum­mer night, the wild-​​oats instincts (get it? Wild Oats? like, you know, the store?) of the late-​​stage Boomer, and I real­ize that the music I would most likely be blar­ing from my mini­van radio with the win­dows open would be… well, dif­fi­cult Thir­teener Shoegazer/​proto-​​Goth/​post-​​techno music. Sis­ters. Med­i­cine (and ohmigod! I love YouTube: my favoritest causative deaf­ness agent of all “Aruca”. God, I wore the bits off that CD.…). Lords of Acid. Lush. God Lives Under­wa­ter. Skinny Puppy. Ein­stürzende Neu­baten.

You know. Good music. Music you can not only feel in your bones, but which hurts those bones (espe­cially the lit­tle ham­mer and anvil-​​shaped ones I broke into dust many years back). Not like that pab­u­lum kids lis­ten to today, with musi­cal instru­ments and words and crap. In my day, you hit shit and that was music. You didn’t talk, you moaned and screamed. Kids.

But (as has been the case since this music’s release), nobody in my fam­ily could stand to be within earshot of the car if I played My Med­i­cine at the cor­rect and proper vol­ume. Which is, of course, 13.…

At any rate, as these con­ver­sa­tions go, we mean­der. What I want to hear, tonight? Goth Polka.

Bar­bara pro­vides a sam­ple. [Minor key] Oomp…thud–PA! Oomp… paaaaahhh. Enter accor­dions of doom. Begin the slow two-​​step to the grave. Black posies and polka-​​dots. A mis­ery of har­mony and bleak frivolity.

But that’s all we’ll get, I’m afraid. The hint of a pos­si­bil­ity. I remain unful­filled. My radio must blare the nos­tal­gic speaker-​​damaging music of my youth.

I have merely to await the won­der of the Social Inter­net to flesh in the details, and tell me where I could find this wonder.