Give Up

Many years later, I still remember that distant afternoon I first heard “(This is) the Dream of Evan and Chan”. It had just come out, and there was a lot of blog excitement about it. I probably was sitting in the Student Union when I read about it and then obtained it through the means people used to obtain music back then, the early, prehistoric days of networked computers, the internet so recent that many media lacked streaming services, and in order to hear songs it was necessary to point at them and download them on p2p networks.

I sat there in the Union, pushed play, and probably wondered for a moment if I’d downloaded a bad mp3, the beat for the first 10 or 15 seconds so completely overcome with static that it sounded like I’d accidentally gotten a 32k copy, or somehow worse. But then that clean, clear river of a synth began swooshing around the slowly emerging beat, and the static washed away, and I was transported. Suddenly the tables and chairs and walls of my college campus dissolved, and everything appeared there before me: the smoke in the air, the tile floors, I slowly stirred the drink I found in my hand. It seemed I'd been transported to the Sokol, but a magical version of it (probably because the tiles floors were glistening, and I don’t know if you ever made it to the Sokol Underground, but, well.), like a pristine, white, futuristic version of the Sokol Underground. The clattering beat, now all high-fidelity clarity in my headphones, Ben Gibbard harmonizing with himself, the eyelashes on my neck, the warm gauzy synths sweeping always upward; I was already in love with the song before the telephone started ringing ringing ringing…

As the song finished I was euphoric, I could feel every molecule in my body, and they were all vibrating with a happiness and excitement that could not stay inside my body, that had to be outside of me, somehow. I listened again. I was consumed with a need to share this, this good thing, this thing that of course lots of people had heard but which no one I knew had heard as far as I knew. I don’t know how I knew that my friend Lindsey Baker would be in the basement, where the Daily Nebraskan was. Maybe she was just always there? Did we have cell phones back then? Did we text?

In any case, I slowly returned the Student Union and I practically ran down there. And I remember so clearly: I didn’t say anything to her, I just walked up to her desk and presented her with headphones, pushed play, and then waited. Gosh, I was a weird kid, really, and probably a normal person would have asked for an explanation or requested that they be able to finish their task before listening to who knows what on someone else’s possibly dirty headphones (which would have been the kind of iPod buds that go in one’s ear. But I knew my friend, who I guess I assessed to be just not-normal enough, and she not only put the earbuds in without question (this is actually kind of amazing, knowing my friend now, these many years later; I wonder if this was an issue for her at the time), she also completely delighted me by listening in motionless silence and as I watched I saw it happen to her, too, the little cubicles of the DN giving way to the smokey club, she, too, found herself in that same place, or her own version of that place, until that last bit about the telephone ringing. I think, if the extremely clear picture I still have in my mind is accurate, she looked up at me suddenly and covered her hand with her mouth, like that moment had stunned her, as it had me. My goodness, what a joy to experience something so reality-altering, even if only for a moment, and then to hold it up to someone else and have them say "yes, I see it, too". It was as if we now shared that magical club, could go there, each of us, and share that space, as well.