The solidarity you feel when encountering someone with a shared interest, for instance, a person wearing a T-shirt of your favorite band, is the sort of low-stakes, icing on the cake encounter that you needn't question.
But the guy approaching in the Steely Dan shirt seemed to be giving me a wide berth. He was heading to my town's Oktoberfest and I was heading back to my house carrying a large pizza with pepperoni and an order of breadsticks. We were the only two people on the street, and I was conscious of the fact that I was grinning like a wacko. I don't meet a lot of Steely Dan fans... because I don't seek them out... because they (and by "they" I mean "we," and by "we" I mean "I") can be insufferable. A lot of them (us, me) snidely denigrate other music. It's not fun. It's sad.
But I was just going to breeze past this guy, so all I had intended to do was say something that would instantly point to the inherent kinship between two Steely Dan fans, like, "Is there gas in the car?" Or, "You must be joking, son -- where did you get those shoes?" Something from an album cut, something from the original seven albums, lest this person have as casual a relationship with all of the twenty-first century Steely Dan records as I do. And as I was formulating just the right vaguely conversational overture, I must have looked a little mental.
He wasn't wrong to judge me. My perception is a little off.
Friday, I was passing through a residential area on my way home and I saw there was an unattended brown animal near the end of someone's driveway. I slowed down to make sure it wasn't going to dart into the street. It didn't seem like a darting kind of animal as I got closer, it was just lumbering around and sniffing. It was big, plump with a short snout. And then it hit me that it was a bear.
And this was very exciting. I've never seen a bear outside of the zoo. And now, not only had I seen one, but I was, it seemed, about to be instrumental in its capture and relocation. And as the guy who discovers and reports the bear, I momentarily and hastily assumed that I would be allowed, once it was in a tranquilized state, be in the bear's proximity and sort of, and even I don't know exactly what I mean by this, commune with the bear on some sort of spiritual level and establish a bond each of us would feel for as long as we wandered the literal (him) and metaphorical (me) wilderness. Things were about to get Grizzly up in this Adams.
I did a hurried three point turn in a church parking lot and, being a twenty-first century American, opened the video camera on my phone. Slowing way down, inviting the contempt of the driver behind me who was not, as far I could tell, on any sort of vision quest whatsoever, I held up the camera and captured irrefutable proof that what I had seen was in fact, without question, definitively, undeniably and unmistakably a very average-looking brown dog.
But the guy approaching in the Steely Dan shirt seemed to be giving me a wide berth. He was heading to my town's Oktoberfest and I was heading back to my house carrying a large pizza with pepperoni and an order of breadsticks. We were the only two people on the street, and I was conscious of the fact that I was grinning like a wacko. I don't meet a lot of Steely Dan fans... because I don't seek them out... because they (and by "they" I mean "we," and by "we" I mean "I") can be insufferable. A lot of them (us, me) snidely denigrate other music. It's not fun. It's sad.
But I was just going to breeze past this guy, so all I had intended to do was say something that would instantly point to the inherent kinship between two Steely Dan fans, like, "Is there gas in the car?" Or, "You must be joking, son -- where did you get those shoes?" Something from an album cut, something from the original seven albums, lest this person have as casual a relationship with all of the twenty-first century Steely Dan records as I do. And as I was formulating just the right vaguely conversational overture, I must have looked a little mental.
He wasn't wrong to judge me. My perception is a little off.
Friday, I was passing through a residential area on my way home and I saw there was an unattended brown animal near the end of someone's driveway. I slowed down to make sure it wasn't going to dart into the street. It didn't seem like a darting kind of animal as I got closer, it was just lumbering around and sniffing. It was big, plump with a short snout. And then it hit me that it was a bear.
And this was very exciting. I've never seen a bear outside of the zoo. And now, not only had I seen one, but I was, it seemed, about to be instrumental in its capture and relocation. And as the guy who discovers and reports the bear, I momentarily and hastily assumed that I would be allowed, once it was in a tranquilized state, be in the bear's proximity and sort of, and even I don't know exactly what I mean by this, commune with the bear on some sort of spiritual level and establish a bond each of us would feel for as long as we wandered the literal (him) and metaphorical (me) wilderness. Things were about to get Grizzly up in this Adams.
I did a hurried three point turn in a church parking lot and, being a twenty-first century American, opened the video camera on my phone. Slowing way down, inviting the contempt of the driver behind me who was not, as far I could tell, on any sort of vision quest whatsoever, I held up the camera and captured irrefutable proof that what I had seen was in fact, without question, definitively, undeniably and unmistakably a very average-looking brown dog.
So, the confidence I had in spontaneously engaging another Steely Dan fan on the street was not where it should have been on any other day. He was already wary of me, grinning, as I was, like a goofball. But as the distance closed between us, and as time for just the right quoted lyric to emerge grew short, providence smiled upon me and my phone rang.
My ringtone is a custom-edited mp3 of my own invention -- an arrangement of Donald Fagen's "New Frontier" which reverses the de-escalating instrumentation of the final measures of the song (it's a whole thing -- I can't really describe it here) and it gave me a chance to tell to the guy in the 'Dan tour shirt, "Oh, hey. Excuse me. My Donald Fagen ringtone is going off while I pass a guy in a Steely Dan T shirt." Laughter, finger pistols... everything was cool.
And the kinship I'd sought with some mythical animal, a brother of the forest, fell, unwasted, on another kindred soul who had doubtlessly table-drummed to "Aja" and learned the horn cues to "The Caves of Altamira"... the way we Steely Dan fanatics all do. And I felt like we were connected in a deeply spiritual way, across time and space.
Until I got home and started sharing pieces of pepperoni with my dog. Dogs are really better than bears and Steely Dan fans.
My ringtone is a custom-edited mp3 of my own invention -- an arrangement of Donald Fagen's "New Frontier" which reverses the de-escalating instrumentation of the final measures of the song (it's a whole thing -- I can't really describe it here) and it gave me a chance to tell to the guy in the 'Dan tour shirt, "Oh, hey. Excuse me. My Donald Fagen ringtone is going off while I pass a guy in a Steely Dan T shirt." Laughter, finger pistols... everything was cool.
And the kinship I'd sought with some mythical animal, a brother of the forest, fell, unwasted, on another kindred soul who had doubtlessly table-drummed to "Aja" and learned the horn cues to "The Caves of Altamira"... the way we Steely Dan fanatics all do. And I felt like we were connected in a deeply spiritual way, across time and space.
Until I got home and started sharing pieces of pepperoni with my dog. Dogs are really better than bears and Steely Dan fans.
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