It's 11:37pm on a Wednesday night and Prince's "7" video is on MTV2. As good a time as any to start a post.

Tonight's "thank you" goes to Totino's for recently making a 3 Cheese version of their nice crispy little pizzas. Now we vegetarian types have one more junk food option than we did 6 months ago.

Next video up?
"It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday" by Boyz II Men.

In the early 90s, we weren't allowed to listen to rock and roll. Or Top 40. Even jazz was iffy.
Discovering music could really only be done on the sly. No money, no car, a little sheltered school, no internet yet. Only the radio, really. I discovered Pet Sounds and some of the other Beach Boys classics early on, but most of the music I dug on was radio music, a complete opposite of how things work for me today. Needless to say, most of the music I listened to then was crap. It's worth noting that in the early 90s, Top 40 stations weren't afraid to play rock and roll, and rap was riding its first wave of popularity, so Top 40 radio was much more diverse than it is now. Boyz II Men was IT back then. My best friend Tim and I used to walk down to an elementary school one neighborhood over from mine hauling a little red wagon containing the following items: water bottles, a trampoline used so we could practice our dunking techniques, my basketball, and a little boombox that blared one of our few tapes, Boyz II Men, once we were safely out of hearing distance from my house, of course.
One day Tim destroyed the tape during a fit of sin-smashing zeal. As I recall, our church school had a special chapel service dedicated in part to helping us get rid of the devil's music. I never had a girlfriend, so music is all I had and I never threw away a tape. I told Tim he could've just given the tape to me and had it off his conscience but he always had a flair for the dramatic and besides, the staff needed to see a little fervor now and then, so I didn't belabor the point too much.

Years later, Tim and I were still buddies and sweating it out at Maranatha Baptist Bible College, a bulwark of fundamentalism in Wisconsin (halfway between Madison and Milwaukee). With less than a thousand students to watch over, the authorities had plenty of time to spend finding sinners and inventing sins. Why Tim and I were in trouble is a longer story, but we knew things had become serious when we walked in our room one afternoon to find it had been ransacked, all our personal belongings rummaged through. While Communism seemed less an imminent threat post-USSR, the Domino Theory still applied, and apparently school officials figured that if we were up to no good on one front, we had plenty of other sin to hide. Sure enough, among the contraband missing were our tapes. Double Jeopardy loomed before us -- not only was rock music not allowed, but we had signed a statement at the beginning of the year promising to not listen to it; every so often we would have a "music check" that involved our laying all our music out on our beds and while we were away at chapel, a couple school officials (one of which was a student politician) checking through it to make sure it was all okay, holding the sinful music for us until semester's end. If we were found to have ungodly tapes in the meantime, we had obviously lied and were held responsible for that AND the rock and roll.

In the end, Tim was kicked out while I was told I was fortunate to be allowed to stay (his main infraction quite serious while I was only the accomplice who claimed to know nothing), albeit on probation. I stuck around for another year just to make sure I reached my maximum potential self-hatred. During my sophomore year I met an out-of-place hardcore kid named Gordon Fry who introduced me to the world of Tooth & Nail. I started wearing my first wallet chain soon after and began the slide to my current status: a vegetarian music snob almost done with his BA in General Studies With A Concentration In English (years later) taking classes on Beats and Hippies and voting for Ralph Nader, not to mention becoming Non-Protestant.
Tim, on the other hand, later married the girl he got kicked out with, had a few kids, became an insurance salesman, and now sends his kids to a school and church almost identical in ideology and rules as where we grew up. For him, it really was too hard to say goodbye to yesterday. For me, it was the best thing I ever did.