I don't want to be defeated! I don't want to be defeated!

FUGAZI, y'all. I had a chance encounter with Fugazi on the iPod the other day (I am in the A-F binder of CD's in my digitization efforts) and it really will not stop. It's like when I first heard Fugazi in Fred's apartment, which had eerily been my old girlfriend's apartment not too many years before, and all I could listen to was Fugazi, making up for all that time I foolishly spent not listening to Fugazi. And, possibly, indirectly from this chance meeting, I landed an interview with Ian Mackaye for a certain graphically distinctive literary journal! The iPod apparently does not know its own strength, or scarily, maybe it does.

"Bed for the Scraping" off Red Medicine was the guilty track that started all this mess. This afternoon, I got stuck in traffic crossing the bridge in my no-AC sweltering car and just played this song and over, yelling "I DON'T WANT TO BE DEFEATED" red-faced, over and over with them until that perfect air-raid-siren guitar riff hit, and in an instant, the fear of collapse I have every time I get stuck in traffic on a suddenly physics-improbable bridge became a moment of electrified Oneness with the hubris of trans-river architecture (and civilization too, in a way) and the gamble we take when we utilize it. I reasoned I could listen through that riff at 0:28 - 0:40 one last time as my rust coffin hung on the edge and then plummeted into the Mississippi. So punk rock, that would be. I never have this feeling when I take the ferry. The ferry is more of a Nick Drake/John Fahey experience, all quaint and complex in its turns and machinations, but slow and simple enough to witness everything going on. I was glad when traffic started moving, but I still listened to this on repeat until I got stuck in traffic safely on the other side, just to be sure.