Memories can be far worse than lousy fish and chips. Here I am, having a retro-high school moment, listening to Wish and some contemporaneous Suicidal Tendencies song I (for whatever reason) taped off the radio onto the same cassette, and all I can think about are cigarettes, nighttime and parking lots. That and feeling like angst incarnate, finding meaning in the lyrics, staring dolefully at the moon, absorbing the pre-dawn humidity and all those other bittersweet, youthful lovelies.

But while we’re on the subject of music, there I was yesterday, channel surfing, looking for something to distract me for the last 10 minutes of my improvised aerobics, when what should I stumble across on one of the local TV networks but a Creed concert. Meanwhile, the bottom right-hand corner of the television screen was a constant ebb and flow of text messages (hey, this is Europe), by means of which city kids were both somehow trying to hook up and express their newfound love for the group. I’m reading their romance language equivalents of hacker type, if not hacker speak, and thinking to myself, “Do these people have any idea what they’re listening to?” Somehow, I doubt it. In fact, I’m sure they’d be the first to go off on a reactionary (albeit ultimately proper), freshman year tirade about why their president and his party are such regressive xenophobes for wanting to include a reference to the Christian roots of Europe in the EU’s imminent new constitution. And yet.. there they were, swooning over Creed. Am I the only one who sees the irony in this?

And don’t get me started on the “Miss Punky” T-shirt I saw gracing the wall of an uptown boutique the other day. It took me about ten minutes to decipher the gothic font, but once I did... “Miss Punky?” Let’s not forget: someone actually buys this stuff. And, who knows? Maybe that someone feels really punk when she does.

My, my... What can you say?