The radiation supply has diminished over the years and I’m bereft of the warm embrace of human commotion that had jostled me along like a nutshell that’s been swept up by the current of a stream. Print advertising has never matched the profound power of the Memorex ad with the dude getting crushed by the sound of his own mixed tape played on an old system full of rich warm tubes of crackling analog volume. Even the lamp is feeling the rush as its shade tilts hard to the right.

This ad spoke to me when I was an impressionable adolescent who would steal my older brothers records to make my own mixtapes of Queen and Pat Benatar and early Ted Nugent. Back before I’d grown to reject all of that commercial appeal and had dug myself into the underground of noise and distortion, the deconstruction of time signatures, bound by sweat to crack songs open and reveal the energy that hurts like heartbreak or falling in love. Or falling off a cliff.

The Memorex dude was my hero. I wanted to be him and in some ways, when I look back on the days with the Chemical Spray, I think I definitely achieved it. In the same way maybe that an ancient Burmese katydid might achieve a perfect stasis locked in amber for centuries only now to be studied and archived by lab coat technicians with dandruff in their hair their white pockets protected against stains by thin plastic prophylactic shields.