I love the internets!

Specifically, I love the way you can find anything you want, or find out anything you want to find out, just by casting about on that loveable series of tubes. Many a time I've started on Google and followed a daisy chain of links, swung through the jungle from vine to vine, hopped from floater to floater and avoided the sinkers... Oh, any metaphor you want, it's all good.

Tonight it's the music that has me burbling with joy. See, I got to thinking about some of the old songs I used to love. Now just a few feet below me, and a couple of feet to the south, there's a cupboard wherein resides a tall stack of vinyl record albums, all in their immortal cover art, some with inner sleeves pristine white and others bearing artwork and doodles of my long-ago creation. Thanks to my husband's audio collection we even possess a turntable whereon these platters can be played. However, I can't sit on the computer (up here) and listen to them (down there); nor can I burn them onto a CD of my own making and play it in the car. And the thing is, tonight what I wanted more than anything was to go on a Steppenwolf jag.

Steppenwolf! Back when I was in my mid-teens and thought I was so much older, and wished so hard that I was older still, Steppenwolf got heavy play on the soundtrack of my life. "Born To Be Wild" of course, because we all loved Easy Rider, and "Magic Carpet Ride" was just so spectacularly psychedelic. But some of their best stuff didn't make it onto Top 40 radio. My favorite album of theirs was "Steppenwolf the Second", with such gems as "28" and "Faster Than the Speed of Life". There you stand, untamed and in confusion, Spread your arms and come to me... There was "Don't Step on the Grass, Sam", kind of a story song with a catchy guitar hook and a fabulous churchy organ, ending in a drug bust and the sound of a toilet flushing. There was "The Pusher", a another great one they'd never play on the radio because of the drug content (even though it was anti-drug!). It was a more innocent age -- though we sure as hell didn't think so then.

So anyway, I went to iTunes, and a few clicks later I had my Steppenwolf jag well under way. "Let the sound take you away..." Oh for sure, and it's all come flooding back, like I knew it would; and I know why the girl in the picture is smiling.