It's a lot of minutiae

Hanging with Kaz, we had been talking about the 80's and early nineties at the coffee shop. What happened to so-and-so, remember him, remember her. After two hours,we traded Ipods. We shared the Charlatans UK and Stone Roses, both Madchester fans.

She had The Creatures though. I have their first album on cassette. Maybe not. I couldn't remember what pile it ultimately ended up in. Mental note: get The Creatures. Then I realized I remembered all the words to Siouxsie's The Last Beat of My Heart. Siouxsie is an ongoing love affair spanning twenty five years or so. We drove off listening to Boomerang.

I had watched Unforeseen that night and saw images of old Austin. The documentary sent me to bed nostalgically recalling The Cutting Edge, Mad Dog and Beans, swimming holes, old friends. I fell asleep thinking of The Reivers and then the Throwing Muses. My thoughts turned a corner and I remembered Shivers by The Boys Next Door then thought of Nick Cave, This Mortal Coil, The Cocteau Twins and so on. My mind was a messy collage of 80's bands, 4AD used as the doorway into the early nineties.

But when I woke up this morning NPR announced the death of John Hughes. It didn't quite fit in with the mood still looming from the night before, nor did clash with it either. Growing up it was Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume books and those John Hughes films. We began with Mr Mom at the new mall movie theatre and ended with Christmas Vacation when I came home from my first semester of college. John Hughes was childhood.

It's been quite a summer.