I think it was somewhere in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that my good friend, Andrew Kovar, and I decided to stop and rest for the night. His parents had just had just flown me out to Springfield, Missouri, to drive back with him to California. We grabbed a cheap grungy motel, the kind you see in horror movies and yell at the people in the movies, “No, not that motel, stupid!” Norman Bates had just pointed us to our room so we grabbed our personal belongings and went straightaway to our room.
Andy had his electric guitar with him and I asked him if he’d show me how to play a guitar chord. 002220. If you understand guitar chords, that’s an A Chord. That’s what he showed me how to play. I strummed the strings and I was hooked instantly. Visions of rockstar status flooded my mind and I was on stage rocking it out but then I came back to reality and remembered I was in a grungy motel room. When we got back home, I didn’t wait much longer to go out and buy my first guitar. I’m getting old, but if my memory serves me correctly, I think Andy helped me pick out my very first guitar. It was a Samick and that guitar was my baby for 6 years until I got my very first Taylor guitar and I’ve been playing music ever since. Now pay attention because here’s where the story gets “for real good.”
On that same trip, we were passing through Nevada late at night…and boy was it dark. We were literally in the middle of nowhere. No city lights. No freeway lights. No cell phone lights. Had we broken down we probably would have had to write our last will and testaments and held each other tightly through the night to survive the elements with our own body heat. Oh wait, it was May. It wasn’t cold. So noooo lights anywhere...just the headlights on his truck and the stars above...and maybe the twinkle of stardom in my eye in regards to my soon-to-be rockstar status.
With pedal to the metal we are out in the middle of nowhere and we had just passed a sign that pointed to Area 51. We joked and laughed how it’d be cool to head in that direction and look for aliens, but we used the “we had to get home” excuse as a justifiable reason for any perceived lack of courage and gas funds. A few moments later, the most remarkable thing happened to us. What follows is no exaggeration of details whatsoever. None. Andy can corroborate that I’m not exaggerating, but all of a sudden the music in the truck stopped. I don’t remember what we were rockin out to, but whatever it was was coming out through a ten pound Disc Man hooked up to the tape deck in his brown single cab truck. Hold up...What’s that you say? “That last sentence didn’t make sense? What’s a DiscMan and tape deck?” Oh, you poor child. I’ll try to explain. Hmmmm...a Disc Man...Just think of a smart phone that isn’t a phone and it has no apps. It only plays music....it’s made of lead and stone and twigs and it plays music that’s been put onto a plastic disc via a laser and four foot wide computer. A tape deck...well, it’s a device that eats musical cartridges made of wheels and string. I hope that helps. So, we didn’t have any tapes because that was old school technology. We were hip and cool and had a folder of CD’s but only one person could listen at a time with headphones unless you got even cooler technology to connect your DiscMan to the tape deck so that everyone could listen through the truck speakers. You trackin’?
So back to the main point...don’t interupt with your dumb questions anymore...so the music had stopped in the truck. Creepy! I checked the Disc Man to see what was going on. I picked it up and it was making a loud humming noise and it felt like a gyro-sphere in my hand. You could tell that the disc inside was spinning at an abnormally fast speed. Double creepy. I pressed the stop button repeatedly and it would not stop. Triple creepy! I opened the lid and, lo and behold, the CD was spinning…BACKWARDS. Quadruple creepy. At this point I wanted my mommy. Having just passed a sign that pointed to Area 51 and with visions of aliens in our minds, our imaginations went wild. Like a couple of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Andy was like, “No way, dude!” And I was like, “What in the world, dude!” And Andy was like “No way, dude!” And I was like “Way, dude!” And Andy was like, “No way, dude!” And I was like, “DUDE! Wayyyy!” We thought we were having a close encounter of the third kind and I suddenly wanted some mashed potatoes so I could sculpt something.
It’s no lie to say that we were spooked. I’m sure it was nothing but some sort of technological malfunction, but when you’re 23, near Area 51, on a dark road, with a vivid imagination, with Andy, it doesn’t take much to get animated about a backwards spinning cd. Orrrrrr did we did have an encounter with something inexplicable?!?! We waited to get teleported and probed by aliens but nothing ever happened. Orrrrr did something happen but we can’t remember because our memories were erased?!?! We will never know.
But that’s my story party dudes, and I’m wayyy sticking to it. And if you drive anywhere near Area 51 and some weird stuff happens, just know that aliens might be for real.
