"Don't Stop Believing."

It roared like a tidal wave from the shitty low-fi speakers of my Kia Rio. "Don't Stop Believing," Steve Perry sang. His lyrics melted his way into my heart. I wasn't the only one. Jeli noticed it as well, each sister separately thinking that it was odd that Journey was being played so heavily that month. We discussed it one day over tea while sitting in my basement. What does it mean? Were too tight, high waisted jeans about to make another appearance? Was the heavy bang back? Was Journey in itself a metaphor, a symbol of our lives that summer?

It HAD been an interesting summer. There had been some very bad, and some pretty good, and some of our group were going through major changes. Some of us redefined what we wanted out of life and how we related to other people. There were deaths and births and weddings, and there was less drinking than in previous years. There were bad haircuts and good hand knits. Biological clocks were set on edge. What did it mean? Was local radio station Q104 secretly following us as we grew out of young adulthood and into a fuller phase of maturity? Clearly this Don't Stop Believing message was something we needed to take seriously. We decided that it would be a sort of unofficial anthem, and that it meant we were somehow more fully tuned into the universe around us.

Well, as it turns out...not so much. After weeks of belting out strains of "hold onto that feeeehhhling, yeahhhhhh" in the grocery store (also "I wanna get back to that citayyy, ooooohhhhhh..." and "anyway you want it----yeah!") I was very rudely informed that not only was I NOT at one with the universe (or at least with major broadcasting) but that the whole Journey thing had something to do with a TV show called "The Sopranos," and that now not only was I a dork for trying to glean meaning out of pop culture, but that I was even MORE of a dork for never having seen "The Sopranos."

Well. Of course I've never watched The Sopranos. I tend to not like dramas, as life itself is pretty darn dramatic and I watch TV to escape, not to torture myself. Also, I personally have lived in a city that was once run by gangsters---Youngstown, Ohio. I lived there briefly during the whole Jim Trafficant fiasco, and as far as I could tell, there wasn't so much organized crime going on as there were people in random vans driving around and offering totally innocent young ladies white powdered substances. At the time I thought they were offering me real drugs, but I'm pretty sure that they were probably peddling bags of sugar or something, since Youngstown is pretty poor and last I checked cocaine cost quite a lot of money. Here's a true story about an experience I had in the big bad city of Youngstown. A woman I worked with laughingly told me one day that she was on the "cocaine diet," and instead of being horrified, I merely thought the following: that this explained why she was living in a boarded up house; why was she telling ME about the cocaine diet? Did she think I wanted to lose weight?; and that she was a pretty crappy spokesperson because she still looked kind of chubby to me. So we see that in Youngstown crime was not so much organized as it was random and stupid. Also, Jim Trafficant eventually went to jail where we all rejoiced at the thought that maybe he'd finally get a decent haircut. (Turns out his hairstyle was actually a wig---can you imagine BUYING hair like that? Ugh. I mean, not that I'm one to talk, with my voluminous eighties hair and all, but I didn't PAY for THIS mop.)

Perhaps these are all reasons why I never bothered to watch an episode of The Sopranos. Or maybe I just don't like being trendy. Who knows.

On one level I was disappointed. I'd been living a lie all summer, and it wasn't anything like the lie I lived that time I bleached my whole head blonde and then tried to dye over it and ended up with green streaks which Jen (one half of Jeli) tried to assure me were "misty" and looked like "beautiful mermaid hair." It was more like the lie you live when you've been walking around all day thinking you look cute only to realize your fly has been down and the underwear poking out says "Thursday" when it's really "Saturday."

I really needed to live that lie, though. I couldn't feel comfortable with myself knowing that the social philosophy I'd been basing my summer on was a big fat joke engineered by prime time television. What I needed was a way to apply my denial (that somehow my soul had merged with that of the band Journey) and what I found was Carl Jung and the theory of the collective unconscious.

I suppose the best way to describe the collective unconscious is to imagine a basketball game, when everyone chants "Air Ball" in unison and in the key of F. Jung argued that it was biological and inherited (some say he was influenced by Darwinian science) and some people refer to it as a spiritual thing, where dreams and instinct guide us towards or away from certain experiences which then merges with our personal unconscious and that our level of deviation or acceptance to the psychic push-pull is what eventually shapes our personality.

I've put a lot of thought into this theory, something that is remarkable when you consider that I am very skeptical of psychology. It's not that I think the theories are bullshit----all theories are ACCEPTABLE (at least, all hypotheses are acceptable, which is why they are hypotheses and not laws), but just because they are acceptable does not mean they are infallible. It's been my observance that the people who benefit from over analyzing this crap generally don't NEED therapy because they've already figured out what the problem is, where as the people who could use the discourse are busy performing unspeakable acts on other human beings. Not that most psychopaths wouldn't know about Jung---it's just that they probably couldn't give a flying fuck, and I can't say that I don't understand that.

ANYWAY---I could accept that The Sopranos totally bastardized the Journey Experience for me, and I could accept that perhaps my friends and I were too stupid to realize that the radio is pretty synced up with television. I could also accept the fact that maybe the REASON Journey even got dragged into the whole Sopranos thing in the first place was because somewhere out there, somewhere, the love of Steve Perry has been broadcast, either psychically or through biological memory) so deeply that it affected The Sopranos and my young, pure heart AT THE VERY SAME TIME.

Yes. Tony Soprano and I are totally on the same wavelength, apparently.

Interestingly enough, as I came to terms with this theory, the frequency of "Don't Stop Believing" seemed to lag. Maybe I'd learned the lesson that had been set for me to learn.

Then, a few days ago, I turned on the radio and heard a song I haven't heard since the summer of 1999, a summer I spent driving around with Joe Joe, Tim and Beaker in a Cavalier GT listening to a Rock 80s cassette over and over and over.

"And so I come to you, with open arms......"

What? What? The summer wasn't over! Sure the leaves are turning and mornings are chilly, but that is a minor fact. The summer--nay---the YEAR of Journey is not over yet. My jubilation lasted all of ten seconds, until I realized my window was down and a road crew (who were clearly more interested in leaning on their equipment than in working) were staring in my direction. I quickly shut my mouth and continued the song in my head.

Who knows? Maybe this will turn out to be the decade of Journey. Any way you want it, that's the way you need it, any way you want it! YEAH!