Minneapolis, Mason, WYEP and Marcy P.

Yesterday I tested my near-excellent memory when I heard a familiar voice on wyep. The familiar voice belonged to Mason Jennings, which was an unfamiliar name. I stopped what I was doing and listened intently and tried to place the voice. It was the same voice from ... from ... from ... from ... it'll come to me .... about 20 minutes later, I remembered: Marcy Playground. So, as curiosity often consumes my brain and pushes every other thought in my multi-tasking mind to the wayside while I wonder about these kinds of tangential connections, I looked it up. I found out that Mason Jennings has apparently no connection to Marcy Playground, except that its main band member/lead singer/guitarist/songwriter/producer Jon Wozniak and Mr. Jennings happen to be from Minneapolis and both released music in the late 1990s. And I like both their music very much. I remember owning the Marcy Playground album and playing it incessantly in 1998 and 1999, during a period when I was having a mid-20s-life crisis. Then, I knew my life as I knew it had to change and I knew it would change. I knew it would have to change violently if I were going to get it to change. I spent many mornings researching graduate schools, and on one of the many Marcy Playground-listening mornings, I discovered the path that would lead me to where I am now. Paperwork, testing, applications, travel, more paperwork, waiting, wondering, getting accepted, and moving. At that time I started an anonymous journal on a friend's Web site. I wonder what happened to it. It got buried in the little cartoon town he was building on his Web site. It was in the library. The town is gone and there's an actual photo of a railyard in its place. That's what happens to towns and cities. Things get built, things get torn down, and other things get built in their place.