Black Friday with the Children of the Sun

Flashing back to a magical day after Thanksgiving

If you’re reading this, congrats on making it alive through Thanksgiving 2022. Hope you ate well, and were able to do so (if you so chose) in the company of people you love and who made you feel loved and appreciated in return. And most of all, I hope you were able to find some things to feel genuinely thankful for.

Gratitude has probably been one of the most important tools in my survival kit over the last few years. As lousy as things have been — in this world, in this country, and in my own life — I still find stuff to delight in, marvel at and feel intensely grateful for on a daily basis. Maybe it’s nothing more than a brain-splitting guitar riff, the rich reds of a late-afternoon sky, or a snuggling cat insistently head-butting my jaw, but the good bits are what continue to get me through the bad. And today, I’m especially grateful for the fact that I’ve reached *300* subscribers here at Jagged Time Lapse, not to mention that a significant portion of you are actually supporting this project with paid subscriptions. Thank you all very, very much!

So for alla youse paid subscriber types, here’s a little special Black Friday something to read while you’re stuck in the checkout line, waiting to get into the RSD Black Friday sale at your local record store, or maybe just chilling out at home because you’ve successfully managed to ignore the siren cry of DEALS DEALS DEALS…

As I mentioned back when I launched this thing, one of my intentions with Jagged Time Lapse is to to share some chapters from my musical-memoir-in-progress with paid subscribers as I kick them into shape. I don’t yet have a working title for the book, but the concept is similar to what my friend and colleague Josh Wilker did with his wonderful Cardboard Gods. Except where Josh used baseball cards from the 1970s as a means to make sense of his past, I’m using 45 rpm singles as a series of windows into my turbulent adolescence — a period of my life which coincided with some of the greatest music ever heard on AM (and FM) radio, and some of the absolute worst. Here is the latest chapter I’ve been playing with. Please let me know whatcha think…

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As far back as I could remember, the day after Thanksgiving had always meant either doing family stuff or returning from a trip involving family stuff. But on the morning of November 28, 1980, I woke up in my own bed giddy with the realization that I had no plans or obligations at all for this particular Black Friday — not that we called it “Black Friday” back then.

My mom and stepfather had some kind of social engagement that afternoon, and my sister was going to meet some of her friends and hang around the nearby Water Tower Place mall. Which left me completely on my own — and I decided over my breakfast bowl of Shredded Wheat that today was going to be the day that I finally ventured into downtown Chicago by myself…