Never put me in your box if the shit eats tapes

I loved Stavros' paean to cassettes and youth so much that I'm ganking his topic and repurposing it as my own. (Be grateful he wasn't writing about the genius of Nora Ephron 'cos I'm suggestible and uninspired today.)

I still have the first mix tape anyone ever made for me. It's a clear blue-and-green 90-minute Maxell, labeled PLAY LOUD! and loaded with music I'd never heard previously--the Mekons, the Minutemen, the Soft Boys, Nick Cave--but which became a staple of my teenage years. My first real pen pal made this tape for me. I was 14, and his letters were written longhand in blue-black ink with a Pilot fountain pen. They were funny and cryptic and, to my mind, brilliant. I keenly awaited his weekly dispatches. I even went out and bought a Pilot fountain pen with blue-black ink cartridges and went around quoting John Giorno to my nonplussed friends-- this was precisely what my penpal did to have me in his thrall, and I was his acolyte.

Because, of course, I wasn't just enamored of his genius; I had fallen into profound puppy love. This is why I remember every detail of this mix tape: I listened to it for hours and hours on end, scouring it for meaning, for proof that maybe he liked me too. (How I could possibly find hints of romance in a Einsturzende Neubauten song is anyone's guess, but that's a whole 'nother story.)

Fortunately it only took me a decade to realize the love was totally unrequited. In those 10 years, each of us had moved 27 times but we still managed to correspond via snail mail (even after the advent of the intarweb), still sending each other mix tapes now and then. I still have all of them, except for the last one, which was eaten by my crappy car stereo. I nearly cried, even though I didn't really like Avail, which was the song playing at the time. It turns out the music industry had nothing to worry about--the only thing home taping was hurting was my fragile, delusional heart.