Time burps: Cheap pizza and radio memories

I’ve got to stop giving into the Friday night temptation of $5 pizzas at Dominick's. But I can’t help myself.

It’s cheap. It’s easy. And it beats my usual strategy of driving around aimlessly past the mediocre array of places to eat until I give in. Oh sure, I could cook. But I findcooking for one more depressing than trying to find a date on the Internet. No that I would know anything about the latter.

Besides, the pizza is big enough to last all weekend. That’s how exciting my social life is. Truth be told, weather permitting, there are weekends when I have no contact with other human beings but for clerks, cashiers and whomever might be on the exercise machine next to me at the gym.

So I gave into the pizza again last night, trying to make it more edible with Louisiana Hot Sauce. Bad strategy, as I didn’t eat until after 9.

Despite a handful of Tums before bed, I couldn’t sleep (gee, what a surprise). And I had left the radio on to WXRT, which is a college rock station for people who went to college in the 80s, like me.

They were having one of their flashback weekends, where every hour focused on a specific year -- not chronologically, but jumping back and forth between eras. Usually they just do this for four hours on Saturday morning and keep it to one year. I listen then, too.

Anyway, when I woke upit was 1988, and they were playing Tracy Champman's Fast Car, a sad song about trying to get out of the hood. If you were a folk singer, you wouldn't want to be in the hood, either.

Half asleep, I pictured myself on a Slip-N-Slide, rolling too fast down a sloped lawn, my legs getting turf burn from the plastic sheet, my fat ass hopelessly heading toward a mud puddle called oblivion. Take that, Tracy, your morose Janis Ian-wannabe.

Next they played a song called Birth School Work Death by the Godfathers. Hey, I know 99.9 percent of the songs they play on XRT. And own most of them. I collect CDs. If I am ever a citizen like Kane, they will be known as my Rosebud.

As for the tune of the radio, the title pretty much gives away the grim topic of the punk song - you’re born, go to school, work, then die. Actually I break my typically underachieving years down by Christmas, the Super Bowl, maybe an award show or to (which I hate, but they’re on Sunday night and there’s usually nothing else to watch), Memorial Day, 4th of July, start of football season, Labor Day, a Notre Dame game, Thanksgiving. Throw in a vacation or two. Lather, rinse, repeat.

For a song, though, it would be hard to make any of that rhyme.

I go to the bathroom and wolf down more Tums (actually the generic ones from Target -- as if the pizza weren’t clue enough of my Trump like lifestyle) get back to bed and they’re playing Handle Me With Care, by the Traveling Wilburys.

Roy Orbison is crying that he’s so tired of being lonely. Welcome to my world, dude, and take off those stupid glasses. Who the hell do you think you are, that pompous ass Bono?

Of course, Orbison is long dead, so I guess I shouldn’t really complain.

Maybe I should stop listening to the flashback shows. I enjoy the music, as these oldies are hipster ones, not your usual Super Hits variety. But it still makes me feel old that I remember all these songs they play. Depending on which year they highlight, the tunes are sometimes older than the people I sit next to at work.

It scares me that I can remember these songs, but starting with the year after I got out of college, few of these years have any personal significance for me.

And, like a Twilight Zone episode, most of the people on the radio station have been working there at least since I was a college freshman. (I was so weird back then, the time before the Babylon that is the Internet made all human knowledge, porn and most radio stations available wherever, whenever. Sometimes in college in Denver I’d tune in the Chicago AM stations to get a bit of home. Now I don’t even want to be here.)

Maybe Atkins is right: I gotta stop eating cheap, leaden, carb-loaded pizza.