Cold walk home today, I looked up overhead. Sunset starts too early these days, both of the middle-aged strangers I spoke to this afternoon said so and I agreed (one at the springs, one at the library). Pinks starting to ring the clouds, and parallel to me, a tiny jet engine plane, its long tail streaming out behind it, white and just starting to get the dusk colors going. From my perspective it looked like a needle being dragged slowly across the light blue skin of the sky, leaving a just-on-the-verge-of-bleeding scratch. From where I was looking we seemed to be going along in the same direction, at the same speed. I stopped and wondered if the plane would stop in mid-air, too. Who was flying in that tiny plane at 4:15pm today above the airspace of my little city?

The needle that drags across the platter of plastic accepts the vibrations of the audio information embedded in the plastic. The embedded music shakes the needle just so, and a series of devices take the information from that shaking needle and broadcast it into a room. In my case my turntable sends signal to a receiver that then sends audio to two big speakers up on milk crates, speakers I bought from a guy's garage on a street with no streetlights or cell service after I saw them listed on Craigslist. He'd only accept cash so I had to drive back into town and get 200 bucks out of the ATM at the Stewart's and when I got back to the garage he popped in a U2 cassette to show that it still worked ("I still haven't found what I'm looking for," the anthem of craigslist). The needle that drags across the plastic only lasts so long, they wear out, and the records that vibrate the needle get scraped again and again, each time the record is played. The needle, however microscopically, rips up the plastic bit by bit. And the plastic blunts back. So every time you listen to an LP you destroy it a little more, until one day you hear the backside of the flip side of the record, the ghostly impression of it, the topographic mirror image of the music on the other side of the record now detected by the needle, which is also ever degrading. In high school I eventually wore out my mom's already worn out copy of everybody knows this is nowhere. I'm on my third copy of it now, and there's nothing more spectral than hearing the backside of music, like seeing the inside of your face.

(I imagine myself walking around and around the dining room table near the stereo, wearing a groove in the floor, like the dog I lived next to for a month that was chained to a stake in the turf - he wound his way around and around the stake and by the end of the month he was a couple inches deeper down in the grass than when I got there. I could wear out records and wear out my flooring all winter, feel the ghostly impression of my downstairs neighbors' ceiling through my house shoes, I could wear away my feet).

Around and around. Miraculously or through my own absolute stubborn disregard I found myself laced into an expensive pair of roller skates at the world's largest indoor skate rink, about 15 minutes away in the next town over. Maybe I made a new friend, or at least there's some new friend potential in my life at the moment, and one of the first and only things I know about him is that he's extremely into roller disco. And he held me to it when I said I wanted to go. There we were on veteran's day, vaping in the parking lot in the rain. Above the entranceway there's a neon sign that says SECRETS in cursive font. And when you leave there's a handprinted sign that says it's a special place for special people. Cavernous, the top 40 played from a DJ booth in one corner is completely washed out, sounds like it's being played off a worn out record. The ghost of music. My buddy's only advice to me - absolute roller-skate novice - is that your body knows how to skate already, which turned out to be absolutely true. I wheeled less and less cautiously on the skates he loaned me with each lap, the less I thought the smoother the transit. He spun slowly with his eyes closed under perhaps the largest disco ball I have ever seen. I sweat entirely through my disposable mask, then my ass hurt from hunkering low and my face hurt from smiling all the next day.

You are surrounded on all sides by radio waves. A radio simply plucks particular invisible waves out of the air around you. Even when your radio's off you're suspended in a bath of electro-magnetic vibrations - cell phones, short wave, WiFi, bluetooth, passing through you. You are also surrounded on all sides by electricity, it's in the walls. The filament in the bulb in the lamp on your desk is burning with power derived from a fuel source external to you, your setting. Where I live the electricity comes from a hydroelectric dam. Some of the water from a river is diverted before it reaches an enormous set of falls. The diverted water flows through a channel built by men hundreds of years ago. The water used to spin an enormous wooden wheel, the wheel would turn and a shaft attached would transfer the power from the water to the wheel to the shaft and eventually to the textile being passed through machinery by one of a thousand workers. Now that same waterway (but not the same water) flows into a turbine. Similarly the turbine spins. This is where my understanding of it ends. But the power of the water flowing is transferred to the turbine and the turbine creates electricity that is passed by a series of utility poles across two rivers and across two towns and into the lamp on my desk. The peaceful transfer of power. Most of the rivers that can be dammed in America have already been dammed. The water has been contained, it has been locked, it has been hemmed in and forced through a tiny aperture in an otherwise enormous wall, and now your walls are humming.