No moral, no point—just an old, random memory that floated back into view—a barge flowing slowly down an Illinois River of the mind.

Sometime, a main era ago—while still living in St. David, that's how long ago, 1993 or so—KZ-93 (93.3FM WZKW) started playing "Changes" by David Bowie. Non-stop. Repeatedly. It started on an April 1st so, naturally, it seemed like a joke. I kept the radio tuned in, waiting for the joke to end. Days later, it ended, and KZ93 was a different radio station.

Why is that esoteric, insubstantial episode of life still stuck in my head?

And the word itself—"changes"—still calls up that song, and the weird feeling of expectation, and of letdown when there was no joke to get. I can't trace the reason for it.

One more thing, and I'm sure it's common, but I hadn't thought of it in such a long time. When thinking of that song and radio station, I also thought of the radio, and the milk crates it was on (still have them, but they aren't shelves anymore), and the room that contained them all. In this memory, the room is huge. The radio is on the same wall, but farther away. The room is bigger, but the contents are the same and the same size, so the effect is that there is so much wall space, so much floor space. That can't be right. And one half wall is—it's unclear. There's something there, but nothing there—it doesn't resolve. The living room is too narrow, almost a hallway.

That's all. The same memory changed and didn't change. It's a funny spectrum of memory resolution. It's maddening. I've been rummaging through my memory trying to recreate the room correctly, because it's hard to leave a memory in that state—complete but incorrect, or incomplete but correct. It's ambiguous, unfinished, strange, itchy.