Sometimes it is easy to capture an era. Like, if I were to pull up to your basement apartment, get out of my Plymouth Horizon wearing Hypercolor, while carrying an Oopie Ball, you'd be like "oh yeah, it's 1992".

Alas, I was not much more than an ickle firstie when I left my Oopie next to the electric heater one February evening, potentially starting a fire, and having my privileges to the Atari with the 300 baud Pocket-Modem revoked. Back then, the "internet" wasn't so much about blogs, or dressing up Zwinky, but more about ASCII art of the Snorks. So... I can't much relate to what 1991 would have truly been like for a conscious young adult, short of the prevailing trends in my brother's mixed tapes at the time, which may have just been Waxtrax! samplers.

I digress... my late teens were spent mired in the throes of convenience store retail. A Cold War radio, a Game Boy held together by scotch tape, and a rack of out of fashion schoolyard collectables (Pogs? Crazy Bones? Digimon? These words mean nothing to us in 2007).

I ran this store with two lackeys, Dave and Scott. We were literally the gateway into Elmira's nightlife, because that's where the townies came to buy their smokes and mixer. I've probably never been invited out more in my life. But we were happy to just stay in the backroom and play UNO. Somehow it was never dull, because if the drone of our rudimentary existentialism ever ceased, the hum of the Coke coolers kept us company.

It's safe for me to say that as the turn of the century loomed, my life was basically the film "Clerks". I can say this unabashedly because, well... who the hell would ever want to admit to that?

Soul Asylum - Can't Even Tell

"i know you know i wanna know how i feel"

One listen to "Can't Even Tell" and it just sounds like the nineties. You can feel the overcast emotion filtered through the rum & OK Soda piss breaks, even if you weren't there. The whole thing grinds like when you first learned stick in the mall parking lot after-hours that one Sunday.

See, that's the thing about the nineties, it was fashionable to be sloppy and under-produced, while still posing metaphysical questions like you were writing your crush's name on the school's brick wall with a stone. We began to realize that we don't really know anything about anything, and will we ever?

I'm guessing no. Pick up four. Then...: "UNO!".

Buy the "Clerks" soundtrack. Sit through all of "Violent Mood Swings" without hating the 90s, and I'll send you my famous banana bread recipe.

-kam