Chasing the Dark Side of the Moon

Pages and pages of scribbled lines…

Dates of Relevance:

1973: On March 1, Pink Floyd releases The Dark Side of the Moon.

1974: In April of this year Pink Floyd releases into US market the theatrical documentary Live At Pompeii.

1974: The author, at the age of four, allegedly hears and watches On the Run for the first time while allegedly watching Live At Pompeii. Exact date and time is unknown.

1990: The author watches Live at Pompeii in VHS format. Exact date is unknown, but it was during the evening. The video seems familiar, enjoys the experience, but has no recollection of seeing it in 1974.

1994: On April 24 the author sees Pink Floyd (sans Roger Waters) perform One of These Days live in concert at Sun Devil Stadium.

1997: While driving through the Alvord Desert in the dead of night, the Author recollects that he saw Live at Pompeii in 1974 at the age of four. The exact date and time of this drive is unknown. It was likely August, given the Alvord Desert's lakebed itself was quite dry and snow was entirely absent on Steens Mountain. The lupin was in full bloom.

2025: On May 2 Live at Pompeii MMXXZV is released in album format and it contains all of the songs performed live in the Live at Pompeii. documentary It does not contain the studio songs that were included in the film and as such does not include On The Run.

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon resonates with me. However, I am going to talk very little about the album specifically. It is there, easily accessible for any who cares to listen to it. One can judge for themselves and formulate whatever opinions, agreeable or not. I feel other people have sufficiently written extensively about this album. What more is there to be said? I have nothing more to uniquely add.

Nor do I feel a need to laud it, malign it, defend it, nor proclaim "I am so done with it I no longer need it!"

For me it is a reference point. It is also several reference points that span across time. I use it much like an adventurer would a prominent landmark that is visible as far as the eye can see. Asking me to give it no mind would be akin to asking a person living in Portland Oregon on a sunny day to ignore Mt. Hood off in the distance. Why? Why do such?

And the Dark Side of the Moon has that style of prominence in my mental landscape. It is not a question of good or bad at this point. It is scenery on my horizon. I encounter it often much like I would were it Mt. Hood and I was driving around in Portland Oregon. I fortunately enjoy it, and I occasionally give it platitudes. Thank goodness for that. Could be far worse.

For many years, I was ignorant as to where my journey with Pink Floyd began. Which has always somewhat bothered me in the same way that a loose tooth is unsettling. It has prominent placement in my mental landscape. Given how much music I listen to and how much it has occupied my mind across several decades ought it not have a wonderful and incredible origin story? Must the origin story be as simple as "dude just showed up one day, we didn't even notice him for the longest time, but he was cool and now we hang out all the time"?

That knowledge was for a long time a bit of a holy grail lost to me. Seemingly undiscoverable. For the longest time I assumed Pink Floyd were a band I simply heard on the radio one day playing some song. Like maybe I heard Money or Another Brick in the Wall Pt 2 and that was that. An unremarkable event, but one my brain sort of somewhat barely registered; and over time, I imagined, I gradually heard increasingly more music by them; until one day, things suddenly came into full focus and The Dark Side of the Moon became an album that I consider to be the master reference upon which I compare and judge all other albums, amongst many other things.

In other words, I originally believed that I developed a strong affinity for this album through an uninteresting series of events. A highly dissatisfying origin story given the magnitude the album has had on the many journeys it accompanied me as I sought out musical and other auditory discoveries; as well as endless roadtrips across the barren landscape of the desert southwest as it sat virtually shot gun in the passenger seat.

But over the course of several years I discovered that my journey towards The Dark Side of the Moon was not simple at all. In actuality it was entirely convoluted. Amazing? Probably not. At least not for others. But more interesting than I originally suspected.

To reinvestigate your own history through your own memories is to tempt yourself into a labyrinth of madnesses as you try to decipher fact from various levels of bullshit you created as substitutes for fact. This is such because a lifetime of memories will leave most of us with only an abundance of incomplete fragmented mental notes stapled randomly throughout our cranial grey matters; leaving them amongst rising levels of dead brain cell dust until we may just happen to unknowingly totter into the often abandoned neurological hallways in which they hang.

Should we be so lucky. Sometimes the house yields itself to such disrepair that it is condemned; left to collapse in a forgotten heap, never to be lived in again.

Frustratingly, these mental notes often lack clarity or detail. The process of aging leaves them covered in worn patinas. They may be only a vague image. Or only a vague suggestion of an image. They may only be a recollection of a scent. Or perhaps an intuition or suspicion. They are the cellular artifacts of prior moments in time. They decay at different rates. They may lose their allure as other notes begin to take higher importance. Some you wish you knew more. Others you would rather forget. These recollections may appear to be hung chronologically, until closer investigation reveals they were simply hung in a haphazard manner and placed amongst others in which they had no actual relation. Who knows why you did this? You may never learn why. You will speculate until your end of days why these were left in such a state; puzzling if there is some deeper meaning you may have overlooked. They all paint a picture, but that picture may be one of delusion, or incomprehensibility, or simply incomplete; the organic equivalent of an incorrectly digitally spell checked word.

At times these incomplete jagged memories encourage sleights of hands that are suggestive of more interesting collections of would be facts about our lives. Those sleights of hands may transform into outright lies given the traumas we undergo and the dramas we create. They may be used to garner attention and spin mind grabbing tales at parties or gatherings. Or used as though they were cudgels in arguments with loved ones or defined enemies. Other times our transgressions are as innocent as a small innocent child pulling petals off of a pretty flower as we incorrectly dissemble and reassemble events based on our own limited recollections; In doing such we create an entire history that did not occur despite us being overwhelmingly emotionally attached to an idea so strongly that we simply convinced ourselves that it must be so and refuse to be talked into otherwise no matter how many irrefutable facts are presented to us.

My memories and my journey towards Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, as with much of my journey through life, meanders in a nonlinear manner. That it is to say, it took several starts with frequent gaps before the relationship was acknowledged. Even through the current day this relationship continues to evolve, albeit perhaps a bit more slowly. TDSOTM has proven to be a good friend; one that you didn't know you needed until you realized that one day it had become a reliable companion on the some of the many journeys you undergo throughout life.

I did not hear the Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety until I was well into my teen years. My parents were not really into Pink Floyd and I rarely heard them on the radio. I heard many other fine albums prior to my teens, but The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety was not one of them.

True, I had heard the single Money countless times over those years. It was played often enough on FM radio that I had become familiar with it. I confess, I thought it was only an ok song. Just ok. I don’t recall the first time I heard it. I was young, money problems were adult problems. What did I know? It had a catchy, I guess you could say memorable, beat. Apparently it is in an atypical time signature for rock music and that makes it neat.

I had also had heard Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2 played many more times. My local community DJs seemed to prefer it. Internally I called it the "We Don't Need No Education!" song until I learned its correct name. I personally disagreed with the sentiment as I loved learning and couldn't imagine not going to school. I found it somewhat humorous. Imagine a bunch of kids collectively rising up and proclaiming to the teachers, parents and all of known humanity "No more! We shan't be educated no more!" I thought it an ok song. I felt it wasn't as good as Boston's More Than a Feeling or ELOs Turn to Stone or the Cars Just What I Needed, etc.

I do not recall hearing Wish You Were Here during those years. I find it a bit odd, given its longevity and popularity. That doesn't mean it wasn't played. But if it was, it did not register with me.

The singles that they released and that I heard, had less impact on me than the albums they released. Prior to my exposure to the Dark Side of the Moon, I had not really considered the concept that the songs on any album could be interconnected. It was the band's intentional use of the album format to address complex themes that I found most interesting. It was a novel idea to me and I enjoyed contemplating those themes and what they may imply. I also found it an impressive task to attempt capture and retain the listener's attention along that journey. Over the years, I came to really appreciate the impossibility of that task, but highly commend those who give it their everything to provide such comprehensive bodies of works. Pink Floyd's albums made me a convert to preferring the album format over all other formats.

I find it amazing when a body of work transcends the boundaries of song and becomes ambitious. Observing a song successfully commingling amongst other songs provisions a different level liveliness and relevance to all of the songs that have joined the accompaniment. Watching an attempt to orchestrate them in such a manner that they work together to provision higher level of relatable and fascinating concepts is inspiring. My opinion of Money changed after I heard the entirety of the The Dark Side of the Moon. Then, within context of other songs, it suddenly found its place along the critical path of assisting the listener through a journey of the themes and weighty issues that weigh us all down as we march across the horizon following the sun.

Once I began listening to this album in its entirety as a cohesive body of work, a relationship between me and the album evolved and it left me forever comparing it with all other albums. It became the reference upon which all others were measured for success. The mountain on my horizon that I use to orient myself along the journey.

When I say ”reference” I am not talking about how great one album is relative to another album in the form of best of lists or rankings. These don't interest me. Rather, a reference album for me is one that is an empirical example of how one succeeds in creating an album length body of work that cohesively retains the audience’s attention throughout its entire performance with minimal unintentional extraneous interference disrupting the body of work.

I suspect most people have reference material stored away in their mental lockers. It need not be an album. It could be any memory that one anchors to and references back to again and again as life evolves. I find for many people I know, there are specific relationships that mark their journeys much in the same manner that mine are often marked by audio.

The Dark Side of the Moon became a defining example for what I look for when I am analyzing how well an album achieves its goal to capture my attention for roughly 44 minutes. Do I check out immediately? Do I suddenly turn the dial so to speak as I think “Ugh, not today!” to myself? Do I wish for the album to be in digital or cassette format so that I may fast forward through the boring bits?

Or do I turn up the volume to hear it more clearly? Do I yell ”hush! If someone wanders into the room to tell me some banal piece of information about their day?” I have spent years pondering and repondering how the The Dark Side of The Moon captures my attention from beginning to end. I am familiar with its nooks and crannies. I am able to float through its drifting waters and permit it to draw me back into and out of awareness. And yet to this day it still surprises me. As such it makes sense that I measure the success each other album I encounter against this album. There are other albums I enjoy that I consider reference albums, but this one was the first. It created this impossible notion that I wish to endlessly listen to other albums that capture my attention. Such an experience with new ears would be deeply pleasurable to me.

Though I had only heard Money and Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2 on the radio up until my teens, neither were my first encounters with Pink Floyd.

In hindsight, over years, I came to rediscover that the memory associated with me listening to Pink Floyd for the first time is not as lost as is the memory of listening to The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety for the first time. The portions I can recall of that memory are quite clear. They were unknowingly left in an old hallway filled with forgotten notes and mental cobwebs amongst the memories of my earliest years on this speck of dust we call earth.

The short of it is that I first heard Pink Floyd watching television in 1974 and the first song I heard was On the Run and this occurred while watching some portion of their documentary labeled Live in Pompeii.

And then there is the much longer story.

Unfortunately these memories I have are also littered with unfillable holes and seemingly illogical gaps and generally defy credibility. It is a bit ironic in some ways that this is the case given the band and its history; the subject matters and themes they explored; as well as the identity of the band amongst all the hubris and baggage we acquire from overanalyzing music for understanding and comprehension. (Something I admittedly enjoy doing with reckless abandon).

My first memory of listening to Pink Floyd, in the end is not really about Pink Floyd or The Dark Side of the Moon or even music per se. It is a memory of youthful boldness, inquisitiveness and exploration and how that boldness and inquisitiveness encompasses everything; including auditory discoveries. That memory was hung in the hall that it was because at the moment of its inception the emphasis of my actions had nothing to do with music and had everything to do with being an explorer. A terrestrial cosmonaut of sorts.

But as I write this, that memory now hangs on an entirely different wall and is, in a manner of speaking, viewed from a different perspective in my time continuum. The more I revisit this memory as time passes, the more I now question if what I really heard, when I was exposed to Pink Floyd’s On the Run for the first time, was an echo traveling across time connecting these moments. Echoes that I would hear repeated at different, lengthening intervals as I also travelled through time.

It took me decades to correctly place and understand the experience I had with Pink Floyd when I was four with the experiences that referenced Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon that I had later in life as a teen and again as an adult. None of them are traumatic experiences. They vary in detail, but are most often introspective in nature.

But with each listen, and each exposure, as time went by I kept having this nagging sensation that there was something about the Dark Side of the Moon that was familiar but misplaced. I could never quite put it into context. And it nagged at me.

As I got older I eventually realized that some memories overlap others; yet their relationship remains invisible or hidden from you until a later point in time brings them together. It can take forever to see the patterns your memories created within you. Disturbingly, this awareness of our lack of awareness brings with it a mild sense of rightful paranoia at our obvious obliviousness to those things we never actually see but suspect exist just beyond our view.

But wait… at first there is no Pink!

My first encounter with Pink Floyd occurs at the age four. At that age I know what music is. I have actively listened to music for comprehension. I also know by that point in time that I also enjoy listening to music. It gives me pleasure.

I am also at the age in which I begin to exhibit small bits of an adventurous spirit. This adventurous spirit is benevolent. That spirit is guided only by a need to learn and learning could be had by doing things like digging for worms in the soil in the back yard. I am a much more localized explorer who is restricted to the house and yard of my childhood. I do not have to behave like Robinson Caruso out in the world. I am not like Shackleton trying to tame the seemingly impossible. I don't disappear for days on end like Huck Finn or come back “whenever” like Lewis or Clark.

As a young child, I do simple predictable boy things. I may be running around in the front yard like a maniac and suddenly have a desire to see what is the back yard and then run directly to that destination. I may flip over a big rock to see what insects are underneath it. Sow bugs are a particular favorite. We also called them rolly pollys. I may also pretend I am a cowboy on a horse and trot around the yard looking for bad guys.

I did all the harmless stuff kids should do at that age.

One morning I woke up early. We will define early as “before anyone else had woken up yet”. I recall a subdued type of light that comes into the window in the early morning when the sun is not yet high on the horizon. I wasn’t cold, but I don’t know that it was spring or summer. I was wearing one of those one piece sleepers that also covered your feet. I would have comfortable across all but the hottest of months in that thing.

For reasons unknown, I pondered how interesting it was that I was the only one in the house that was awake. I apparently had no prior recollection of me waking up earlier than both parents. That isn’t to say that had never happened before. I was a kid. I am sure that happened. Kids, once they can walk, will often crawl out of bed on their own accord and go wandering around even if every one else is asleep. At least my kids did. I assume I was no different.

Regardless, I do not recall those instances and yet at this time I was conscious of that I was the only one within the household that was awake and this thought was consumed my attention. I found it fascinating. I was suddenly very self aware of the novel feeling I had about being awake when everyone else was asleep. There was a weird thrill about this. An odd notion of solitude intermixed with a feeling of deep freedom. This circumstance excited me. Very much.

The question came to mind; "What should I do?"

This question lacked any pretense or nefariousness on my behalf. I didn't intend to, say, go fetch the matches and make fire. I wasn't looking to get into trouble. But for certain I wanted to do something "all by myself". I have no idea why that was suddenly an important qualifier. But it was the thought that came into my head. Perhaps it is biological? Perhaps when we reach a certain age we are self prompted to seek out independence, regardless how ill advised that may be. Perhaps genetics drove me to it? It is possible my ancestors have always been prone to an odd degree of periodical nomadic wanderlust and ask of themselves "ought I not wander a bit?"; and perhaps it begins with small little independent journeys away from figurative family fire pit that we call home at the time.

I can say with full confidence that I was not compelled to behave in such a manner for any spiritually related reasons. I was not commanded by a God or other spiritual entity to go forth and quest. Nor am I saying “A presence previously unknown to me swept through me in an unspoken suggestiveness that I should go forth and so forth.”

No, this thought to do something all by myself was entirely in my own head and of my own accord. And my actions were of my own doing and with intent. I say this with full understanding that I do not understand why the thought originated in my head.

I did have a definitive notion that whatever it was that I was going to do had to be done inside the house. Going outside without telling mommy would get me in trouble. And telling her would ruin the plan to "do something all by myself." Besides, I was already being quite bold and there was something a little bit scary about making this bold step all on my own. I think in my own little way I was trying to behave responsibly. Be bold, be responsible!

Who knows?

For sure I wasn't going to play with toys. That wasn't novel. I could do that all day long. Boring! And really, when we get right down to it, playing with toys was the only thing I was actively encouraged by others to do on my own; as in "why don't you go play with your toys?"

In that moment I understood that it needed to be something I had never done before "all by myself". But I also understood I was incapable of doing almost anything. I couldn’t, for example, fix myself breakfast. I couldn’t even get a glass of water because I was too short. I could climb on top of the counter, but that could get me into trouble if I got caught. I wasn’t looking for trouble, I just desired autonomy and independence.

My list was looking pretty bleak.

The only thing I could think of doing was to go turn on the television.

Yeah, that sounded like a great like a great idea.

Back in the day one could only watch video through a big old box we called a television. TV for short.

Prior to this moment I had never intentionally self determined to turn on the television. I understood how the tv functioned. I learned this by accident when I realized that pushing and pulling a certain knob would turn the tv off and on and that constantly turning a dial would eventually get you a moving picture. I understood that randomly doing this to the tv was called "messing around" as I was told to "stop messing around with the tv" whenever I did such.

Televisions back in the 70s were analogue in nature. Cable TV was slowly starting to become a thing but fewer people had access to it. Most of us, even if we had cable, would watch television that arrived at your house through the airwaves.

I lived in rural community in western Colorado. Early in my life, we used antennas that stuck out of the back of the box to capture whatever signals were in flight in our area. We called those antennas “rabbit ears” and you moved them about until the picture came in clear. Or at least as clear as it was going to get.

In my community we would get two channels reliably. One was local CBS channel and the other was the PBS channel that broadcast out of Denver.

That was it. There was no other moving video whatsoever available unless you went to the movie theater. No phones, computers, tablets, game consoles, etc.

Every once in a while, depending on the time of day you could sort of get a third channel that came out of Denver. It had B level horror movies on it Saturday mornings. You had to ask yourself if you wanted to stare through the increased noise that obscured the video and audio you were attempting to observe or if you would rather go play with your toys.

People in the future will have no clue what any of this tv shit means. These are the dead experiences that prior peoples lived and the future people will puzzle at. For those of us who lived those times it was really important shit. You would maybe force your life around your favorite programs as absolutely nothing was available on demand.

Of the two channels, the one everyone called CBS or KREX or channel 5, was the one I liked least. My four year old self thought that channel was boring. There was news on it. Too much news. As far as I felt, any news was too much news. I felt that were I in charge there would be no news. It also had Soap Operas during the day. Those were the worst. A bunch of adults talking to each other about boring things. They never did anything. Except kiss. And that was gross. They ust talked and talked and talked. And kissed. And in the evening there were more boring adult shows. Though sometimes these were less boring. Baa Baa Black Sheep, for example. It had World War II planes flying about which interesting to me. It was cool to watch when they weren’t talking. Which was still a lot.

I also wanted to watch Gun Smoke because it had cowboys and I was way into cowboys and being a cowboy. But mommy said that it wasn't something a kid should watch and that it was too late to watch anyways and that I needed to go to bed. It was a real bummer to me that they couldn’t play that show earlier. I was mad about that.

Fortunately, we had that other channel. PBS. A channel that taught children to be decent to one another.

And it was the best channel by a mile as far as I was concerned. Why? Because it had Mister Rogers on it. I loved Mister Rogers. He was nice and kind. He was fun guy who talked about cool stuff and did fun things. He told little stories and fed fish. And talked to Mr. McFeely.

The idea that I should go turn on the tv to see if Mister Roger’s was on began to appeal greatly to me.

My idea was that, best case scenario, I would go turn on the television and sit down and watch Mister Rogers. I had no idea if i Mister Rogers would be on. Often it wasn't, But maybe it was.

And if Mister Rogers wasn't on, then maybe I could watch a number of other great shows that came on instead. Things like Sesame Street, the Electric Company and Zoom. Or The Wonderful World of Disney, which was not a channel, but a single show that could be either a movie or a documentary or some other kid oriented episode and commonly watched early Sunday evenings in my neck of the woods.

There was only one bad show on that channel. That one was The Lawrence Welk Show which had old people singing and talking about old people things. They also dressed like old people and they danced like old people. I found it boring.

So with this level of enthusiasm, I got up out of bed and walked out of my room and meandered over to the television and turned it on. Hoping to see Mister Rogers and hopefully not Lawrence Welk.

Wait a minute; this one‘s Pink!

But alas, there is no Mister Rogers in this experience.

My memory and my adult understanding of 1970's era network programming, suggest such anyways.

The earliest image I recall seeing on the television was of a video of some gentlemen with long hair sitting around a table. Some had a mustache or beard. Others did not. I understood their words, but they spoke with an interesting accent. They enjoyed smoking cigarettes. Mommy said these were nasty and that I should not play with them in the sand in the ashtrays that were found everywhere back in those days. Nor should I smoke because it was an overall disgusting habit.

But these funny men didn't seem to mind. Sometimes they were saying some funny stuff about food. Which seemed to make a little bit of sense to me as they all seemed quite skinny and probably were hungry all the time. Other times they were talking about making music using tools and trying to get whatever was in their head out via the machines to make music. This was fascinating to me as I had never heard anyone say such a thing. We only used words to say things in my family.

And interspersed here and there there was one of the guys with long hair messing about with some kind of machine and getting really neat sounds out of it.

Years later I would understand the man was playing a synthesizer and developing his portion of the song named On the Run. But in that moment I can only recall thinking that playing with that machine sure looked fun. He basically turned little dials on the machine which in turn made really weird cool sounds that I had never heard before. According to what the men said when they were talking he was doing this on purpose to get the sounds that were in his head out into the world. I found this to also be amusing and fascinating.

I was not watching Mister Rogers; but rather I was watching Roger Waters.

I was unknowingly watching a portion Pink Floyd's Live at Pompeii documentary.

I would not know that this was my first encounter with Pink Floyd for a couple of decades.

As the years went by I would occasionally recollect this experience in which I got up and, for the first time, intentionally turned on the television to hopefully watch some Mister Rogers. For years that was what this memory was mostly about to me``. The memory always included the men with long hair talking about music and food and it always included one of them playing around with a machine to make sounds that turned into music. Oddly, I could never precisely recall the sound, I could only vaguely remember in a nearly indescribable manner. Had I known the word "oscillation" I would have likely hung that sound on that peg. But as it was, I didn’t and I also could not recreate the sound identically in my head, my memory's short hand abbreviation recalls it roughly as:

"doodledoodledoodledoodllewakkawakkawakkarooooar"

The gears that would eventually bring everything together began to turn only after seeing Live at Pompeii in its entirety whilst in college. It was a glacially slow process that ran over the course of many years; nonetheless slowly bridging the distance between the two states and bringing them closer together.

By time I was in college I had fully embraced the albums that were The Dark Side of the Moon; Wish You Were Here; and the Wall. The latter mostly because I had several friends who were simply more attached to that album and through them I learned to better appreciate what I had heard. It has a certain theatrical flair that the others lack as well as a full film full of Gerald Scarfe animation and a pre live aid Bob Geldoff. Their other albums were fine, but I did not really explore much outside of those three choosing to invest my time and money into expanding my knowledge of other bands and other albums. Of Pink Floyd’s catalogue, those three seemed sufficient for my needs at the time.

But now you are in your old run down cinder block apartment that you live in with Trav way back in the day. We would house a merry band of mutually minded freaks most weekends and it was great. On this evening we rented Live at Pompeii in VHS format to have something to do. Why wouldn't we? We were a bunch of kids with long hair and we lived a quasi intellectual lifestyle in that moment. We were intrigued and curious about things and loved to experience them ourselves. We were mighty fun people. Sometimes a bit obnoxious, but with no ill intent.

This memory is simple. It is that of a core group of college aged kids that I consider quite close to me and quite instrumental to my growth as a person. In all manners it was a nice memory without any drama. Just a good time. It was beautiful.

When we got to the portion where Roger Waters was twiddling knobs on the Synthi AKS synthesizer, I had an "Oh, I have seen this before" epiphany. I noted it, but nothing else. I gave it no other thought. It was a bit startling in a very slight way, but I could not place any additional context to it and I was way into enjoying the moment more than I was in disrupting it through hyper analyzing my own headspace. I dismissed the moment as some form of deja vu' and carried on. I felt that maybe I had seen this footage before but felt it was an otherwise irrelevant and meaningless incident.

For certain I did not associate it with my exploratory television adventure that I had when I was 4.

Why wouldn't I? Was I feeble minded? Why could I not tie the two experiences together? Same band. Same video footage. I was older. I was more familiar with the band. I loved the Dark Side of the Moon. So I claimed. I would occasionally recollect my memory of my bold four year old behavior in watching television "all by myself "and the strange man who twiddled knobs to get interesting sounds out of his head. But never had I connected the sound I heard that day to the sound that lay before me in VHS format. And I am embarrassed to say that I did not do so that day. Feeble minded I may be.

But these two memories remained two distinct islands separated by a sea of cranial fluid between which no ship connected. Who knows why? Likely it was as simple as this: I was living life and I was in the moment. Maybe "why" is not relevant. Perhaps I was quite high at the time? Regardless, the re-exposure to this artifact did not serve as a catalyst for me to rediscover that I had been unknowingly aware of at least some small context to the Dark Side of the Moon for quite some time far longer than my initial suspicions. It remained more firmly as a deja vu.

But that deja vu would keep knocking on the ancient memory of the four year old until, eventually, the adult version of that four year old would discover that moment from a different perspective and realize that he had seen On the Run in visual form long before that college moment. It was mostly a matter of adventuring into the right context as it collided with the right moment in time.

I just needed the right environment and the right circumstances to exist.

Much as I prefer the veracity of this memory that I watched Pink Floyd in a brash instance of willful independence hoping to see Mister Rogers; as much as I insist this memory is not only true but also a critical moment in which the trajectory of my continued existence veers into a certain direction of musical adventure; as much as I insist this memory is canonical to my experiences as a human being- I do often question it validity.

The memory, though very clear in some regards, is very unclear in others, making it hard to cross validate using other means. The boundaries of the memory are quite concrete in form. It begins and ends abruptly without transitions. While I can easily recall seeing the faces of the people who were Nick Mason, David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Roger Waters with fair clarity and I best remember watching Roger Waters getting the sounds that contributed to the song On the Run, I lack any other visual memory from that moment.

That is to say this memory begins and ends within those moments. There is no recollection of any lead-in there is no clear remembrance of an outro.

I don't recall other details. For example, I recall no detail regarding turning the television on. I have a vague recollection of standing before the television. I was quite small it seemed quite large. And I did something, I think with my arms. But that something isn’t precise. It was in the direction of gestures one would make to turn on a television. But I do not precisely recall turning the television on. I also do not recall the design of the television. Or what the on/off knob looked like. Nor the color of the dial that turned the channels. Nor the font of the numbers. I also do not recall the first image I saw immediately after the television came on. It could have been precisely the images I have already shared. But it could have been others. I do not know these things.

My memory also has suggestive visuals that I know are logically incorrect. I consider much of my memory visuals as being suggestive abstractions. That is, they are just enough to get by. As though my brain were too small to retain every detail. Or more likely, too lazy to consider mindless details that serves limited purpose.

For example, this memory places the television in the incorrect room of the house. In my memory the wall along which the television appears was found was in my sister's bedroom which was in the furthest back corner of the house. I recall debating in my head whether this was unfair to me as any intruder that entered the house to kill us, would start with me first as my room was the first the murderous intruder would encounter.

The notion that the television was in my sister's room is almost certainly nonsense. Our house had only a single television. This memory is of a time that predates when houses average more than one screen per person. Back in the days in which this memory was embedded into my brain cells, televisions were considered a luxury of sorts. Particularly in rural America at that time. Most houses in those days only had a single television and they were almost always found in the family room of the house. Where the family would watch the singular together as a family. So the myth was told. There is almost zero chance there was a television in my sister's room. Who knows why this memory is recorded as such? It raises the eyebrows so to speak.

A reasonable explanation could be that this misremembrance is an honest and irrelevant omission in my brain's archival process during those years. Why would I need to accurately note the precise location of the tv for this memory? What purpose would it serve? The memory isn’t about the location of the tv, but my desire to act autonomously. The tv, the only one we had, was wherever it was. My memory wants to suggest my sister's bedroom, but perhaps I first checked her room to see if she was asleep; after checking my parents room to see if they were asleep; and then after confirming that, yes, everyone was asleep, only then did I go to the tv and turn it on. In other words, an irrelevant misrememberance. Or better yet, a concatenation of lesser important information that has little relevance to the memories that are the story in my life.

We can't expect too much from the mind of a four year old. He was trying to remember things to be sure. But he also was required to understand how to use those things he remembered. Doing all of this without an instruction manual, so to speak, meant a lot of trial and error was to be had. Let us grant this child his youthful ignorance as he was attempting to get along with life so to speak. Had he known this moment was to be reencountered multiple times throughout his life, I am sure he would have noted a few more details. As it was, he was focused only on completing the task at hand which was “watch tv”. Nothing else. He wasn't getting up to watch Pink Floyd.

Perhaps, rather than focusing on the memory of the 4 year old, we turn our attention towards the archival footage itself. Afterall, the assertion is that a preschooler got up, and watched Live at Pompeii. Rather than further interrogating the young lad, let us us instead review the precise portions of the documentary itself and reexamine that which we are most confident we experienced at the age of 4. We shall search for clues there.

At 12:44 into the film, immediately after the scene that shows Pink Floyd playing Echoes, Part 1 , we see the camera pan across each member of Pink Floyd as they sit in front of a table eating a meal and saying funny things. They joke about milk. At 13:08 we see Roger Waters playing a synthesizer. He is closing in on the approximate sound to the Dr. Who theme song. At 13:40 we go back to the lads eating at the table and saying funny things. Often about food. At 14:08 we are back to Roger messing with the synthesizer and slowly moving the sound towards a new direction. At 14:22 we transition the image to the amphitheater in Pompeii with a voice over from David Gilmour and the video quickly transitions to a close up of David Gilmour as he speaks. He is talking about how they need equipment to make music. But he also says that the equipment will not take over their music. He says it's not the tools but the people that makes the music happen. At 14:40-ish we then move to a close up of Roger talking about much the same thing as the image transitions to the other footage of Roger who is now futzing with what is apparently a Synthi AKS. He is now modifying the sound further and it begins to take on a new tone and shape. By 14:55 we are back to a close up of Gilmour and he is talking more about getting the songs out of their heads and into the world using the equipment. Once again the picture fades back to the amphitheater in Pompeii. At 15:15 we see Roger back at the Synthi AKS asking the sound engineer if he can record this section. You hear him record a single note into the Synthi AKS. AT 16:14 Gilmour philosophizes about what people would create were they just given equipment with no explanation as to how use it. He says "They just get on with it and create something." At 16:28 Roger Waters philosophizes about how a Les Paul will not make you Eric Clapton. As he says this the sound that we will come to know as the core piece behind the instrumental On the Run which appears on the Dark Side of the Moon (side A, song 3) comes to our attention. The screen flips back to the amphitheater in Pompeii and Roger indicates that just giving someone the same synthesizer they use won't make them Pink Floyd. By 16:43 we are back to seeing Roger dialing in the sounds that we now hear as On the Run. By 17:00 we are panning away from Roger and across the studio he sits in as we continue to listen to On the Run. The sound builds and escalates until 18:11 where we cut back to Pompeii and a long shot of Mount Vesuvius which created all that damage and buried Pompeii and its people way back in 79 AD.

It is precisely this last bit, the one that runs onwards from 16:43 up until 18:11 that created an odd type of explorer within me, one that would go to the furthest reaches of sound just to simply experience something auditory from a new perspective. As I aged, the memory became less and less about my bold behavior and guys joking about food and it became more about why I felt I enjoyed discovering really interesting sounds and new possibilities. While I could never really recall the audio I thought I heard in the memory, I do loosely peg this notion of music being a philosophical marriage between intent and discovery to this moment.

Were we more bawdy we would say it were a fertilization of sorts! Nay an insemination!

Yet, so many questions remain unanswered. For example, was the image of the men around the table the first images I saw when I first turned on the television? The scene prior to the piece that leads to On the Run is a performance of Echoes, Part 1. I have no recollection whatsoever that I saw that portion of the video.

That could be entirely coincidental. Something had to be on. What was on was simply as previously describe above.

But why was any of this playing on an American television channel? We had only two channels and we were in a rural cowboy community more known for being fond of artists such as Hank Williams (the original) and Patsy Cline (the one and only). The Live In Pompeii theatrical release in the US occurred in April, 1974, the same year that I saw it. Why on earth would it be on the airwaves in my countrified rural town? And on what channel? PBS? or CBS? Give me a break. That does not seem likely. Perhaps it was a movie trailer or a review of some form on the CBS morning news?

And if true, why this portion? Even if we agree that something had to be on when I turned on the tv, the memory abruptly discontinues after On the Run. This portion is neither the beginning nor the end of the documentary. It is inwards towards the beginning middle right after Echoes, Part 1. Perhaps it was playing on one channel and while I found it interesting initially, I soon realized it would never turn into Mister Roger’s, became alarmed I was missing Mister Rogers, and I changed the channel in a panic once On the Run completed and I became bored of the content?

Perhaps. The notes no longer seem to exist in the known hallways of the memories that could answer those questions. I have resigned myself to acceptance that I will likely never really know the answers to these questions. Who knows? Life evolves. Regardless, today they are unavailable to me if they exist at all.

All this to say that the portion of me that thinks critically, a huge persona living within my mind, is quite suspicious of the validity of any of this and severely questions the reliability of this moment.

I think the suspicion is warranted.

But that does not negate it. It does nothing to bring it down to a non zero chance of being entirely true, if somewhat blurry at times.

The only other memory I have loosely attached to this memory is that of also hearing and watching the theme to Big Blue Marble. Big Blue Marble was a kid's television show. I have no prior recollection about it other than this single instance. The Big Blue Marble was a reference to planet earth. It was a topical reference as humans had only recently begun flying out to space. People were in awe of the first images of the earth that were relayed to us from out in space. The images made us appear so small and insignificant. For many it served as a wake up call that we ought to better take care of the earth. That we ought to preserve it as it was relatively clear from out in space that our tiny little planet was quite rare in the larger expanses of the universe. The idea behind the show was that kids are kids and kids are all around the earth doing stuff, and we are more alike than different and isn't it a small world? Let's be a community of humans regardless of where we live and who are. It isn't by accident that our largest most successful environmental policies were created during these years. Things like the The Clean Water Act, The Clean Air Act, The Environmental Protection Act, were all bipartisan creations signed under the Republican Nixon administration. Oh how the times have changed.

The theme song was memorable in my head because it was both interesting and a bit disturbing. Haunted even. Unintentionally dark. The theme was interesting because kids sang it. It was disturbing because the kids singing it seemed some how very far away and remote from one another and from me. It made me feel a bit lonely for them and for me. It was man introduction to the emotion of melancholia. I just didn't know it at the time. The only visual I recall after the theme was of some kid walking along a train track all by himself which seemed to be a great idea for a fun time. Then the memory abruptly ends. Who knows why?

A possibility is that I watched this immediately after watching and listening to On the Run. I either changed the channel or the programming segued into this program. I could see my four year old self getting bored by the Careful With That Axe, Eugene segment that followed the On the Run segment of the documentary. Or perhaps a small theatrical trailer of sorts played immediately prior to the time for regularly scheduled programming of Big Blue Marble to occur? That seems less likely given that one was an adult oriented program and the other one was for small children. Then again, it was quite early in the morning and programming could shift suddenly from adult oriented content to child content depending on the precise time of day.

Is this memory a potentially invalid or unreliable memory?

I doubt I will ever really know.

Regardless, I don't I remember seeing the Echoes, Part 1 portion of that documentary that morning. Certainly if On the Run blew my mind, then Echoes, Part 1 would have destroyed it.

There is a romantic part of me that suggests this to myself.

Oh, to be sure you saw it. You were four. You couldn't handle Echoes, Part 1 at that age. No way. It would have driven you into madness at that young age. You would have fallen into its black hole. In fact, perhaps that is exactly what occurred. You went into its void and felt complete bliss. You travelled far away on the waves of sound and then, inexplicably, as Echoes, Part 1 came to a close and you found yourself returned to earth watching some guys with long hair, talking about food and then twiddling dials to get really really cool sounds. Your brain simply wasn't ready for more. A primordial sort of protection mechanism went into play until you were ready to handle it at a later age.

Nonetheless, I insist on the memories I can recall. The recollections are vivid. While there are gaps or questions, what is there is logical and coherent. Perhaps it has trivial innaccuracies. Inaccuracies easily explained by how a four year old does (and doesn't) think. Perhaps I am inadvertently truncating my experience due to a a lack of experience?

One could say that the essence of my being is adamant that I have the basic facts correct even if we cannot fill in all of the adjacent detail. I think this is for the best. If such memories as these are not accurate, do we really have any accurate recollections of our pasts at all?

Would any memory pass every litmus test we could create?

I often wonder how many of the people who enjoy Pink Floyd enjoy some form philosophical existentialism. I sure do. Some loathe doing such to be sure. Regardless, it seems that The Dark Side of the Moon is such that it causes some of us people to think. It is an album that invites contemplation.

I have been a lifelong unintentional philosopher. Of sorts. Of sorts. I have been a student philosopher prior to discovering the word philosopher.

I remember a moment in time when I was under the age of four wearing a blue windbreaker. I was sitting at the bottom of the slide in our little house in western Colorado. I was playing with fake playdough. Which was really just flour plus water plus a shit load of salt so you wouldn’t eat it after you got your filthy grubby dirty hands all over it. It was what you used when you didn’t have the real thing- real playdough. Fake play dough was the worst. Because it was nothing like real play dough. For one that weirdly pleasant ambrosial scent of real playdough was entirely absent in fake play dough. Secondly, even its most fresh state, fake play dough was never pliable in the way of real playdough. Worst yet, it dried out rapidly and became unusably crumbly.

Still, better than nothing.

The memory of the birth of my philosophical tendencies is succinct and quite existential. I was randomly looking at my hands and wondering with awe at their presence. I sat there pondering this and the word ”exist” popped into my brain. I surmised it was some extention of the word “be”. I didn’t think “to be”, just “be”, as in my hands, ”are”. They are. They be. They exist.

The immediate thought afterwards arrived as an extension to the first and it was “I exist”. I found this fascinating. I still do. I exist. I am. I simultaneously both understood what that meant and also how vague that notion was. What did it really mean to understand that one existed?I found this fascinating. It seemed like rather good thing.

This is not to suggest I fathomed myself at the time, or any subsequent time, some microcosmic version of Plato. It is only to say that this was the first moment I directly reflected on my being cognizant of my being.

There I sat fasciated with this new mystery. So much so that I said such out loud. “I exist.” I said it with confident enthusiasm. And then I got up and started running toward the back door to go into the house exclaiming such a few more times as I trotted along. I exist. I exist. I exist. A late stage early aged Wordsworth. Once inside I resumed life as one would. I ate a baloney and ketchup sandwich on white bread. A totally unexplainably disgusting combination of refrigerator cold bologna with ice cold ketchup and lots of nasty ickiness. Prior to my self awareness of my own existence, I apparently had a fondness for this food combination. Something about my existentialist experience, however, changed this perspective and I suddenly felt the food appalling. Disgusting. And after a moment, I decided ”I was full... or at least would rather be hungry" than eat this meal. The approximation of the thought in my head at that moment was one who exists does not eat such as this. I never ate cold bologna and ketchup on white bread again.

Ever since that moment I have questioned everything. Veraciously. What is truth? What is not true? What compels a person to behave as they do? Why do we believe what we believe? What happens when people behave irrationally? Why....

The Dark Side of the Moon, regardless of the vagaries of my memory, was my introduction to music as means in which one an explore philosophical ideas. What could be better? What could be more fun? The Lyrics and structures lent themselves towards an easy and pleasant entry into to a contemplative, metaphysical and at times deeply meditative state of mind where I could ponder the greater commonalities we share as we experience what we reference as life and all of its common challenges. Here was an album as a body of work that invited contemplation. The songs actively ponder the basic universal connections that both bring us together as well as they tear part.

Many people loathe such pondering. I am unashamedly otherwise.

Regardless of not understanding when I first listened to the Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety for the first time, I do understand quite well how I came to love that album: It was entirely through the act of frequently driving alone through the Southwest American desert during the darkest hours of night from the mid to late eighties.

There was nothing more spectacular in my mind than doing this. Doing so in these modern times would not yield the same experience. Our world has moved into the digital age and nothing is the same. We now have different experiences. The physical boundaries that separate each of us evaporated. The psychological boundaries that separated us grew exponentially. Current technology no longer permits us to be invisible or anonymous. Those days are gone, probably forever. I am forever grateful to have experienced something so profound as solitude. The personal feeling you can only have when absolutely no one is around you for as far as the eye can see. No person knowing precisely or even generally where you were at that given time. You could be anywhere. You were not an algorithm in those times. And you didn't generate data as you lived your day to day. You were pure analogue human in those days.

The feeling of solitude is acute. You either love this feeling. Or you hate this feeling. I love the feeling.

There you were. A solitary person standing in the middle of a two lane road in the middle of the desert in the deepest reaches of the night. Your car sits idle, directly behind you. The headlights out. There is no moon. Just you and a view of the Milky Way that was not blighted with space junk. The deepest expanses of the universe lie before you and you fear not a thing. Everything is possible.

It was a fantastic experience.

The Dark Side of the Moon was my most preferred soundtrack due to and because of this experience.

The Dark Side of the Moon remained invisible to me until I started driving a car. I obtained my license the day I turned 16. It was the earliest I could obtain my license. I was driving around our beige-inside-and-outside-manual-drive-train-4-cylinde -off-brand-economy-sedan down any road I could find as soon as I got that license.

Shortly afterwards I also obtained a copy of The Dark Side of the Moon from my friend Bunker. I can't confess to knowing the exact moment I started listening to it in its entirety. It was likely just spinning along in its entirety, often in the back ground, as I drove myself and my friends around with this new found freedom and I slowly, over time, became overly familiar with it.

Eventually, over time, I realized I often reached for that tape. It was a tape in particular high rotation when I drove around at night. One can listen to it during the day, but it always becomes most alive to me at night, when I am behind the dashboard with an unobstructed view of whatever is illuminated before me and the shadows just beyond that providing only hints of what lay beyond those beams of light that point my way.

The experience was even more heightened when I was driving alone. Solitarily speeding down the road. I could be going anywhere. Or nowhere. It didn't matter. This feeling was particularly acute when I was driving alone at night along the rural corn fields that scented the arid environment in which I lived. The windows down. Total darkness absent the low powered incandescent bulbs lighting my journey onwards. The stereo blasting as I listened with young ears to the album evolve across the road that lay before me. I would often drive the long way home just to complete the album.

My first 24 years of life were spent in the deserts of the southwest. My home town is found in the deserts of western Colorado. I then pursued my undergraduate degree in the Sonoran desert. I confess, I never really wanted to leave that desert. Not permanently. But as is often the case in life, sometimes life’s path draws us elsewhere and commands we follow its path for reasons that are never entirely clear.

Regardless, I loved and still love the desert and many of my fondest memories still reside there. And it is always calling me back to it. And whenever it does, it will dot the feature wall in my head with momentary glimpses of the great times I had in the desert, including those many times I drove through the dark of night somewhere remote doing nothing more than listening to the Dark Side of the Moon.

There is something about the arid desert air in the darkest moments of night in particular that heightens my auditory sensations. This feeling occurs only in the dark of night. The darker the better. A new moon is best. It also must be in the desert. The hotter the better. Why, because the windows must be rolled down to best experience this feeling. I need the walls torn down between me and everything else as I hurtle my metal junkyard down the road at 55 miles per hour. Speed is not the goal.

I am seeking a momentary form of transcendence.

I may start out listening to FM radio. Before Satellite radio, we rode only the airwaves. At night the airwaves get super powers in the desert. It's as though the sun sets and they break out of their diurnal prisons and run amok across the desert. In my teens I would stay up late at night playing the tuner dial on my radio alarm clock looking for radio stations from far far away. If I was lucky, I could get reception as far away as California. It would never last long, just a half an hour or so before the earth rotated in such a manner that the air waves wandered off towards some other far off destination.

My favorite station to reel in was a station located San Bernardino California. If the timing was just right I could listen to about a half an hour of the Dr. Ruth show. A show about sex. Oooh. Ahhh. It was informative and entertaining. There was a summer in which I ardently listened to that show and dreamt of San Bernardino women.

But right now you are driving in northeastern Arizona in the dead of night. There is a nice crispness to the air as the elevation is higher here than it was in the city you originated in further south.

You are driving into the night in part because your vehicle, a small maroon pick-up truck with dual fuel tanks ,lacks air conditioning. If you leave in the darkness of night you stay much cooler. It could be 50 degrees cooler.

The vehicle has a stick shift and clutch and you can drive it 0ver 400 miles before it runs out gas.

No one knows where you are. This memory and many like it derive well before anyone used GPS maps in their cars. Maps were on paper.You had a road atlas for the entire western U.S. in my car that you often referenced while searching for the blue highways that would take you further off the beaten path.

But you didn't need a map for this drive. You didn't need them for these desert roads. You simply knew where you were going because you'd studied them for eons. You'd driven them numerous times. You had made this 589 mile one way trip so many times you could do it in the dark without anything but your innate sense of direction telling you which way to turn when. If you timed everything right and nothing weird happened you would leave just as dusk set in at your point of origin and arrive outside of Moab 9 hours later as the sun was rising.

During this entire time, no one I knew would know where I was. Sure, I told my friends I was headed to Colorado for a short indeterminant amount of time. A week probably. Two tops. Probably. I had just decided a couple days before to head out. As finals wrapped up and the temperature in the metro area was crossing the three digit threshold I was looking forward to a brief change of scenery.

Sure there would be other cars on the road that would pass you by over these many hours. You would also briefly interact with various cashiers of gas stations and convenience stores along the way and maybe the odd fast food (which was much rarer in these remote places back in the day). Hopefully no law enforcement. You rarely broke laws, and if you did it was only one at a time and only over the stupid laws that no one followed or hurt anyone. You were even loathe to speed.

At the time you felt in a hurry to get out of town. The most critical part of any road trip is getting onto the road. You always get a bit itchy when you are about to hit the road. It's like you are an athlete during pregame, running through everything one last time before you take the field. Keys? Check. Wallet? Check? Diet Coke? Check. Smokes? Check. Some kind of snack, probably with peanuts and sugar and chocolate? Well, you can get that when you get gas. The gas tank, both of them, must be completely full before you hit the road. You'll be a complete jittery mess when you arrive at your destination. There will be highs as well as moments of tedium. But it will overall be great, we just need to get out on that road.

Sometimes you would confound everyone by suddenly leaving quite a lot earlier than you had initially shared. You just had to get onto the road. But this one you timed just right and the was just starting to begin its set as you pulled from the gas station with your two full tanks of gas and peanut chocolate treat as well as an extra pack of smokes as well as a topped off mug of ice cold Diet Coke.

But now you are hours under way. You are way out here and are no longer in a hurry. You are on the road. You just need to sustain this nice steady pace. Place the car into cruise control. Ease back. Scan outwardly. It is dark. Not a car in site. Maybe the odd incandescent bulb from some small abode on the reservation. Perhaps the next small town is slightly lighting up the far horizon, but not much. Perhaps it is just you and your headlights and the amber glow of the 20th cigarette that helps keep you alert over this odd stretch of road as you keep an eye out for deer and other creatures that may dart out in front of you unexpectedly.

You are 20 and full of life and everything is hunky dory and you are as free as you will ever be. You have worries and cares. Some more worrying than others. But you don't let them get you down.

Why? Because you have time. You are young and life is long. You have time. You will never have more time than you have in that moment. It will forever wain as you march forever towards your sunset as though you are running to catch up with the sun.

Breathe it all in.

This knowledge would be melancholic if you were not living so deeply in the moment. You are not looking back on it so you have no nostalgia. You will later, but right now you are dialed all the way into this moment.

You "are".

And you are in the middle of nowhere. You stopped the vehicle in the middle of the god damn road. Stopped in the middle of the road somewhere outside of Kayenta heading towards Mexican Hat. There are no cars sharing the road with you at this time of night. No human lights of any kind in your view. Why pull over when there is no one visible for miles and miles? Just stop. ut the car in neutral and get out for a moment. Stretch the legs. Relieve yourself.

You look out into a world that, even in the dark of night, is entirely familiar to you.

You have a lit cigarette that is a nasty but vocal companion number one. Its orange ember glows in the air. It says a lot with few words. It keeps you awake all through the night. Never a dull moment.

Another companion is the refilled container of ice cold diet cola. Zero nutrition! Plenty of caffeine! It is comfortably, but not overly iced. You intend to do drive all through the dark of night fueled by only caffeine, nicotine and the odd sugar high you got from a bag of chocolate and peanut candy that you purchased at the last gas station. By sunrise you will be a jittery fucking mess. But you are young and you will feel oddly alive at the same time. You will have to pull over and get mildly high and rest a bit next to the Colorado River outside of Moab so as to finish your drive towards Grand Junction later that morning a bit more calmly. The calming waters of the Colorado gently flowing by as you ponder the uniquely red soil from your homelands. You'll put Seals and Crofts into the cassette deck and listen to Summer Breeze in the early morning summer breeze and you will think to yourself "This is the best feeling ever. The road is endless! Early summer is the best! One last summers of freedom! You will make the most of it."

And you did.

But that is later. Right now the ember glows in the dark as you take another meaningless drag. It is the beacon pointing the way forward to that moment and countless others.

You hop back into the car a drive onwards. You have dimmed the dash light so it is it is unobtrusive. Your two incandescent headlight bulbs reach far out into the night and down the long road.

Your third companion is the Dark Side of the Moon. It has been playing the entire time and boy do you love this album. It is great. It speaks your language. You enjoy its ambience. It not only keeps you awake and motivated, but it is also a fantastic conversationalist. It always teaches you something new. It knows how to speak to you and are able to best listen to it way out here in the middle of nowhere where no one knows where you are and are unable to find you should they desire to do such.

Breathe had just started playing as you pulled over. You are listening to it on a cassette. That is the only technology available to you in this vehicle that permits you to transport yourself wherever you want to be. In your head at least.

Earlier that week in preparation for your journey back to your homeland you had copied a friend's vinyl version of the album onto this cassette as the prior copy was needlessly stolen from your vehicle. You had limited time to do such and needed several hours of music for your journey so you did not have a chance to listen to any of the music before your departure. You had to copy a lot of music as all of the cassettes you owned were stolen from your truck the week before.

While copying the Dark Side of the Moon you somehow fucked up the job. You probably did not quite push the buttons on the cassette recorder down entirely. At least not initially. In doing so you somehow accidentally managed to overdub a portion of Eclipse over the top of On the Run for an amazing one time one off crazy good mash up between the two songs from the same album. Amazingly, this happened in such a manner that the transition was kept in time and the transition was seamless to perfection. The net effect was that On the Run transitioned into Eclipse which then after approximately one minute, give or take, transitioned back into On the Run.

It is at this moment that you first hear this crazy mash up.

Typically that would have pissed me off. Generally speaking I did not want what was effectively a mash up of two Pink Floyd songs blemishing what I considered a a seminal reference album. But the timely accident was of such a serendipitous nature that I tended to really scrutinize metaphysical nature of that unintentional error on my behalf as much as I analyzed the original body of work itself.

This was grand and beautiful mistake. It was entirely unexpected. It was unusual. It was unique. A series of accidents located on this particular cassette, in this specific car heading down this specific road at this specific time. A simple quirk in fate augmented it with a surprisingly precise overdub that introduced a unique perspective that had not been previously existent to anyone. It was as though I had accidentally created a wormhole bridging the two worlds of each song together, circumventing many other elements of time. Rather than blighting those other worlds from existence to make the journey shorter, I had simply burrowed through time. And then travelled back again.

It begs the question of how much of our lives are influenced and ruled by unintended consequences relative to the intentional decisions we make in the hopes of obtaining predictable outcomes. And how do we assess value to these possibilities in our chaotic timelines?

And right on cue On the Run would morph back into Time, just as it always had and the album would continue as faithfully as it ever would. And onwards into the night I travelled.

One of the sadder days of my life was losing that cassette when someone broke into my car a year later and stole yet another entire collection of tapes I travelled with as my travel companions. I still miss it to this day.

Every album I listen to is consciously or subconsciously referenced against Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. To say it is the reference album in my life is to state a truth. I am forever looking for albums that compel me to listen to them as deeply and repeatedly as I do when I listen to Dark Side of the Moon.

Really, it is entirely accidental that I see it as such. Some collision in time has made it such and it is what it is. Had it not been this album, I remain convinced it would have been one of several others. This album, for unknown reasons, struck a more personal chord than others and as such remains a bit quicker for me to access from a memory perspective.

It has been this way for decades. I just accept it at this point. It's a transcendental prayer to me in the same manner that Our Father is for a Catholic. Spirituality is personal and oftentimes we experience very personal journeys along our pilgrimages to our personal holy lands.

Obviously I have undertaken a great deal of thought about this body of work throughout the years; it remains present as I age through life. An unintentional soundtrack of sorts that provides comfort and solace. These endless repetitions over time built up a muscle memory of sorts, but I don't recall most of them.

Some, however, are memorable.

One night, back in the mid 90s, I was driving across eastern Oregon. It was a few years after my college experiences and I was struggling to make my way through the early fucked up stages of adulthood. Life was not as planned. I was working, but I loathed every aspect of my job and was working in an environment I did not enjoy. I was surrounded by a lot of well intended people having this same experience. A land of forgotten and misfit toys. A land I would symbolically flee from time to time by driving as far as I could faway rom where I worked. Or at least as far as I could escape in 24 hours as my weekend was only 48 hours long.

I was driving through the Alvord Desert when I first recall really listening to Echoes. I had certainly heard versions of it before, specifically when I saw the Live at Pompeii documentary, but it apparently never really registered to me, at least consciously, until this experience in the Alvord Desert.

I was driving through the dark of night to get to the hot springs. I was hoping to have a quick soak; after which I would then drive out into the middle of the dry lake bed; upon which I would sleep while gazing upwards into the billions of stars dotting the Milkyway. Stars that were not yet shrouded with endless space junk strewn across it. It was a new moon and I would gaze into the infinite depths beyond those stars and into a night that no longer exists as it once did back then.

The sun had set a couple hours earlier. I had watched it do such while I was on the top of Steens Mountain. I spent some time in solitude up there railing against the uncertainties of life as the sun set and a gusting cold wind perpetually beat upon me as though it was the heart that beat within my chest. There was not another human soul around. It‘s one of those memories easily recalled due to the acute emotional negativity one earnestly felt at the time. It is also a paradoxical memory as I simultaneously recall the complete awe I was in as I witnessed an impossibly grandiose sun setting upon an endless horizon. All of this made available exclusively to me for own viewing pleasure. It was as though the entirety of the future of the planet lay right in front of me to witness, but was also just beyond my abilities to grasp. It was pleasant in a holy, satisfying, way. I have experienced very few moments as grandiose and majestic as this one. These experiences always bring me calmness and strength even in the most difficult of times.

And you selfishly had that moment; in its entirety, to yourself. You felt a bit sheepish for railing on and on about other nonsense.

But now I am off that mountain and back on the desert floor. For whatever reason I had a cassette of Meddle in the cassette deck. I also don’t really recall why I had never really actively listened to Meddle before. But I recall wanting to listen to One of These Days and had picked up a copy a couple of weeks earlier. My first recollection of hearing One of These Days was seeing it performed live in 1994. I had picked up the cassette to expand my awareness of the Pink Floyd catalogue.

The last song on Meddle is Echoes. Echoes Part 1 is also the first song on the Live in Pompeii documentary.

For some reason up until that point I had also never really listened to Echoes except that one time I saw Echoes, Part 1 and Part 2 in the Live at Pompeii VHS college experience. Or at least I have no recollection of simply listening to the song. When I first saw it played live in the documentary in college I don't recall having any reaction to it one way or the other. Or perhaps I was delayed from entering into the room and simply missed viewing it.

But in this instance, way out here in the darkness of the Alvord desert under a new moon, I was fully attentive. I was listening with intent as I was driving, alone, with only the starlight above to symbolicaly guide the way. Occasionally, I would spot a snake on the road, warming itself off the remnant heat of the day, but very little else of note was visible absent the distant silhouettes of the hilly terrain on either side of the road and the suspicious shadows of more distant landscapes looming in the distance, beyond the lights.

And it is within that moment that I find my mind metaphorically blown wide open by Echoes as it leaves the speakers and falls into my ears. I am blown away as memories that I had carried as though they were entirely separated, began to commingle on that dark desert road.

I had never heard this song in the manner I was now receiving it. It was the perfect partner for the moment as it shared many of the aspects I enjoyed best about the band’s catalogue. Particularly those that pertained to The Dark Side of the Moon. Overlooked by me simply because there are so many albums by so many artists; so little time to listen to them all. I accepted a general consensus that the Meddle album has its moments, but was not their best, so I had avoided prioritizing it until later in life and allocated my ears and money expanding my musical knowledge elsewhere.

I couldn’t believe my luck to be really listening to it, rather than simply hearing it, for the first time way out here in the desert. And so familiar. It was as though echoes from the past and they are only out there on the airwaves deep in the desert in the darkness when the sun is eclipsed by the earth.

I had heard On the Run, easily, a hundred if not hundreds of times and had never connected it to my experience in seeing it first in Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii back in 1974 when I was only 4. Back on that day when I decided I was going to, all by myself for the first time ever, turn on the tv and (hopefully) watch Mister Roger’s.

But it was only way out here under the cover of darkness as I drove across the Alvord desert, much later in life, listening to Echoes, that I finally connected Pink Floyd directly to that event.

The odd echo I encountered deep in the valley of solitude. The echo that reminds how interconnected our experiences really are despite the wild oscillations experienced across each and every moment we encounter.

My brain finally bridged the gap between these two memories.

One time, around the age of four, I got up early in the morning in hopes of seeing Mister Roger’s Neighborhood on television. Now, decades later, thousands of miles away, I was driving across the desert in the dark of night; watching that child experience Pink Floyd for the first time.

It was awesome.

The brain is a fickle thing sometimes. It is hard to pin down. What we insist as absolute truth derived from our personal memory is sometimes obscured by other memories that we either forgot or misunderstood or otherwise suppressed.

Perhaps sometimes the sum of the whole is not greater than a particular part if that part is a consequential moment in time.

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