Stuck Record

I’m old enough to remember vinyl records, 45’s, 33’s. I can still hear the scratch echoed sound the needle made through the speakers as it first made contact to the record grooves. I remember almost like a background static crackling as the record spun round and round on the turntable. The simple but pure amplification created from the record needle to speaker is nostalgic and unique to that era of time and equipment. Record enthusiasts to this day keep their records covered and scratch free. Because a scratch on a record is the worst if you remember and know what I’m talking about. Place a record on the record player, drop the needle down, hear the crackle of needle to vinyl and then the music starts to resonate from the speakers. It usually plays for some time, maybe even through the first song, and then, ” Video killed the radio star, star, star, star”, with a never-ending repeat stuck due to a scratch or even a blemish on the record. That song and more often than not that side of the record is lost and doomed to forever be a stuck record.

Now days we have digital music and that’s not an issue but back in those “ancient” days, those 1900’s, stuck records were a thing. But here’s the modern equal; people today are still stuck records. They have been damaged by a plethora of many different states of affairs; divorce, death, loss of job, health issues, on and on, and they are playing the same resonance over and over again. We don’t know how to fix ourselves. We just continue on with a deep scratch or scar across our lives. And we play the same tune over and over mostly not even realizing it and or with no way to advance to the next tune in our journey. We get stuck in the same abusive relationship, scraaaaatch, same job that keeps us just over broke, scraaaaaatch, same understanding, same dread, same walk over and over again, scraaaaaatch. Now I’m not trying to sound like a pessimist, I’m not. I’m trying to point out the obvious. We are a hurt people from all the different experiences in our lives. Some of those create the best of memories but some create an unnatural blemish across our surface. What can we do about it? There are solutions, I promise you.

First, we must recognize that we have a scratch and our record is stuck. We get so used to just hearing it that we pay no more attention to it. But sometimes when one stops to listen then the skip of that record is like nails on a chalk board. And it propels us to action. We can fix the scratch and stop the skip, maybe a little old school ingenuity there. We can buy a new record and throw away the old, but sometimes that’s one of the hardest things to do, get rid of the old and start with something new. We can go digital and modernize ourselves, whew that’s a big step. But my point is, is there is a fix, we don’t have to be stuck. Action is a call to works. At least push the needle and let it advance other than repeating the same vice over and over. Once there is a change then a new journey can begin. Want to take a new journey? I do. Let’s go.