Standards of Measurement

Blur - Song 2

Back in the middle days of high school, me and my friends rode the bus to school every morning and took the same one back in the evening. Since we went to a county-wide magnet school, our bus ride would usually be well over half an hour, and even more than an hour on bad weather days. Being a group of sophomores, we needed something to entertain ourselves. I was smart enough to pick up a set of tiny speakers to go along with my discman, because the bus we were on didn't have a radio. I could do an entry alone about the speakers, as I went through no less than four sets in my sophomore and junior years, each one bigger, better, and requiring more batteries than the last. I won't, though, because I can't think of a good song to associate it all with.

As most groups of teenage boys are prone to do, we fixated on a lot of weird things and generally tried to make fools of ourselves as much as possible. One thing we would often do on the bus would repeatedly play a song, to see how long it took for the people in the front of the bus (freshmen and sophomores, underclassmen to us) to notice or to get irritated. And we developed our own set of standards and favorites, such that the Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic" or "Girls" would be played at least once a trip, or Fatboy Slim's "The Rockafella Skank" would never be allowed to play for its entire seven-plus minutes (it does kinda just keep going). And along the way, Blur's "Song 2" became our default number-one song of all time. It grew to such a mythological status for us that we started measuring distances and times in the number of repetitions of the track - since it was exactly two minutes long, it was very easy to tell time by. We knew what point on the road was one Song 2 away from the school, and I can think of several days on which we just put the song on loop for half an hour.

While all this was going on, generally we played cards. Playing cards on a bus was rarely easy - the seats were somewhat difficult to work around, the cards would slide a lot, and of course it was hard to really pay attention to what was going on. Every now and then, the bus would stop too fast and we'd all scramble to grab something before it clattered to the floor and slid up five or six rows. Despite all the irritations and messing around, we had a lot of fun on those bus rides. And I guess we owe a good bit of that to a little two minute rock song out of England.

Plug in, and turn it up...