1997

Of all the years of this retrospective, he had the hardest time picking a song for 1997.  In a lot of ways, it was a terrible year for music - everything on the radio was all Everclear and Third Eye Blind, or smug and pompous Brit-pop, or American power-pop disguised as punk.  The music press and MTV kept trying to convince people that they really needed to take The Spice Girls seriously (as it turned out, you didn't).  A really awful year, and even good bands came out that year with sub-par records (yes, he's looking at you, The Sundays), with the notable exception of Radiohead's OK Computer, which he didn't even listen to until years later.

Given all that, the song that best sums up that garish, cartoonish year for music was Blur's garish, cartoonish Song 2, a 99X radio staple and the soundtrack to a great many television commercials for years to come.

It didn't help matters that in 1997, he wound up drifting apart from his flight-attendant girlfriend.  She seemed to be going through some dark times of her own and while he tried to be present and supportive, she became more and more withdrawn and distant and by the end of the year she decided she had to move out.  They still saw each other into 1998 after she had left, but the tension became too great for them to bear continuing the relationship much longer.

She had grown up in Hawaii, but her family had eventually settled in the Pacific Northwest before she took the job with Delta and had to move to ATL.  But while they were together, she had instilled in him a dream of eventually moving to Washington State.  Her grandmother had a house in Friday Harbor, a small town on Puget Sound accessible only by boat, and while they could have moved in there when Grandma eventually passed, they also talked about moving to Anacortes or Port Townsend or even Seattle itself.   Even after she had exited his life, the seed that she had planted remained, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he still fantasized about a life somewhere up in the Northwest.  He even read David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars, which only made the fantasy more vivid.

If there was one thing he had learned in his Atlanta-to-Albany-to-Pittsburgh-to-Atlanta escapade, it was that the one thing he couldn't run away from was himself.  But in 1997, 10 years after Paul Weller had saved his life on that bridge, little did he know that 10 years later he would finally get his chance to move to the Pacific Northwest.