"Caught In The Crowd"

I love iTunes.

My best friend has shown me three times now how to use the torrents, and he looks at me askance because I let his instructions trickle in one ear and torrent out the other.

I'm not absolutely averse to piracy. I joyfully accepted a copy of "The Terrible Teague Bunch" by Gary Jennings from this same friend even though I know he got that from a torrent. I know this, and accepted it, because he couldn't very well have got the novel any other way without incurring considerable expense...it's been out of print for decades. So torrents have their uses.

But the vast majority of my music comes through iTunes. I don't think 99 cents is too much to pay, if I like the song.

Every week iTunes selects one track by an up-and-coming artist and gives it away. I've dutifully previewed each track for the last year and a half and doo-doo-fully refused to download it. There's a whole hell of a lot of so-called "music" out there that's not worth the nothing I'd have to pay for it.

But this week...

I don't mind admitting I cried the first time I heard Kate Miller-Heidke sing this. I've probably listened to it twenty times since Tuesday and I still get chills.

You may as well call me James: I was bullied and ostracized through a goodly chunk of my elementary and secondary education. I've been tossed into lockers, kicked in the jewels, and subjected to seemingly endless verbal taunts that were somehow worse. You remember that saying, "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me?" Probably the most vicious lie adults ever tell children, that one. It rang doubly untrue to a kid like me, who lived his life (when he wasn't having his face re-arranged) buried in a bottomless pit of...words. The books I devoured as a child and pre-teen served as an escape hatch to a world where I wasn't a "spaz", a "quad", a "geek" or a "nerd". I had no friends? The hell I didn't! I was good friends with Frank and Joe Hardy, Meg and Charles Wallace and Cal, and a bunch more besides! Later, there was Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and Jem and Scout and Boo Radley, and Gene and Finny, and about two hundred other people who were no less real just because they were made out of words.

But none of this combined with Miller-Heidke's sweet and wistful vocal to produce tears on my face. You see, I was a bully myself.

Oh, not in the same way and at the same time, of course. Victims can never be bullies simultaneously: they'd have no credibility. But in my lifetime, I've hurt people, some of them probably worse than any schoolyard Hun ever hurt me. Words were my weapons of choice and necessity, and I occasionally derived a great pleasure in wielding them so as to inflict maximum damage.

And some of the people I've hurt had thought they could call me 'friend'.

A guy who lived on the outside of every inside there ever was would make a point of treating other people properly, right? No. There is instead a terrible urge to dole out some of what you've been taking. It can even manifest itself years later, once you've gone "inside" and--ha--"grown up". If somebody, even unwittingly, makes you feel like a child again...a poor, pitiful, picked-on child...you can lash out. You can elevate a little dig into a major ambuscade. And the little kid who still lives inside you will caper with glee and shout "see how it feels?"

I think I've outgrown all this now, at the unforgivable age of 38. I think. I really try to let empathy affect everything I say and do. But it's way too late for the folks I've let down. Empathy is rarely accepted after the fact.

That didn't stop Kate, though, and it won't stop me from echoing her words:

If I could go back, do it again

I'd be someone you could call friend

Please, please believe I'm sorry...