on observing & free associating: fresno, 12.29.23
fresno high, tom seaver, the quesadilla gorilla, teenagers and the limewire era
The local coffee shop has pour-over and avocado toast, borrowing the aesthetic of a cafe that could be on Valencia St. As I look closer, the cartoons on the wall have bible verses, and this place, Kuppa Joy, appears steeped in some Christian aesthetic. It's across the street from Fresno High School, which looks very nice – tall white pillars framing a brick facade, with light posts aligned in front of it – it could be a movie set for an American high school. It’s on Tom Seaver Way: he was class of ’62 and then Baseball Hall of Fame ’92, as the signs read. He must have been born right at the tail end of World War II. I wonder what this place must have been like then – maybe not as different as other places 80 years ago. I wonder if he came back from New York to visit his parents for holidays.
This town has a nostalgic feel to it, which combined with my unfamiliarity makes it feel like a movie set for a period piece. Large signs with lightbulbs for letters – Me n Ed’s Pizza – and the bottom row says “The Original,” implying there was an era where the sign aesthetic didn’t make that immediately obvious.
The downtown stretch has record shops and antique stores. There’s an old-time drugstore that I imagine has a soda jerk serving malts inside. I circle the block and see a newer sign that makes me smile: QUESADILLA GORILLA, in all caps, complete with a parklet, though I have to imagine there's more than enough room inside anyway.
The word pairing amuses me, as I'd never thought of these two together, and I’m imagining an amateur etymologist double-checking to see if they might share any of the same roots. It also comes off as a nickname you might hear a teenager throw at a friend aggressively inhaling Mexican food.
The quesadilla may be the most basic, least differentiated Mexican food. The cheese sandwich of the taqueria, and naming the restaurant after it and appending Gorilla, two words that look like they should rhyme but don’t, amuses me. In an alternate reality, I can imagine my friends and I wasting time there in high school. I start driving in search of a basketball court.
I have a ball in my trunk that I'd meant to return to my brother-in-law, but seeing as I have it with me, I might as well make use of it. Turning the corner, sure enough, there are outdoor hoops at Fresno High School, though it's unclear if there's an opening in the wall of the surrounding chain link fence. Years ago, I would have hopped the fence and gone in, but now I imagine doing that and play the tape forward: I’m there, shooting around at a high school alone, and a security guard approaches and asks why a man in his 30s broke into the high school. That's a question no adult wants to hear.
It's December 29th, so as sure a day as any that the high school isn’t in session, and yet there are dozens of kids in mostly gray and black clothing, wandering in groups around the track and football field. It’s strange – they’re not moving as a single group, but rather in groups of 5-7, seemingly unaware or at least unaffected by the other groups. There’s an intention to their group constructions but a randomness to each collective’s movements, and they’re also all dressed kind of similarly. Is this just what high school kids wear now, the teenage aesthetic of today? In these loosely held groups, it does make this feel a bit more like a movie, though maybe being off of technology and paying more attention to life around me has biased me toward that framing. Maybe they all just decided to get a break from their families for a bit.
A sign for FAST LOANS in all caps is on the telephone pole at the corner from a guy named Nik with a Gmail address and a phone number with a 702 area code. I add “looking up 702 area code” to my list of things to check when I get back to the Internet. Doing this makes me feel better about not checking my phone, and though I rarely revisit these post-its and lists, the notion of not losing a thought, no matter how trivial, is oddly comforting. I have a vague sense that I may recognize 702, but also can't place it in the outro of Ludacris's Area Codes, which is the area of my brain I search when I don't immediately recognize a string of three digits.
It does remind me of a different song though, 702 Girls - Where My Girls At. I still know the chorus from that era of early Limewire and mix CDs, and I think I remember my sisters putting it on a burned CD. That song must be 25 years old at this point and fits nicely into that pocket of a good song of that era that people haven't overplayed yet, so playing it feels fresh but nostalgic. You haven't heard it so much since that you've overwritten the memories of first hearing it on the radio or at a middle school dance. I learned a few years ago that every time we recall a memory, we write over the actual memory of it in our heads with a memory of the memory, meaning a song like Hypnotize, while great, has been played so much (as a result of its greatness) that the original memory of hearing it the first few times has been overwritten so many times, our ability to pull the actual original memory has long since passed.
That era of music may have been the perfect amount of friction for finding and listening to new music. It was after the “recording songs from the radio onto tapes” era, which could take all afternoon, and wasn't as seamless as Spotify, where you search and play instantly. It felt a bit dangerous, at least at first, with stories about kids and grandmas being sued for thousands of dollars per infringing track, a number so enormous that it felt simultaneously terrifying and comically impossible.
Those Limewire days, you never knew exactly what you were going to get. It'd take a few minutes to download and could be a totally different song, a virus, a crappy recording off the radio, or just the thing you were looking for. The artist was often wrong – Green Day being credited for Semisonic’s Closing Time – but somebody renamed a file and then it became a source of truth from spreading through the upload and download cycle.
That internet scavenger hunt for music made the acquisition feel like a slight accomplishment. A risky little adventure to get the thing you want and get out. I graduated from there to the chat rooms and forums to exchange hard-to-find tracks, radio freestyles, live recordings at St. Andrews – I was listening to so much Eminem at the time. That search for rarities felt like the online equivalent of what I imagine Deadheads doing, trading live show recordings. It wasn’t exactly crate digging at a record store or parking lot tape exchanges, but it hit the sweet spot for a young teenager obsessed with music: it didn’t require money or travel, just time, dedication, and a slight risk tolerance to find what you were looking for, or even to know what to look for. There was joy in the search and satisfaction of hearing something from your favorite artist that you never would have been able to hear otherwise.
