Ever spend one of those days in front of the computer from light to darkness and wonder where the time went?

That was my Friday.

My greatest accomplishment this week took place on Thursday afternoon, when I installed new RAM in my Mac Pro. Turned out to be a wee bit more complicated than the instructions, it was not easy to seat the harmonica-like sticks into the grooves, but when I slid the card back into the computer and closed the door I had six gigs of RAM, and there was a certain speediness to my machine absent previously. I kvelled every time the Activity Monitor told me I was utilizing more than the two gigs installed previously.

It’s the minor triumphs that warm our heart.

Yesterday, after a doctor’s appointment, I upgraded my iPod Touch to the new 2.0 software. An iPod Touch is an iPhone without the phone. An iPhone for Verizon users. Able to surf the Web via Wi-Fi, but once you leave your house… Ultimately, I was able to download some of the free apps from iTunes and I got that same feeling, albeit on a more minor scale, that I had after installing the RAM… The "New York Times" app is better than the Gray Lady’s traditional Website, with all the news broken down into categories, and listed from new to old. And "Pocket Express" gives me express lanes to sports scores and other information. Very cool. But it took a long time to download the 2.0 update, and almost forever to upgrade my Touch. You see, it’s wiped and all the info is reinstalled. This took way longer than an hour. So, in the interim, I downloaded music. Not from iTunes, but from a blog. Stuff unavailable at any price. Live concerts from the early seventies. From before Jackson Browne’s first album was released. When Bonnie Raitt’s second album was in the can but hadn’t seen the light of day. From when Ry Cooder was unheard of by the PBS set. A set from Tom Rush so similar to the one he still does today. And one studio album, David Ackles’ "American Gothic".

You can buy it on CD, online today. But when I first started hunting for it, "American Gothic" was a lost classic. Something I owned on vinyl that was never digitized. I got one track, but the cut I needed to hear…eluded me. I gave up on the album. But on this site yesterday, there it was, so I took it.

I can’t tell you what the weather’s like in your hometown. But in Santa Monica, the sun doesn’t burst through until the afternoon, and by evening, a haze encroaches upon the landscape. You’d think it’s September, not July. So, when I finally made it into the mountains, there was a haze, a soupiness akin to the one JFK, Jr. encountered on his fateful trip.

Yes, I finally made it into the mountains. Upon realizing that if I didn’t get motivated immediately, the whole day would slip from my grasp, I did my back exercises, I stretched, picked up my iPod and took to the trail at…10:30 PM. And nothing sounded good.

I had dozens of new tracks. Live takes on some of my absolute favorites. But none was ringing my bell. I tried not to fast-forward too much, because then you really feel at loose ends, when you discover that you’re in such a state that nothing will satiate you. I’ve learned to just let the songs play, and allow my mind to drift. As James Taylor so famously sang, into places I should not let it go. Then I heard "Another Friday Night".

I was shy of the summit, the bridge above Will Rogers State Park, and my heart started to palpitate…was this the song I had been hunting for, the one that resonated with me back in my dorm room at Middlebury College?

I didn’t expect "American Gothic" to be good. I hadn’t loved it thirty five years ago, except for this one track…which was the one playing now…

Another Friday night
Guess I’ll put on a clean shirt and hitch a ride to town
No more work for two whole days, there’s no point hangin’ ’round
Working on the road, I sweat and ache and cuss the pain
It sure does pass the time
Two days free and all I see are the same old walls to climb
Yes I could call Bob Morrow’s bar
Maybe borrow Jack’s guitar
Find a girl to sing to
Lord knows she’s what I want
Hey, who am I kidding
She can’t be the sort of girl who’ll wait for me
In Sunday laces
In the kind of places I belong…

I don’t know what kind of establishment of higher learning you attended, if you went to college at all. Maybe you went to one of those big midwestern schools where everybody goes to the football game on Saturday afternoon. Or maybe a city college, with myriad distractions. But neither of these was my experience. I went to school in the middle of nowhere, prior to not only cell phones and the Internet, but cable TV. All you had was what was at your fingertips, what you could see. And I’d be lying if I told you it squared with my personality. I grew up fifty miles from New York City, in a suburb roiled with the passion and angst of the sixties. Whereas in upstate Vermont, hours from New York City, nothing seemed to matter much, you couldn’t get a rise from almost anybody. They’d been brought up in an alternative universe, one in which study was the only activity that was countenanced, that mattered. I ran on adrenaline for eighteen months or so, and by time I realized this was not the place for me, it was too late to transfer. I’d have to attend college for an additional year. And that was never going to happen.

So I read "Rolling Stone", "Fusion", "Crawdaddy", any music magazine I could get my hands on, and purchased the records they raved about, like David Ackles’ "American Gothic". And, having paid for them, I played them, waiting for them to reveal themselves to me. But "American Gothic" never did. Why did the critics say it was so great?

But, decades later, at a different point in my existence, realizing that life is more about loss than triumph, suddenly the record started to make sense.

My favorite song about Friday night opens my favorite Todd Rundgren album, "The Ballad Of Todd Rundgren". "Long Flowing Robe" is not like "Bang The Drum All Day", it’s far from mindless. The whole album is rich with stories, of romance, both good and unrequited. I loved that album without any hits. I couldn’t understand why none of the songs became hits. I know why nothing off "American Gothic" became a hit.

Starting down the mountain, I let the iPod shuffle through my newly downloaded tracks. But realizing that the exhilarated mood I’d been in when "Another Friday Night" had been playing had fled, I stopped, and dialed up the entire album, thirty six years later, I was going to give it another go.

I was stunned. The songs were miniatures that truly captured life. Life I now understood.

"Waiting For The Moving Van"… I’ve been divorced, almost everybody from my generation has been. The emptiness, the aloneness, makes us want to jump out of our own bodies. We might be able to ace the SATs, but real life, that’s a challenge.

"One Night Stand"… We’ve all experienced something akin to this.

Then there’s "Montana Song", an epic about going to the venue of one’s upbringing… Contemplating one’s ancestors, leaving home years before, looking for answers. That’s what you do when you get older, look for answers. Try to figure out how you got here, whilst realizing that it’s too late to change the course of your life.

Your parents tell you it’s going to be this way, but you don’t believe them. The media tells us youth rules, older generations get plastic surgery, to try and believe they’re thirty years old forevermore. But they’re not, inside, their real age can’t be hidden.

But there’s wisdom in aging. What you thought was important, you realize is not. Like my college degree. I don’t want to abandon it, but I’m a self-educated man. If I learned anything at Middlebury, it had to do with the intersection with a type of person I’d never met before, the truly rich. If I’d traveled the country, could I have had just an eye-opening experience, albeit leaving me with a chip on my shoulder that I didn’t have a sheepskin, evidence of achievement in our modern world.

I was thinking how "American Gothic" was so different from what’s purveyed today. I realized that in the early seventies the album was the new novel. Where you attempted to make a statement, leave your mark. That’s what albums used to be, statements. Now, they’re ways to make money. Sure, generations past wanted money, but it was not primary, self-expression came first.

But not only the novel and record album have been plowed under by history, but the movie too. Now, everything’s high concept, only about the money, why take a risk when you can remake "Get Smart". Actually, innovation and truth are left to TV. That’s why everybody’s raving about "Mad Men", because of its insight into the human condition.

But not enough happens on that show. It’s more about the look than the drama. Whereas a great album from the seventies is laden with tons of story and truth.

I’d love to tell you to buy "American Gothic". But don’t. Not unless you’re over thirty and are willing to listen and listen only. For hours, after dark. It’s not easily accessible. Almost sounds like a poet backed by an orchestra. But, it’s that poetry that’s appealing.