COLUMN: ASMR

My name's Shane, and I'm a media-holic.

God forbid I spend even a single moment alone with my own thoughts. I guess it's just comforting to know that the world continues to spin even when I'm in my own private Idaho. There's nary a second of the day that I'm not plugged into multiple media sources. 

You think I'm kidding? I often bring speakers into my bathroom so I can listen to podcasts while I'm in the shower. As I'm typing this now, I also have a second window pulled up on my laptop where I'm watching tornado chasers livestream from Kansas. Over my right shoulder, someone just missed the answer to Final Jeopardy. Over my left shoulder, Alexa awaits my every command. My police scanner is on. Downstairs, music is playing from a stereo no-one's listening to, while my bedroom TV is playing a looped film of some random guy's birdfeeder in case the cats need their own media fix. I may have a problem.

I'm even media-obsessed when I'm unconscious. Yep, I'm one of those weirdos who can't sleep unless there's a TV on in the background. The problem is, I can't find the right thing to watch -- or, more specifically, NOT watch and sleep through.

For years, I just tuned in overnight to one of the local networks with the sound nearly muted. After years of sleeping my way through Agribusiness Today, you'd think I'd be subconsciously well-versed on soybean futures by now. 

Lately, though, I've been experimenting with some new overnight options. The results have been decidedly mixed.

Do you guys know what ASMR is? It stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, although I'm pretty sure it really stands for Absolutely Stupid Mindboggling Ridiculousness. Its a new fad that's crept up from the oddest corners of the internet over the past few years, and it might be my favorite thing ever.

ASMR is a recognized form of paresthesia -- a tingling sensation that some people claim to experience when watching or listening to certain triggers. (I'm not one of them.) Most people who experience ASMR describe it a pleasant euphoric experience. I'm guessing it's sort of like fingers on a chalkboard, but in a GOOD way?

There are self-styled ASMR gurus online who claim their videos can can induce the phenomenon. Trust me, it's must-watch TV at its finest.

Traditional ASMR triggers are said to include: soft or whispering voices, repetitive noises, watching someone perform mundane tasks, tapping, clicking, breathing, and close-up hand movements. I've yet to have an ASMR video give me tingles, but they've definitely induced laughter.

If you've ever wanted to watch a 48-minute video of a guy leaning over a microphone making squirrel noises with his mouth, ASMR videos are for you. If you get euphoric tingles from watching a girl click two Lego pieces together for 17 minutes, ASMR videos are for you. If you want to watch a complete stranger brush their teeth for twenty-four straight minutes, ASMR videos are for you.

Personally, I don't care HOW good those tingles might feel, NOTHING is worth the uncomfortably close-up video I just watched of a guy's mouth as he slowly and loudly ate an entire bag of Doritos. 

Some people find ASMR videos incredibly relaxing, so I thought I'd try some as background noise while going to bed. I typed "ASMR" into Youtube and hit play on the first video that came up. Naturally, it was titled "100% ASMR Ear Licking." What followed were 29 of the least relaxing, least euphoric, and most hysterical minutes of my life, as I couldn't stop watching this asinine video of a girl licking a microphone for a half hour straight.

Even the cats looked at me like, "Have you gone weird, my man?" 

ASMR trigger videos do NOT help me sleep. They DO help me feel gross, awkward and especially worrisome about future generations -- and frankly, I'm already skilled at those feelings without the need to watch 29 minutes of faux ear-lickery. 

I tried some other relaxation videos instead. Norway's public television is famed for their all-day marathon shows of trains, sheep shearing, and people quilting for entire afternoons. There's oodles of rain sound effect videos. There's even videos labelled "sci-fi ambience" that are apparently supposed to emulate the feel of being aboard a spaceship, but in reality just kinda sound like muffled vacuum cleaners.

I also noticed most of those videos have now changed their titles to add "ASMR," as if now ANYTHING that's boring and long can now claim to be an ASMR trigger. I should just film myself typing this column and upload it as "ASMR Typing Trigger" and see how many views it gets. You might think all of this is weird (I sure do,) but in ONE month, "ASMR 100% Ear Licking" has been viewed 637,003 times. When your video's been viewed by more people than live in Wyoming, it gets tougher and tougher to argue that it's weird.

All I know is nothing made me tingly OR tired. I tried watching a 12-hour video of a guy driving cross-country and I found myself Googling road signs he was passing so I could map his course. I tried the app where celebrities read boring stories to put you to sleep and I ended up getting WAY into the stories. I think tonight I'll try this radical new sleep trigger I've been reading about online - it's called "silence."  I guess you turn off all your electronics and just, like, lay there in the dark. It sounds SO weird. 

COLUMN: Bad Week

Citians of Quad and Islanders of Rock, I have always championed you.

But some of you are seriously trying my patience this week.

I came to the Quad Cities by way of Augustana College. A good chunk of Augie's student body hails from the Chicagoland area, including many of my college friends. Some of my friends really liked the Quad Cities, but most of them treated our area like some sort of backwoods prison camp they were forced to endure in order to get a decent education.

I know, right? It seems impossible that ANYONE could happily exist in a metropolitan area with only THREE major shopping malls and few if any daily traffic jams, but somehow, we unfortunate backwoods country folk manage to survive.  

I always had a different take on the Quad Cities. Growing up in Galesburg, when the cool kids at my school talked about going to "the city" for the weekend, they didn't mean Chicago. They meant HERE. The QC is fancy big-city livin' compared to Galesburg. I remember the first day I ventured to Rock Island on my own, I turned the wrong way down the 7th Ave. one-way. About 72 people honked at me and I nearly wet my pants. I questioned whether I could ever hack life in such a big city.  

Growing up, my family seldom traveled to the Quad Cities, but I knew a lot about the area thanks to QC television channels. I came to college with a bucket list already in mind. I wanted to eat at the Choice Smorgasbord. I wanted to see Orby the Super Van Man. I wanted to visit the Showcase Cinemas in Milan, buy records at Co-Op, and rent videos from Time Travellers.

My friends may have thought life in the QC was tortuous, but I loved the place -- and I still do. After graduation, I planted roots. The Quad Cities was plenty big for me, and life here has treated me just fine. 

All this time, I've remained in Rock Island. Our town sometimes gets a bad rap, but I've always defended her. Rock Island's got amazing character. The hilltop area has great shops and eateries. The District has its highs and lows but will forever be my nightspot. Rozz Tox, Ragged, and Wake make the east end of downtown special. Broadway has some of the coolest homes in the Midwest. It's a town rich in culture and history. It's my home.

I love my neighborhood. My neighbor to the right barbecues every weekend and brings me ribs. My neighbor to the left doesn't speak a lick of English, but for years and without having ever been asked, he comes over in the middle of the night and rolls my trash to the curb. I like my neck of the woods.

But this week's been testing my allegiance to our town. A few days ago, I was playing with cats when my silent alarm system triggered. A quick glance at the cameras revealed someone trying to break into my garage in broad daylight. Based on the footage, I'm pretty sure it was the same kid who stole a package off my porch last week. This was deja vu, as last year someone tried a similar move and made off with my childhood bike. This time, I had a reinforced door, a spanky new security system, and a fast hand to 911.

My uninvited guest ran from the cops, but hopefully now realizes I'm not the easy mark he must've taken me for. Thanks to my security cams, we now have many stylish photos of him in action, so the cops have a good chance of tracking him down. But they may have bigger fish to fry.

It was three hours later when my world suddenly filled with sirens. A car chase in Davenport had made its way over the bridge and ended up careening through my neighborhood, as a speeding car followed by multiple cops barreled down my street at scary speeds. Thankfully, the cops cornered those idiots and caught most of them.

The next morning, it was a beautiful spring day that felt like a rebirth. Gentle rain on the sidewalk, birds chattering all around -- and, suddenly, rapid fire gunshots that had me heading for the basement. It was several blocks away, but still way too close for comfort. 

I just don't get it. I don't understand hating someone enough to draw guns at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday. I don't understand the thrill of stealing a car or breaking into someone's garage or ripping stuff off a stranger's porch without guilt or remorse. 

"We're living in a different world," a few people have told me, and sure, that may be true. Once upon a time, Elvis shaking his hips on TV was a global scandal. Today, Cardi B gives us graphic updates on the state of her nether-regions and we declare it an important moment of empowerment.

The world IS different. Change is inevitable, and if you don't think you should have to adapt, ask the Mayans or the Cahokia or any other stubborn lost civilization that refused to roll with the changes. But just because the world is different doesn't mean it has to be WORSE. I still believe most people are innately good. We've survived wars, depressions, derechos, divisive politics, and now a global pandemic. We're nothing if not resilient.

Is there an answer? Probably not an easy one, and I'm certainly no expert. But I'm not giving up on my community and neither should you. If you're a do-gooder, do a lot of it this week. If you're a do-badder, give it a rest. It's been a rough year, and we need to get back on track. I didn't just spend a lonely year indoors in order to NOW be too afraid to leave the house. Bad stuff's bound to happen now and again, but it shouldn't be the norm. We're better than this. The Quad Cities are better than this.

All I'm saying is give peace a chance. Be kind to your fellow man - or at the very least, leave their garages alone (FYI: it's EMPTY, people. Do I LOOK like the kind of guy who owns tools and sporting goods?) 

COLUMN: Porch Pirates

Stupidity, thy name is Shane.

Sometimes I can't help but marvel over my own idiocy. This was one of those weeks.

I work in media -- specifically, in this very company's advertising department. Over the years, I've had a front row seat to product pitches, exclusive offers, and countless ways to drive consumer interest. By now, I should be well and fully jaded when it comes to most marketing efforts. Surely I could never fall prey to a sales pitch, right?

Wrong. Advertising works, people.

As regular readers know, I'm a music junkie. When I'm online, I'm usually talking about some band, listening to some band, or listening to someone else talk about some band. Therefore, it's no surprise that when Facebook's marketing algorithms look at my user profile, they immediately go, "Fish on the line. Serve this guy as many ads about music stuff as possible."

Every time I hop on social media, I'm bombarded with products for music geeks. Just today, I've seen ads for a tape dispenser shaped like a DJ turntable, an area rug that looks like a vinyl record, and custom lighting that pulses in rhythm to any music you play. If I bought every nerdy item pitched to me on Facebook, my house would be a tacky pulsating discotheque, but with cats.

Good thing, then, that I only buy SOME of it.

It started innocently enough. A few months ago, I got served an ad for a t-shirt company that made me chuckle. In the small ad, the company offered glimpses of two music t-shirts they were selling: one for Metallica, and one for The Carpenters. This is not exactly the kind of mash-up one normally sees in an ad. If you are a fan of both The Carpenters AND Metallica, you are officially VERY strange and we should probably be friends.

I HAD to check this company out, so I clicked the link. Immediately I was taken to a sketchy website that looked like it was thrown together in a hustle. Nothing fancy, just dozens and dozens of music-related t-shirts and click-buttons that said "BUY!" It was pure musical chaos. ABBA t-shirts next to Marilyn Manson t-shirts next to Garth Brooks, Megadeth, and Cher. They even had t-shirts from some of MY favorite bands. You know, those snooty indie bands that no one but record store clerks and that one irritating guy at your school listened to? I was that one irritating guy.

I knew this website was less than legit. There's no way some fly-by-night t-shirt company owned the rights to all these images. When I buy band merch, I like to make sure it goes to the band, not some seedy company somewhere in Cyber-third-world-istan. BUT it's not every day you run into someplace selling My Bloody Valentine t-shirts, either. And they even had them in Fat Newspaper Columnist size. It was too much to resist.

I ordered ONE shirt on a whim. I expected to be out $25 and have a cautionary tale to tell. Instead, my shirt arrived two weeks later, exactly as promised. The package came from China and had the oh-so-legit return address of "Joe Doe," but the t-shirt was there nonetheless, and it was shockingly decent quality.

I ordered another and it showed up, too. That's when I threw caution to the wind and placed an order for 6 of the coolest shirts they offered. Soon I would be the king of music-nerd fashion, even if it meant being a 50-year-old strutting around in a t-shirt better suited for a 20-something, except 20-somethings wouldn't know any of these bands. 

The days ticked by. No shirts. "It's okay," I thought, "maybe there's a traffic jam in China somewhere. Have faith." As it turned out, I should have had more faith in the sketchy company and less faith in Rock Island.

A quick review of my security camera revealed that the package had, in fact, arrived. It lasted on my porch for approximately thirty minutes before some kid sauntered up and stole it. My pirated t-shirts got plundered by a porch pirate, and a stupid one at that.

The money I lost on the shirts was almost worth the comedy captured on my security cam, as the dude took almost six minutes attempting to look casual while failing repeatedly to do a sly reach-around, as if he were just learning the length of his own arms in real time. Eventually he just gave up and showed his face to the camera while running off with the package. I just REALLY wanna see the look on his face when he opened it up to find weird obscure t-shirts of bands no one's ever heard of before.

I almost felt embarassed filing a police report over such a ridiculous purchase, but I did -- and the thief's picture is now being distributed to officers around town. The only thing more embarassing than wasting money on a bootleg My Bloody Valentine t-shirt would be getting arrested for stealing one, so good luck, kid.

The officer suggested I write the company to see if they carried insurance and could possibly re-ship. I did -- and prmptly received the following response: "Thanks you for contacting we! Much of happy to service of your shirts. The mail will be order delivery of very important! Please you for my patronage." I clearly can't say enough about Joe Doe's customer service -- mostly because I can't speak Joe Doe's language.

So, lesson learned. My days of ordering sketchy stuff from sketchy websites is done. Now, this OTHER website I just found that sells plaid flannel shirts in color combinations that match your favorite album covers? Well, that's just about the nerdiest thing I've ever seen -- and of course the shipment arrives tomorrow.

NO, WAIT, IT DOESN'T. THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE ON MY PORCH. KEEP WALKING, FRIEND.

COLUMN: Shoegaze Revival

I think I was twelve years old when I discovered the Beatles.

There was a kid at my school who was the absolute coolest. He was tall, good-looking, and had the uncanny ability to grow facial hair in 7th grade. All the girls swooned over him and all the boys wanted to be him. 

He was too cool to listen to the radio. All he ever played on his boombox was vintage classic rock, and you couldn't catch him anywhere without his faded denim jacket covered in Beatles pins. Suddenly, it seemed like our whole school became Beatles fans overnight. I was no exception -- except I wasn't cool. I was obnoxious.

I quickly procured all the Beatles albums. I went to the library and checked out all the Beatles books. I wore a pair of round Lennon specs. Within a week, I fancied myself an expert on the Fab Four, and every day when my parents would pick me up from school, I'd spend the drive home explaining the Beatles to them as if they hadn't lived through it.

"Did you know Ringo's real name is Richard?  Did you know if you abbreviate 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,' it spells LSD? Did you know Paul is probably dead and they replaced him with a look-alike?" It's a wonder my parents didn't throw me out the car to be raised by raccoons (and raccoons that likely didn't care about George Harrison's middle name.) 

I just got a taste of what my parents had to endure.

Someone once said there's no music better than whatever you listened to in college, and that's absolute truth for me. But I'm honestly convinced that the best music of all time just happened to get released between 1988 and 1992.

My tastes in college were all over the board. I was learning to properly DJ, so I listened to a ton of dance music. But I also worked at the college radio station and developed an ear for esoteric, left-of-center indie rock -- especially the underappreciated bands that critics dubbed "shoegaze." It's still my favorite music to this day.

The dictionary defines shoegaze as "a subgenre of indie rock characterized by ethereal vocals, guitar distortion and effects, feedback, and overwhelming volume." Shoegaze originators like Ride, Slowdive, and My Bloody Valentine would famously spend months in the studio layering simple guitar chords with enough reverb and effects to punch holes through speakers. When I saw Slowdive play Chicago in '92, I remember having to grab the railing after every song, because when they'd stop playing, I'd be dizzy from the change in equilibrium. It's like if your favorite musician was, in fact, a jet engine.

It's definitely not the music for everyone. I don't know many people on the fence about shoegaze. You either really get it or you really DON'T. I read a review once that said shoegaze was like listening to a mermaid fall into a black hole. My mom told me it sounded like a vacuum cleaner. Even the term "shoegaze" was originally an insult hurled by a music critic, aghast that people were paying money to watch musicians stare stoically at a bank of effect pedals on the ground.

But shoegaze was MY music, and being a fan felt like membership into a secret club. You'd see the same people at shows. You'd nod respectfully at anyone you spotted wearing a Ride t-shirt. For once, I finally felt like the coolest kid in school, hip to something no one else understood.

That is, until this week -- when I saw an article on Vice entitled, "Gen Z are Resurrecting Shoegaze for their Bleak Post-COVID World." Unbeknownst to me, today's cool kids have rediscovered those esoteric little bands from my youth, and those hard-to-find albums are now in heavy rotation on Spotify.

I went to TikTok and it's eleventy times cringier than me trying to teach my parents about the Beatles. There's kids making viral dances to Slowdive songs. There's shoegaze make-up tutorials. Girls are posting videos where they burn incense and fondle crystals to "manifest a shoegaze boyfriend." There's blog articles entitled, "What your favorite shoegaze band says about you."

Worst of all, it seems like the overwhelming consensus among the new generation is that shoegaze is supposed to be the soundtrack to mopey depression, sadness, and pandemic isolation. I guess it's now supposed to be the music you listen to when you need a good cry. It was never that way for us back in the day. If anything, the layered guitar effects and sonic maelstrom of shoegaze made me feel happy, alive, and blissed out. Not once did I listen in order to mourn my own existence. That's why God invented goth music, you sillies. 

I'm not sure whether to be appalled by these new fans getting it all wrong, or if I should feel like a golden god for being a card-carrying member of the original shoegaze fanbase. Part of me wants to find these teenagers and lecture them on proper music appreciation. The other part wants them to think I'm a cool kid, too. 

Except I'm not a cool kid. I'm a 50-year-old dude who happens to like the same music as a bunch of pretentious trendy kids right now. Maybe some of them are telling their parents interesting facts about Slowdive as I speak. I think I'll just stay off TikTok and let the kids have their mopey shoegaze moment. Their misappreciation and misappropriation of my favorite music is appalling, but if it results in Slowdive going on another reunion tour, we all win (except the people who think they sound like a vacuum cleaner.)

I'll be the blissed-out 50-year-old sore thumb in the back row and I won't care one bit.