Reply #3: I probably owe my life to music.

[Systematic Chaos]

Growing up during the 80s I was a complete wreck. My father had passed away in 1975 when I was 6, and my mother, who was already totally ineffectual and lost, became a raging alcoholic and started dragging me all over the country. I didn't settle anywhere until I got to Vegas in 1982, and thanks to her gambling problem we ended up in section 8 housing and living on gov't cheese and crap from the "Christian" food bank.

I was a strange one, all right. I remember back in 1983 when Duran Duran and Iron Maiden both hit it real big. I liked them both a whole lot, so naturally both the preppies and the metal heads thought I was some kind of freak. During my senior year of high school, one of my teachers hired me and a classmate to do a bunch of work around her yard. She and her husband paid us very well for back then, and the money I made ended up getting spent on either quarters for the arcade or tapes from what was then the best record store in town (R. I. P. Odyssey Records and FUCK YOU Wherehouse Entertainment!)

I stumbled into prog rock during this same time frame. I already knew I loved the more commercial material from bands like Yes and Genesis which was on the radio frequently back then, so I just started looking at copyright dates and buying albums from those bands from the most current to the oldest. It just seemed to me like each new round of purchases sounded even cooler and more wild than the last one. Then I started perusing books which showed how different bands were related and had musicians in common, and who influenced whom, and things really took off. Today, thanks to the intertubes and iTunes Plus, I feel like I'm in some kind of musical nirvana (no pun intended) that just doesn't end.

Oh, and hey - if you're "old" at 36, :wtf: does that make me at 39? Fucking Methuselah?