No need to fear, St. Stephen is here...

My computer crashed…
Fortunately I have backed up all of my essays, papers, poems, fiction, resumes, intern lists, and randomnosities on a flash drive.
Unfortunately, I lacked the mental capacity to do the same with my music.
My music is gone.
All of it.
Gone.
I feel as if I have lost a favorite pet…it was crushed by a dying laptop.

Safety suit, Santigold, Ben folds, Ingrid Michelson, Coldplay, Counting Crows, One Republic, Random Rap, Stateless, Parachute, Paramore, Allison Krous, Dave Mathews Band, The Swell Season, Josh Radin, Imogen Heap, Goo Goo Dolls, Train, Vitamin String Quartet, Bach, Bethoven, Jack Johnson, Taylor Swift, Five for Fighting, Foo Fighters, Jet, Flyleaf, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kings of Leon (that one hurt), As Tall As Lions(that one hurt a lot), BAND OF HORSES…can’t….go…on…..

I think my heart is crawling on all fours, dragging its inferior Vena Cava of a tail behind it…leaving a ugly trail of brown blood on the white carpet…goodbye strings and drums, goodbye basses and cellos, goodbye kick A guitar solos, goodbye acoustic guitar that makes me drool…goodbye. I’m sorry I didn’t copy your name somewhere, I’m sorry I didn’t call the next day, I’m sorry I didn’t even say goodbye. WHAT KIND OF A PERSON AM I???

I now live in a world of depressing silence. All I have left is my little iPod, my little iPod holding what little music it can with no home to return to. Poor thing. It’s an orphan. I’ll refer to it as Annie now. Little Annie, my lonely, abandoned, neglected iPod. No more USB cables for it. No more electric highs or buzzes. No more musical library for it to wander through. My iPod is now deprived of sustenance and education. It’s going to be mentally stunted by the lack of new music. It’s going to be the annoying kid that sings the same songs over and over and over again, it’s going to be THAT kid.

ITunes can go to h-e-double hockey sticks. Who at ITunes agreed that once someone’s computer crashes, their library is forever closed? Evil people…evil people who would join the dark side for crappy, crumbly cookies, or worse, Nilla Wafers. You would think that with all of their knowledge, there would be some way to log back into iTunes to have your whole musical life there, but no, they’re too smart for that: They decided on the one time download policy. Forget taking a bite from that apple and putting it back into the refrigerator to finish eating it later, it won’t be there. One bite, one time, that’s all you get. What a waste. Had I known that, I would have just spent more time stealing apples rather than buying them to have them disappear in an ITunes magic trick.

We need a music super hero. I imagine a guy- young, maybe early twenties- who’s a hybrid of all music types. He’s got dark, brown hippy hair, glasses, emo bangs, ear gauges, a diamond studded tooth, a 5:00 O’clock shadow, tattoo sleeve on his right arm, a European/Australian Accent, piano hands with string calluses at the end, and some Toms. And he works at a Guitar Shoppe, and goes by the name, St. Steven.

St. Steven is the guardian of all things musical, that’s right, guardian. He’s like a human musical encyclopedia. He knows every song ever created, all the notes in that song, and he even knows who wrote it. And when he hears the cries of someone (me) in pain due to a musical catastrophe, he rides in on sound waves carried from Mount Treble (the place of his birth) which is much smaller, though the neighbor to Mount Olympus. Yeah, he’s part human- his mom was Heather, the blond who worked in a music store chewing juicy fruit and selling used records- and his dad was the god Apollo.

You might think that with a god-dad and a cool mom, he’d have a better name, but on the day he was born on Mount Treble, the sun momentarily went out, and because everything on Mount Treble works by sunlight, the power was gone. Because his mom was so in tune with music, she needed it in order to get through the birth…and Apollo was gone tuning some god’s guitar or maybe it was a sitar so he couldn’t sing to her or play the lovely lyre, the radio wouldn’t work with no power, and she couldn’t sing to herself because she was actually tone deaf, but then, just when she thought there was no hope, she found a toy Hera had given to her for the baby, a-grateful-dead-in-the-box. Perhaps you have never heard of this before, but that is only because the grateful-dead-in-the-box isn’t made anymore…too many people were becoming curious about its origin, which was actually Olympus because the gods liked a little grateful dead too. They were all freaked out by the Jack-in-the-box, except Hades, he thought it was delightful, which is the real reason why he was kicked out of Olympus and put in the land of the dead; no one could stand the suspense of little Jack popping out of the box. So after Hades and his demented toy were kicked out, the gods replaced Jack with Jerry and changed the song to St. Steven. So, on the evening of his birth, his mom cranked and cranked the grateful-dead-in-the-box, all the while she sang to herself, “St. Steven with a rose, in and of the garden he goes. Country garden in the wind and the rain, wherever he goes people all…” and right when Jerry sprung from the box, the little boy was born, and named St. Steven accordingly.

St. Stephen inherited his mother’s musical artist wisdom and his father’s musical ear, and thus, creating the perfect super hero for my debacle. And if he were to hear my cry, St. Steven would appear as if on wings, I would tell him my dilemma, and from his musical soul and through the ends of his callused fingers, he would command the exact music I had lost back onto my computer. End.

I can’t believe I really just made that up on the spot. Or did I? Maybe there really is a St. Steven somewhere rocking out….whispering to the minds of all artists desiring to write a song that will reach beyond our human limits….or trying to remind us to back up our iTunes on a flash drive.