Part 3: Children of the supernormal

When forming an understanding of anomalous experiences, it helps to ask the history and meaning of the concepts and terminology it has evolved from, and what those words were attempting to do. For that, the word “Spiritualism” and the history surrounding it is a worthy starting point, keeping in mind that people have had what is conventionally now known as ‘spiritual experiences’ throughout the world and history. The Encyclopedia Britannica in the early 20th century described “Spiritualism” as:

“a term used by philosophical writers to denote the opposite of materialism, and also used in a narrower sense to describe the belief that the spiritual world manifests itself by producing in the physical world effects inexplicable by the known laws of nature.” ¹

The first thing I notice with the definition is the way it spans a broad philosophical meaning and then a narrow experiential one. The second thing I notice is that the second meaning subtly concedes: inexplicable by the known laws of nature — with the crucial qualifier, known. The authors did not write “inexplicable by the laws of nature.” The key distinction is the phrasing, “known laws of nature.” The exception is, thus, built into the definition as both precaution and foresight.

I’d also note that something interesting is missing from the definition. Nowhere in its words on séances, mediums, raps, and the whole apparatus of modern Spiritualism does the word paranormal appear. The entry is a fossil of its time — written when investigators used a different term entirely, one now almost forgotten: the supernormal.

As I follow the entry, my word search takes me to Hydesville, New York, 1848.

What began the Spiritualism movement, the entry shows, was the family of Mr and Mrs J. D. Fox and their two daughters, in Hydesville, New York, disturbed in 1848 by unexplained knockings. It was one of the daughters, Kate, aged eight or nine, who discovered the sounds would obey requests — that the cause was, according to their account, intelligent. With communication established, the rapper professed to be the spirit of a murdered pedlar.

From that single household came, over time, a transatlantic movement. From knocks agreed to mean no and yes, an elaborate technology of alphabets, table-turning, trance-speaking, and materialized hands. And from the story of a murdered pedlar came a claim that the dead never left, and can be reached by certain means.

The story’s entry is remarkable less for its history than for its record, for it leaves both sides of the account open.

The account continues to indicate that experiments conducted in 1851, as part of ongoing investigations into their claims, suggested the Fox girls produced their rapping sounds by partially dislocating and restoring their own joints. Additional investigations revealed that the conditions most favorable to obtaining phenomena were also precisely those most favorable for deception. According to one Stainton Moses, a leading Spiritualist at the time and himself a self-professed medium, people did not get what they wanted or expected in 99 out of 100 cases. Further experiments by a certain professor of physics at Geneva convinced him that the unusual experiences, séances in particular, were of an unknown force. The results of which, in addition to a listing of other investigations into these experiences and claims, were inconclusive at the time, indicating that it could be deception or some other conventially unexplainable phenomena.

What should an anomalologist make of a century like that one? Perhaps the calls of fraud and the possibility of truth are not mutually exclusive. They are the same history, of course, but even the exposure of frauds and conmen didn’t explain all accounts, including those by witnesses otherwise known to be competent and trustworthy. In the end, the claims of the Fox girls were never fully accounted for, leaving witnesses to draw their own conclusions.

If I view these accounts through the lens of Part 2: the Fox girls as witnesses, Hydesville as place, the communications as account, and Crookes, the Society for Psychical Research, and ultimately the Britannica itself as observers — each deciding what the phenomena would labeled and categorized. Such categorizations are never neutral, then or now.

It is worth pausing to examine the entry's vocabulary, because it lacks its own awareness and foreknowledge of how terminology and accounts would later evolve. The entry uses the term supernormal rather than paranormal, which came into context and the lexicon years later. Supernormal was coined by Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, based on a need for a term to include the beyond-normal without theological commitment. Supernatural belonged to the church. Supernormal was an attempt at a neutral perspective.

Paranormal came onto the scene in English in 1905, a loanword from the French, and for three decades the two terms competed, with the newcomer winning sometime around 1937-1938 due, at least in part, to J.B. Rhine’s experimental program at Duke University, which was part of the same shift that retired “psychical research” in favor of parapsychology, a term coined by philosopher Max Dessoir in 1889. The séance moved to the laboratory, and the vocabulary followed it, where it would, by the end of the 20th century, begin to fade from serious discourse and take up new residence in popular culture and mass media as entertainment.

What I find interesting, however, are the prefixes rather than the succession.

Super- means beyond. The supernormal rises above the normal; it claims transcendence, however carefully disclaimed. Para- means beside. The paranormal is the neighbouring country — not above the world, adjacent to it, a republic next door whose border nobody has satisfactorily mapped. And beneath both sits the parent term of this series: anomalous, from the Greek anōmalos — uneven, irregular; not against the law, not above it, not beside it, but simply off it. Outside the pattern.

Each prefix is a small, subtle ontology. Each word, in being chosen, redefines what kind of thing the phenomena were permitted to be: transcendent, adjacent, or merely unruly. There was no adjudication involved as to how these terms entered the vernacular of common discourse and conversation. The drift from supernormal to paranormal to anomalous was a century-long slide and the witnesses whose experiences were being renamed were, as usual, not part of the result.

There is a lesson here for the anomalologist, and it parallels a theme I began in Part 1: the classification of anomalous experiences is never neutral. Neither is the classifier's dictionary, often smuggling in biases and motivations masked by the veil of clinical objectivity, theological canon, or mystical desire.

Whatever became of Hydesville, the movement it began died long ago as an institution leaving behind only traces of the legitimate questions those events triggered.

Strip the séance rooms of their conjuring, the mediums of their cracked toes, the century of its documented fraud, and something remains that neither side has been able to remove. What remains still are the central underlying questions of what was left unexplained and why. This does not mean that investigation into the supernormal-paranormal have ceased. Merely to say that they have transformed over the decades since, from shocking domestic phenomena to religious propaganda to streaming jump-scare entertainment.

Despite this evolution, roughly one-third to one-half of the given populace report having personally experienced at least one such experience in their lifetime.² That’s not an insignificant figure. More interestingly, I suspect, is that most people avoid discussing such experiences openly, leaving any sharing of them to closed, confidential conversations with psychologists, priests, or sympathetic therapists. I would also presume that any resulting explanations or conclusions they arrive at are likely as varied as the people and encounters themselves. Experiences that occur within the world, framed as of the world — beside or outside its known laws.

Here the honest scholar meets the central problem, and I should admit it. A strange dream is not an anomaly. Noises in an old house are not anomalies. The feeling of being watched in an empty parking garage on a late Sunday afternoon is not an anomaly. Each is odd; none crosses any line an impartial observer could identify and explain. And yet somewhere between the odd and the anomalous there is a boundary, no one knows precisely where, and every party to this history — the grieving mother, Faraday with his unconscious muscles, the aged encyclopedia entry — has stood at that boundary and decided, or refused to decide, where the Hydesville phenomena belonged.

The anomalologist, I propose, does not adjudicate the truth or falsehood of such accounts, or draw the line between them. Certainly, each person who encounters them will draw their own conclusions, which may or may not change with time and experience.

What I’m left with is the position the anomalologist takes toward the vocabulary of the last two centuries. I’m not one to discard terms or choose victors. I gather them while keeping their history, meaning, and function.

The spiritual remains the oldest term, the manifestation of a spiritual world into the physical, the belief of the mourner at the séance. It deserves neither praise nor condemnation. The term simply identifies what the experience meant to those who lived it. The supernormal remains what Myers forged it to be, a term of careful trespass, beyond the normal without requiring theology. The paranormal remains the word that conventiionally won out a century ago. And encompassing both of them is the anomalous, making no promise about divinity, transcendence, adjacency, or meaning. It claims only that a pattern exists.

None of these terms is wrong. Each is a piece of a larger puzzle, forged by the people who needed them, the eras they inhabited, and the cultures they inherited.

#Anomalology

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Notes:

1. Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Volume 25 (1911).

2. Bauer E. (2004). “Panel Discussion: Counseling persons with exceptional experiences: The example of the IGPP.” in Paper presented at the 47th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association. 319–324.

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What is Anomalology?

• Part 1: Defining the Undefinable
• Part 2: Anomalies and Frames
• Part 3: Children of the supernormal

---

By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Créditos · © 2025 Juanma Menéndez

Esta obra está licenciada bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional (CC BY 4.0).

Esto significa que puede ser compartida, copiada, adaptada y distribuida en cualquier medio o formato, incluso con fines comerciales, siempre que se dé el crédito adecuado al autor.

#procesos

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

“Greenland will be a policeman, and it will extend to Iqaluit.”

— jtw

Sometimes I wonder how I became a pastor.

Yeah, I know the official story.

I went through CAMS. C-A-M-S. I studied. I worked. I went through the exhorter program. I did what they told me to do.

But then, right before I could take my final test, my son was diagnosed with bone cancer.

And suddenly, that test didn’t matter very much.

I wasn’t leaving my son to go take an exam.

So I waited a year.

The next year came, and because of a miscommunication, I missed it again.

Another year.

Another delay.

Another round of studying because things had changed.

At the time, it felt like life kept getting in the way of ministry.

Looking back, I realize something.

It was the ministry.

God wasn’t keeping me from my education.

He was giving me one.

Sometimes I wonder how I became a chaplain.

Then God starts reminding me.

Back in 2006, there was Grandma Logan.

Colon cancer. Hospice.

Mom and I were there taking care of her.

Then Dad got sick. COPD. His breathing became harder, his world became smaller, and Mom and I took care of him until he passed away.

I was a caregiver for Grandma.

I was a caregiver for Dad.

Then came my son.

Bone cancer.

The very reason I couldn’t take my ministerial exam became another classroom.

No desk. No textbook. No professor.

Just cancer.

Fear.

Prayer.

Hospitals.

Waiting rooms.

And learning how to stand beside somebody you love when you cannot fix what is hurting them.

Years later, I stood in my own church and married that same son to Kaylee.

There were probably 80 to 100 people in that sanctuary.

Love filled the room.

It was beautiful.

Then Kaylee began helping take care of him. As he grew older and matured, he learned to take care of himself.

And then there was Mom.

Mom had been my mother.

Then she became my co-parent, helping me raise my children.

But dementia is a thief.

Little by little, it took pieces of her away.

And somewhere along that road, the woman who had once tucked me into bed became my little girl.

I tucked her in.

I kissed her forehead.

And at night, I would have her repeat the Lord’s Prayer with me—

the same prayer she had taught my children,

the same prayer she had taught me when I was a child.

Life had turned the whole thing around.

The hands that once cared for me were now in my hands.

And I cared for her.

So sometimes I wonder how I became a chaplain.

How I became a pastor.

And then I look backward.

Grandma.

Dad.

My son.

Mom.

Hospice rooms.

Hospital rooms.

Bedrooms.

Deathbeds.

Wedding altars.

Church altars.

And suddenly I can see it.

God had been training me the whole time.

I thought I was being delayed.

God was developing me.

I thought life kept interrupting my ministry.

Life was becoming my ministry.

And now I’m a caretaker for a church.

Because pastors aren’t just preachers.

We’re caretakers.

We take care of bruised souls.

Hurting hearts.

Weak faith.

People who come through the doors carrying wounds nobody else can see.

And we stay with them.

We pray with them.

We preach Jesus to them.

We walk beside them until the bruises begin to fade, the weakness begins to strengthen, and the broken places begin to heal.

Not because the pastor has the power to heal them.

But because Jesus does.

He came to bind up the brokenhearted.

And maybe that’s how I became a pastor.

Maybe that’s how I became a chaplain.

Not because one day somebody handed me a certificate and said,

“Now you’re ready.”

Maybe God had been preparing me for decades.

One bedside at a time.

One broken heart at a time.

One goodbye at a time.

And I didn’t even know I was in school.

Choir sound is different

Over the last year, Keri and I have been working on a choir sound. We got some things, read some things, and went to town on experiments. We got in the garage. We got the closet. We even tried the shower. We just did a job for a cool song from Scotland by Andrew Anderson, coming soon. We feel good about the choir sound now. I wanted to talk concepts about making good choir in your songs.

Disclaimer:

First off, both Keri and I grew up in protestant church choir and that has a lot to do with our sound. We are not trained, we just showed up. My concept of choir might be slightly different than yours if you have never sung at vacation bible school, or a funeral, or a wedding.

If you were a dozen people, it would be really loud.

I learned by placing different mics in different rooms that the nicer mics get to do their thing in large spaces. I found this crucial for making convincing choir tracks. The room had to be bigger than my normal tracking space.

The mic I am currently using for these kinds of tracks is the Myrtle by Ear Trumpet labs. The Myrtle picks up from 3 feet away like nothing. So I put it in a large room, imagining the sound going out in front and not being able to bounce back to the mic. Huge space. Garage works. A hallway gives interesting and notable results. The small insulated room isn’t even usable here. I would have to change mics.

It has to move.

So I have my big space and I set my mic, it never moves through the whole process. But Keri and I move a ton. I have a taped out semi circle, 4 X’s, we’ll take turns. No choir we have done before sounds good up on a smaller mic, standing in the same spot. But the choir tracks have movement and realism if we stand in 4 or 5 different spots. For Andrew, we did 2 groups of 4 spots. Each.

This works for other instruments too. If you play strings, put the cello, bass, viola, and violin, in all different spots. I’d probably just go with a semicircle there too. But you can get a little crazy…

A fabulous way to learn your mics.

Maybe you have a big room with a little closet. Experiment with standing in the closet, facing the room, singing or playing. With the Myrtle, I get very usable sound this way. But I also get it with the SM58 too. Now turn the operation around. Stand in the room, face the closet, see what happens. I think this helps me with mic placement everywhere, just having done it at home. By doing this, I can echolocate places for microphones better. I have a hearing memory of their reaction to different size spaces. Muscle memory is talked about a lot in other jobs.. I use a lot of hearing memory.

Now do it with multiple distances away and to the side of that mic. You might not realize it, but you are building a choir!

Small set up, large space.

Choir tracks need space, an ensemble mic, an iPad, an interface. It is not necessary to try to force tracking at the house when you can borrow a church’s sanctuary to track vocals. We have. We’ve tracked whole live songs in churches too. Tiny donation, they open the doors. The nice mics love it. They can breathe.

Choir coming on The Kintners record out Christmas.

This time we wanted to try at the house since we are recording a double-album ourselves. Andrew got us off our butts about the choir. Glad he did. I think we have it worked out. One less thing to worry about for the record, choir.

Kelly Kintner

The Horses Mouth

The Kintners

Djembe Funk

I posted some time ago about how I was going to start prepping for a 5k running event. Now here I am, weeks later, at the other end of that prep. It went quite well. To be honest, surprisingly well.

Yesterday was the last day of intermittent fasting. This morning was my last run while wearing the weighted vest. I've never done anything like this in my entire life. I don't know if what I've been doing will result in a personal best on race day, but I have to say that I feel quite healthy and fit.

I've been at this point prior to other running events. Just days to go. It is an odd place to be every time. It is the point where no more gains can be made. I will be at the peak. Whatever the outcome of my efforts is meant to be; it will be that.

These prep routines for running events are kind of funny to me. I go into it all knowing that I could train harder, and be faster, if only running was the main focus of my life. I could be on a very strict 5k training plan that has been used, tried and tested, by professional athletes.

As it is though, running prep is not my main focus. I have to find ways to fit it into my life that revolves around doing a very physical, and at times stressful job for 40 hours a week. It consumes more of my waking hours than anything (getting ready, getting there, doing it). It is not easy... but what is, really?

I started to get into fitness just prior to the beginning of COVID restrictions. I told those stories elsewhere in this blog. I never would have started running if the gyms had not closed when they did. I have learned a lot about running over the years. Each year has been different. I kind of view it as a strange skill that I have developed over the last few years. Also a strange knowledge I now have about what my body is physically capable of.

This year I was doing interval runs, and stairmaster, while wearing a 12 pound weighted vest. I had never done this before. I expected it to be hard, and it was. Very hard. I expected weight loss, my legs to become stronger, and my resting heart rate to become lower. Those things happened. Some things happened that were a surprise: Number one would be how my balance has become noticeably better. My upper body strength has increased. It forced me into engaging core muscles, and also forced me into better running form. I can feel that I have increased lung capacity. These things were a surprise, but after thinking about it, they make sense.

Overall I would say that I feel quite good. Race ready. I would also say though, as good as it feels, it is very unnecessary for living daily life. Not only unnecessary but is also, to me anyway, mentally unsustainable. I can be fit and healthy without being race ready.

https://write.as/thingsleftunsaid/event-prep

https://write.as/thingsleftunsaid/running

https://write.as/thingsleftunsaid/fitness

College Football Saturday

If I am home (circumstances may call me away, but let's hope not) and have the option, my first college football game of choice today finds the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers travelling to Bloomington, Indiana, to play the Indiana Hoosiers. The game is scheduled to start at 3:00 PM CDT and good radio pregame coverage should be available an hour earlier. GO HOOSIERS!

And the adventure continues.

At long last, I now have a physical film library again.

In a way.

Going the DVD route is simply not an option for me, as I don't have the space to store that shit. Plus, the constant moving over the past 12 years has put me in the state of mind of thinking twice before adding to my physical possessions (I still maintain a storage unit back in Houston filled with books, comics, zines, records, and I don't even remember what else).

So, with leaning on anything like DVDs or videotapes being out of the question, and being really sick of the subscription-based streaming service model, I opted to go the SSD route. One terabyte dedicated to film. It is presently loaded with 171 titles accounting for a little over 200 gigs. Room for much, much more. Now I just need to get another dedicated drive for TV shows, one for music, and one for books and comics (still prefer physical for those, but not everything I'd like to have in physical form is within reach, plus it'd be a bonus to have a digital copy of all physical books I acquire because I've lost most of my physical belongings at least 3 times in my life and it never hurts to have a backup just in case).

#journal

The Arrow, Painted

To the North And policy of neighbours This is the sight we knew Failed landings by the yardhouse And a hijack of esteem We were very aware, just- A friend And in the swill Of the colleagues we share Man will have a plan of time And to be shoring now A difficult way in And subservients of war And there will be no money Nor peace- even if we liked our reach But then reviled- The rightist fight It is only my country And it is a landgrab No benediction Beauty bereft And the tides of another- will do us in And to speak of the arousal The ancient high One can live with anxiety But this operand is here The living and paid little The worst work in the world- which is to live under the United States Plain in sight There are plaintiffs And there is will And to the first of mind We were errant to the South But Denmark sold us As mercury would And seven times the Dutch In a river of years

And mercy howled For honest endeavour And we were chains on a cross The living avoidant And this river Would it stay the same

And the Earth ate the salt And there was no plan But the United States and money

Fresh as going alone There is errant ground And convolutions of wicca For the Sun has a plan,- so they thought But I was hoping- To be eating peace for dinner And now there is none.

20 Hours

Russia sees its reward In coming clean at first And time’s original thought Why verses Rome to court Apart as we are Symphonic distress To the notions that be A place in Quispamsis becover And Nuuk across the arc What difficulty Rome In quarts of lethal wonder To the sacristy we kept And Donald never came And stole our world And our share of thoughts to know Cavity to stream Pieces fired anew And Jehovah’s Witnesses came To speak across the road Inefficiency be And Nuuk would go to Rome Beatified at night Thus early cross Fit for dozen wonder Why excessive Kushner For all to fall forget And banking proud To Russia as they saw Greenland across the bay.

Put it To Rest

In today’s better and remain We sought what we all have A night into the aether And legions by the year Hurried to Afghanistan Apparently by rote And Rome And rote And war The efficacy men In letting grass remain And off accustom view Witnessing the trial Men ahead, Ascension Ligatures and light

And who was there for fortune cure Every Justice called to act A year for portmanteau In lucky shares to Telluride

Nothing for suggesting But the ruse I thought you knew Mentality is sinking On this ice and growling sheen Up and coming just this once To be better then and back As a difficult endeavour We sought and we elect

In time Europa kneeling We hug the best at dawn Raoul rather than rather The Earth shall keep us keen While the Taiga at its will For us to row and without flight The licensure in keep Too much vernal but we show And in this crisis might I should Ever after on this cay What good redemption, Peter In a better view and pie

Thought to body ransom Impure to fight to loss Renewing what is spoken To the court and country worth

Oxygen to wherewithal Standing fortress by the board In between our haught appeal Roads to roses, then and for

Isn’t limelight for the limited As a day in Holy curfew We ascended to the Trinity In this day alight to shore And the mercy we extended All our neighbours Sultan row No more laughter but in daylight No duress, my Doukhobor

Maybe set and in discretion Digitalis on the Moon My redemption has no Heaven But to you, my God above

And in this peace of Ferdinand We obsessed with what we have Inner order and of strength This to wherefore by the sea

Intonating every know-how Fresh to bloom in cotton air I can see my city running Golden lava, just to there.

While revising one of the essays on method, a question emerged that felt larger than the editing itself.

Which sentence is the defining sentence?

Literary criticism often looks for one. The sentence that unlocks the piece. The sentence from which everything else follows. The sentence that resolves the argument and allows the essay to close neatly upon itself.

There is elegance in that approach. But I find myself increasingly resistant to it.

It's a question of focus – here are a few words I scribbled in the margin: I think at this point I don't want the piece to have a clarity of focus – I want a vagueness to it – that encourages the reader to explore, perhaps to define for themselves – I don't want to close the circle in that way – I know that literary critics would see that as elegant, but a pedestrican crossing is more than stripes on the tarmac.

Yes the image that came to mind was a pedestrian crossing.

A critic might look at a pedestrian crossing and see a successful arrangement of white stripes on tarmac. They might admire the geometry, the symmetry, or the way each stripe contributes to the overall design.

Yet a pedestrian crossing is more than stripes on the road. It may even have lights. It is an invitation to cross. A convention shared by drivers and pedestrians. A piece of civic infrastructure. A relationship between risk and trust. The visible part is not one thing, and it's not the whole thing.

I am trying to construct my essays to work in a similar way. Readers rarely leave carrying away an entire argument. More often they carry fragments. A phrase. An image. A question. A way of looking; perhaps even an adjusted disposition.

One reader may remember: Dig where you stand. Another may remember: The contradiction remains interesting. Someone else may carry away: The argument can wait.

I am not convinced that any one of these must become the master key to the others. Readers bring themselves to the page. They are not all some idealized type.

The temptation to identify a single defining sentence is really a temptation to close the circle. To say: this is what the essay is about. Yet some essays are less concerned with bringing a reader to a destination than equipping them for a journey. Perhaps essays do not always need a centre. Perhaps they need landmarks.

A landmark is not the destination. Nor does it prescribe a route. It helps someone orient themselves within a larger landscape. That thought seems increasingly important to my own practice. I am less interested in delivering conclusions than in offering navigation tools.

A useful essay may not tell a reader where to go next. It may simply help them recognise where they are standing. And from there, they can decide the direction for themselves. David Marshall Flic en Flac, Mauritius

Publicat la 6 septembrie 2011

Pe vremea când încă mai primeam mașinuțe, eram cu părinții în vizită la o fostă profesoară universitară a mamei mele. Nu eram ca Dl. Goe, așa că ei nu-și făceau griji că aș putea face ceva rău (asta s-a întâmplat într-o altă vizită). Din locul în care mă jucam, am auzit-o pe doamna profesoară povestindu-le cu mândrie părinților mei un episod aproape de neconceput la acea vreme. Fiul ei, student la acea vreme, mirat că profesorul său îl tot apostrofa pe un alt student, a îndrăznit să i se adreseze astfel:

„Hey, teacher, leave the kid alone!”

Ați recunoscut, probabil, unul dintre faimoasele versuri ale nu mai puțin faimoasei piese Another Brick in the Wall, de pe excepționalul album The Wall, al formației rock Pink Floyd.

Era primul meu contact cu Pink Floyd.

Și încă nu venise Revoluția!

Doamna profesoară locuia la Timișoara. Aveau să treacă ani buni până la libertatea de exprimare. Iar în decembrie ’89, tocmai de acolo avea să înceapă prăbușirea zidului care ne înconjura viețile.

Dar acel prim contact a fost atât de puternic — sunt tentat să fac o analogie tehnică, dar mă abțin — încât, de fiecare dată când ascult Pink Floyd, mă trec fiorii sau mi se face pielea de găină…

Coincidență sau nu, primul album Pink Floyd pe care l-am avut a fost The Wall, înregistrat pe o casetă BASF de 90 de minute!

Între timp, l-am oferit unui vecin adolescent, cu gusturi muzicale în formare…

Mai poate fi o coincidență faptul că avatarul meu preferat este o secvență din Comfortably Numb, cu Bob Geldof într-un fotoliu?

Cred că nu!

De fapt, avatarul acesta avea să-mi fie de folos mult mai târziu, după desființarea comunității ascultătorilor Virgin Radio. Împrăștiați care-ncotro, ne-am regăsit, totuși, câțiva dintre noi.

La un moment dat, cineva mi-a spus că mi-a recunoscut avatarul și că și-a dat seama că eram chiar eu, nu altcineva.

Și nici nu era de mirare.

Fotografia fusese făcută în 2007, la Budapesta, la concertul lui Roger Waters, The Dark Side of the Moon — spectacol care avea să includă și episoade din The Wall.

Așa că, dacă primul meu contact cu Pink Floyd a fost o voce auzită cu mult timp înainte de Revoluție, iar primul album a fost The Wall, poate că avatarul acela nu era chiar o simplă coincidență.

Poate că era doar o altă cărămidă din zid.