Turntable Man is not feeling well. He gets his exercise from countless trips from his carefully positioned listening chair to the turntable and back, so he can lift the needle and play the same song repeatedly. The song is “You Were Born to Be Loved” by Lucinda Williams. From this you can deduct that Turntable Man doesn’t feel validated, successful or wanted: He has one hell of a case of the blues. Either that or he just likes the way it sounds. A round trip to the turntable and back is 16 feet, so it takes many song repetitions for this activity to accrue a meaningful number of steps, but he’s seemingly intent on wearing out the record, and all those steps add up. This will take a long time, because the turntable is an expensive model that exerts hardly any pressure on the stylus. Listening to Lucinda Williams’ reassuring lyrics, Turntable Man worries: about the perfidy of bug exterminators, the sanctity of raw dairy products, high pressure fronts that can spawn tornadoes, the deteriorating state of the gutters on his house, the damage many boxes of Entenmann’s pastries have done to his ability to metabolize glucose, the carnage countless bottles of alcoholic beverages have inflicted upon his liver, the savagery wrought upon his heart by a catastrophic love life. He finds some reassurance in the number of albums Lucinda Williams has recorded (15).
Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.
