This is the message I posted in December to a Listserv that talks about the bands "Loud Family" and "Game Theory". It is about how I found the love of my life.

For those of you with Attention Defecit Disorder, there is a short version as well.

I posted just a short while ago with hints about the story of how Game Theory played no small role in my finding the woman of my dreams. I also said that I'd eventually get around to telling y'all about it.

Well, this is it.

It *is* long.

Back in high school ('87), I used to occasionally pick up issues of Option magazine and peruse the album reviews in the back. It was a great way to find out about cool new groups and keep my music collection from becoming my own private copies of what I could hear by simply turning on the radio. That was where I'd first heard of Game Theory. As a band, that is. I sorta had a vague understanding of what it meant as a method of evaluating situations and making decisions. I had a habit that annoyed my friends back then; I would methodically go through the record racks alphabetically. When I got to Game Theory, I remembered the favorable review, and looked at the vinyl I found. It was a double-length album that was no more expensive than any other normal-length one, so I bought it. I taped it (plus a few tracks from The Enigma Variations, Vol II) and loved it. It stayed in my walkman for quite some time. It had so much that I enjoyed. Wonderful power pop. Weird bits that were squirmy and uncomfortable during the first few listens. Star Trek references. Very circuitous, yet eloquent and evocative lyrics. My bestest tracks were Chardonnay, Toby Ornette, Look Away, The Real Sheila, and in spite of it not being very flattering, it still had my name in it: Andy in Ten Years. I played that tape to almost to death. The EV2 stuff included Erica's Word and Shark Pretty, are also up there with my bestest.

Around a year later, I'm out of high school and working. 2 Steps From The Middle Ages comes out. I don't like it quite as much as my first taste, but enjoy it none-the-less. I had also found Real Nighttime on cassette, and kept scouring the bins for anything else. Then I read an ad that says they'll be playing in town. I *have* to go. They are playing at The Roxy, which quite oddly, usually only books Reggae bands. I go alone. I'm a little nervous that I might have to be 21 to get in (not quite at that point). But I have to go anyways. Turns out not to be a problem.

The stage at the place is barely 15x15 and is at least 4 feet up. Had a great view up Scott's nose. _The New Marines_ opened up. They were okay. I liked that the lead singer banged on shell casings with drumsticks, but that paled when the metal pipes were clanked in Friends of The Family. It was a great show and I heard so many things I'd wanted to, and lots I didn't recognize from earlier stuff I'd not yet found. When Scott offered to take requests, I jokingly suggested Vacuum Genesis, then got serious and asked for Andy in Ten Years. Scott had trouble remembering all the lyrics. One of the cool things I remembered from that show was that there was this girl who quite easily caught my eye. She had this green army overcoat that had a large "G" painted on the back. I thought she looked cool, but was way too shy about girls at that point in my life, so I didn't even talk to her. After the show, I wanted to buy a T-shirt, but they weren't selling any. I found Scott and asked him about it, and we went out to the van where he rummaged through some boxes until he found one. It was a size too small, but I bought it anyways. I drove home with ringing ears, but was quite happy.

Over the years I found Pointed Accounts on vinyl, got a CD player and picked up another copy of Lolita, this one minus the clicks and pops. I worked at Tower Records for a short while, and read something in some trade zine about a best-of compilation coming out. I was ecstatic. A few days later, I couldn't find the article anywhere, and nobody knew what I was talking about. Not even the representative for the company that distributed Enigma stuff. For 3 months I thought I must have just dreamt it one night or something. Finally, a friend tells me about Tinkers To Evers To Chance. I was so happy when I got a copy. Especially the liner notes that claimed that another minor music god of mine, Michael Quercio, was playing with them full-time. But not long after that, a letter from The Tater Totz told me that GT had broken up.

Some time later, I found about about The Loud Family, just in time to buy P&B&R&T on my way down to see them play in DC. Lots of new faces, with one still the same. Small crowd as always. I enjoyed the new stuff and was glad to hear the older stuff as well. I requested 24, which had a special meaning to me then. Scott wrote on the booklet from the Restless re-issue CD of Real Nighttime:

Congrats on being 24! A tip: The turtleneck was of no obvious benefit. Scott

I was quite embarrassed when he corrected me on the pronunciation of Michael Quercio's last name.

As we come forward in time to early Summer of 1994, I have left the working world to go to College. I have my Internet account and have been reading some Usenet Newsgroups on and off. Talk.bizarre. Dc.general. Rec.arts.erotica. But the one that I stick with most frequently is Rec.arts.bodyart. It is about tattooing and body piercing. I'd been with it since I first got my account around '91. I watched it grow bit-by-bit over time. I saw two people come in and finally organize a decent FAQ for the group. I even met and hung out with a few regulars when it turned out that we all were going to be at a science fiction convention in Baltimore, back in Spring of that year. One of the most interesting details that surfaced was that there seemed to be an unusually high population of pierced and tattooed Librarians who frequented the group. And a few who were working on Library Science degrees as well. Does a nice job of breaking the stereotypes of both who librarians are, AND who tattooed people are.

One of those librarians, who lives in Columbus Ohio, posted telling us all about her latest work. She had gotten the Alphabet tattooed across her back. Twice. Upper and Lower cases. The font was Bryn Mawr. She even typed up a sketch of what it looked like. I thought that was SO cool. Not at all the common small-flash-picked-off-the-wall-and-put-some-place-easy-to-hide. I wrote her some Email telling her how impressed I was, and asking her about some of her feelings about her new ink.

As you can tell from the bottom of this message and the other few I have posted in this group, my .signature lists what's in my 5-disc CD player. Well, Janet noticed the GT album and got excited. We wrote back and forth to one another about what other bands we liked in common, and what things we liked most about GT and our experiences with the music. Turns out she used to *live* in the DC area, and did some of her undergraduate work at GWU in town. She had seen GT twice in town, one of them being the *same* show at The Roxy. We shared our separate recollections of the evening. The Email we sent back an forth got longer and longer as we talked of our attitudes and cosmologies and what had gone on in our lives. At some point she mentions that she used to have this jacket on which she had painted this large "G" on the back. I wrote her back describing it in as much detail as I remembered. By now, we were writing back and forth to one another in about *7* different threads. It was amazing.

Some few weeks later, some people on the bodyart newsgroup organized get-together at a restaurant, so that many of us could put faces with the names and voices behind the words. Janet decided to collaborate with a few people who lived further away from DC and make a road-trip down for that weekend. When she posted in the group asking for crash- space, I checked with my house-mates and wrote back to her offering my house. She thanked me profusely and we started arranging the details.

Before that weekend arrived, she had sent me some pictures of her tattoo. Just her back. In all of the pictures she was facing away from the camera. I was SO intrigued! We talked on the phone for quite a long time, a few evenings before her trip down. I was SO anxious and nervous as I waited for them to arrive some time after midnight that night. When a car looped around and parked in front of my house, I walked out and met her on the driveway and gave her a big, long hug. Up until that point, I had avoided admitting to myself how in love with her I was. I was afraid that it wouldn't all come true. But every moment from then on, my feelings for her have just *grown*.

The four of us (Janet, myself, Cate and Sarah) sat up for a long while sharing stories and looking through tattoo and piercing magazines and talking about who we were expecting to meet tomorrow, and who we already knew. Eventually they got tired and I left them to my room and went to go sleep on the couch in the living room. Janet wandered out after a minute or two and we talked and held each other close and admitted our feelings to each other. We stayed up the whole night. The four of us had a wonderful weekend in DC and New York. We crashed at Cate's home in Delaware, and then drove back to Ohio to get Sarah back in time for the start of Fall classes at her school. I stayed at Janet's in Columbus that night. The next morning before we left to drive BACK to DC, Janet was showing me around her yard, and I realized something about the clothing she was wearing and where she was standing. I stopped to stare and marvel for a moment and then I *stepped into* the photo she had sent me. We drove back to DC and she stayed with me until the end of the week before leaving to meet her sister in *Toronto* for that weekend.

We go back and forth visiting each other almost monthly. The last time she came to visit, we found out on the day she left that Loud Family was playing in town again the *following* weekend. I chatted with Scott after the show and told him this story (maybe not quite so verbosely) and he enjoyed it quite a bit. He loved the idea of the alphabet tattoo, and he *remembered* the painted jacket from the Roxy show, too!

And it was there that Sue pointed me to this list. The first thing I did when I got home was fake some mail from Janet subscribing her to it. She was quite surprised the next morning.

Well, thats pretty much the story. I tried to limit it to the stuff would be of interest to this list. There's plenty more wonderful things I could say about Janet, and I could easily go on indefinitely that way, but that's not exactly what this list is about (for YOU people, at least). Hey, I'm in love. Sue me.

ObLoudFans: I have a tape of stuff from 120 Minutes that includes the video for Erica's word. One of the big wordy pieces of paper on the wall makes explicit reference to one of my favorite non-fiction books: Douglas Hofstadter's _Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_.

-- 
| These days in my five-disc player:    Stump -- A Fierce Pancake   |
|  Mercury Rev -- Yerself Is Steam  |*|  Meryn Cadell -- Bombazine  |
|   Stereolab -- Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements   |
|  Fripp & Eno -- No Pussyfooting/Evening Star  | IGNORE THIS SPACE |