This is a short story about dreaming into the future.

Maynard’s three children are having a sleep-over tonight. They come over about every other week or so lately to spend time with their father. I don’t mind in the slightest, though I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to relating to kids between the age of 8 and 14.

This evening, however, Maynard tells me that Cailean (the eldest, who is 12 or 13, I always forget) wants to hear Iron Man. As I’m certain Maynard expected, this fills my soul with a tremendous glee and I feel my heart grow two sizes.

“Yeah, I told him you’d be more than happy to introduce him to Black Sabbath.”

So I turn to the Monolith (the nickname for the big rotating CD rack), spin it a couple times, pull out a Black Sabbath album, slot it, and we listen with the volume up loud.

Cailean is what I call “Rock N’ Roll Curious”. I can tell that his tastes are protoplasmic: he doesn’t know where to go, what he likes. Maybe he doesn’t even like guitars? Is he a metalhead? Who knows.

So I decided the best way to do this was to prepare a “Rock N’ Roll 101” course for him. I pulled a set of CDs for him to take and listen to – the really, really basic building blocks – so that I can get a gauge of where he is.

In the list: Back in Black, Led Zeppelin I, Led Zeppelin IV, Black Sabbath, a Sabbath compilation, Frampton Comes Alive, The Best of the Doors, Legend (not really Rock N’ Roll but a good thermometer), Van Halen I, and Foreigner.

Building blocks.

This evening we sat down and we introduced him to Led Zeppelin IV. This was my introduction to the band back in, oh, 1984 (when I was twelve), and I think it worked out okay.

The other night I had a dream about something this.

I had forgotten about it until last night, when Charity made a reference to the movie Singles and I remembered that, in the dream, I was (for some reason) compiling a list of albums to for someone to listen to in order to get an overview of important rock and roll from 1970 to 2000, and (in the dream) I had gotten into an argument with someone about the proper chronological order of the Singles soundtrack and Sweet Oblivion by the Screaming Trees.

I wonder if I shouldn’t make such a list for real. I probably wouldn’t put Sweet Oblivion on such a list (but I would probably put the Singles soundtrack on there as an overview).

I wish my parents had listened to rock n’ roll. As it is, the only thing I can blame my father for is introducing me to the Beatles and getting me to love them when I was 17.

Which isn’t that small of a feat, when you think about the fact that I was listening to Slayer pretty exclusively then.