OK, Break's Over

My first car was a 1984 Chrysler Laser. You might look at that and say "Robert, that there is a Dodge Daytona" but no sir, that's a Chrysler Laser. Subtle differences. I used to point them out to anyone who would listen.

That's not my exact car, of course. That's the color, but mine had different rims. I spent $4,000 on the car in 1989 and then immediately spent $700 on new rims. Rims were everything. Rims were the reason high school girlfriend #2 and #4 dated me. I should find a photo of similar rims.

Apologies to all of my female readers for raising the temperature in here.

My Laser had a tape deck. In college – I think around 1993 or so – I got a Sony Discman with skip protection (so you could use it in the car on a bumpy road) and then one of those fake cassette thingys with a cord attached. You'd put the cassette in the tape deck and then the cord would run out to your Discman and then you could play your CD's in the car. I don't know why I told you any of that because this story is about the tape deck.

I heard Gen X described as the Cassette Tape Generation and that's so true. In the 60's and 70's they had vinyl records, in the 90's everyone got CD's, kids today can pull up any song on the planet with their watch, but when you were cruising around town in 1989 pretending you were actually going to stop and talk to those girls at the Northtown parking lot, you were playing a cassette tape in your car.

And with a cassette tape, you listen to albums. Sure, some people had the fancy fast forward that would stop at the next song, but I did not. If I wanted to listen to the fourth song on an album, I'd fast forward for 35 seconds, hit play, find that I'm still on the third song, fast forward again, stop nearly at the end of the song I wanted to hear, and then just give up and listen to the fifth song. Because of that frustration, you often listened to all albums straight through. Your favorite song is the fourth song on the front side of the tape? Wait 15 minutes - it will come on.

I still had that car in the summer of 1993. And there was one tape that stayed in my tape deck nearly the entire summer. It's not an album I would have originally gotten into, but I bought it for one song, listened to the rest of the album (you kind of had to), and then got hooked. The album: Ten Summoner's Tales by Sting.

The album had a fair number of hits (sorry, "bangers" as you kids call them). The three most well-known songs are probably It's Probably Me, Fields Of Gold, and If I Ever Lose My Faith In You. But the one that stuck with me, for whatever reason, is Saint Augustine In Hell. Put that song on and I can picture every road I drove in the summer of 1993.

The song has a very very very weird bridge. It's a great pop song and then suddenly there's just this voice talking (some guy with a deep British accent - not Sting) who is supposed to be the devil. And he's talking about everyone who is in hell (or something - I didn't get very deep with songs back then). And he finishes his little interlude by laughing, and then saying "OK, break's over", and then laughing some more. It's at 2:30 of this video:

Since then – my whole life, really – I hear that guy with that accent saying "OK, break's over" when I'm transitioning from downtime to busy time. I don't know if everyone's brain works like that, but whenever I'm in a conversation that circles around the topic of "time to buckle down", I hear "(laughter) OK, break's over (laughter)" in my head. And then I think about the summer of 1993 and my Chrysler Laser and wish life were that simple again. (And then I count my blessings and my grandkids and my football team and realize that life is amazing right now.)

I heard the song again today driving home from Bret Bielema's press conference. I mean, I didn't hear the song. I left the Smith Center, I was driving down Kirby, I saw a bunch of activity going on (either setting up for fall camp or preparing the stadium for the season), and there was that British devil in my head again.

"OK... break's over (laughter)"

The first practice is tomorrow night. The most anticipated season of Illini football in my lifetime is here. You feel pressure, I feel glee. All I've ever wanted is to enter August without hopelessness. And now I'm entering August with actual hope.

How will the season go? Don't know yet! Will there be a big letdown? Couldn't tell you! The reason I don't put out the preview until the Monday before the season and the reason I don't predict the season record until the night before the first game is because I need all of August to collect my thoughts. I'll be a squirrel storing up nuts for the season for the next month. And then I'll turn those nuts into, uh, peanut butter (?) when I write the preview in a few weeks.

Every year when I'm writing the preview, I'll complain to someone about how much writing I have left and they'll inevitably say "why not start June 1?" (or something similar). And my answer is always the same. The words I would write on June 1 would look nothing like the words I would write on August 22nd. I need to immerse myself in everything first.

And no, that doesn't mean "at least one week at Camp Rantoul" like it used to. I live here now, but with closed practices, I see 1/4th the August football I used to when I had to travel here from St. Louis. I've had to adjust the way I write the preview because of it.

But that doesn't mean I can't immerse myself. I write the preview from a mental space where I'm surrounded by Illinois football everything. Tailgate prep. This year (and last year), fire truck prep. Practice attendance. Group texts with friends. I embed myself and then I write out my thoughts. "Rumination" probably isn't the right word because that has a negative context, but it's close to that. The reason I don't write as much in May, June, and July is because August requires immersion.

If you're new here (who is ever new here? I ducked behind a paywall five years ago and no one new really knows what I do because I never link articles anywhere or advertise the website), when I'm talking about "the preview" I'm talking about the 20,000+ word preview that I write every August. We have three subscription tiers here - an Introductory Membership for $25 per year, a "Grange Membership" with extras for $77 per year, and a supporter tier called the "Seventeen Club" for $17 per month – and subscribers at those top two tiers get the preview (a PDF, last year 54 pages single spaced) emailed to them the Monday before our first game. If you want to subscribe (I'd, like, appreciate it and stuff), you can do so here.

(The point of all of that: the upper two subscription tiers get the preview. I'll reference the preview a lot in the next few weeks. Preview preview preview. And that's who gets the preview.)

Those two tiers also get the Slack channel. It's our message board that's not a message board. Someone in the next three weeks is going to ask me "Robert, where are the practice notes you used to write up all the time?" Those exist on Slack now. If you're a subscriber at one of those two levels and you never got your Slack invite email (sometimes it's screened to "promotions" or spam), just email me (Robert@illiniboard.com) and I'll send it to you again.

Oh, and one other thing while we're on the subject. One thing that takes me a fair bit of time on the admin side of things: expired credit cards. If any of you subscribers know that you had a lost, stolen, or expired card number in the last 12 months and you plan to allow the auto-renew to do it's thing when your renewal comes up, can I ask that you go to that link (here it is again) and update with your new card information? It's not a huge deal – you would get an email if your auto renew can't process because of an expired credit card number – but it saves me the headache. Again, this is only if you plan to renew. Which you should because I'm so damn entertaining.

The point I've been trying to get to: break is over. The season is here. Immersion is imminent. Between Easter and now my wife and I visited Idaho, Los Angeles, the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Jekyll Island in Georgia, St. Louis (of course), South Haven, Michigan, Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, Glacier National Park, Fayetteville, Arkansas, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Three of those trips were her work trips where I tagged along and the rest were vacation trips. We have summered the hell out of our summer.

But that's over now. The first football practice is tomorrow night (open to the media for 45 minutes!). I'm about to sink into the orange ooze and not resurface until late March. Top-15 football team, top-15 basketball team. The 20's Belong To The Illini.

See you there. See you... everywhere.