In my freshman year of college, I only owned about twenty audio CDs. My freshman year of college was also right before MP3 and, um, free music started really taking off. I think a solid twenty-five percent of my music catalog was Led Zeppelin. So, in 1996, I listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin.

I also have this “awesome” super-human power to endure the same music over and over. Ask any of my former roommates – I remember having a 200 MB (that is an M, for Mega) partition on which I stored MP3’s. An average MP3 length was about 4 MB, so this means I had about fifty to sixty songs that I listened to. So in effect, for almost nine months, I listened to the same songs over and over. I didn’t have room for anything else, and I liked them and as a digital packrat I didn’t want to delete them. I ought to apologize to Bautz directly for forcing him to listen to Radiohead’s The Bends roughly four-hundred times over the course of a school year. So, Bautz, I’m sorry I made you listen to Radiohead, bad techno, and probably a fair share of Led Zeppelin (see above paragraph).

For music now, I’ve mostly shifted to Pandora. Pandora is nothing short of rad, because it plays random music in whatever genre I feel like. It’s also trainable. For instance, if Led Zeppelin’s Dancing Days is playing, I can hit the thumbs up button, and in the future Pandora will find more songs like this. If another song, say, anything that isn’t by Led Zeppelin shows up, I can hit thumbs down to virtually strike Pandora with a rolled up newspaper. It’s great.

So rewind to 1997, with my small music catalog chock full of the Zep. In the winter of 1997, I broke up with my high-school sweetheart, with whom I had been foolishly attempting a long-distance relationship in college. These kinds of things make you sad, from what I understand. At the time, I had Led Zeppelin III in the old musical player – and when you’re sad and have a superhuman ability to endure the same music over and over, I listened to a lot of III.

When you’re depressed over something like this, you may find it difficult to do things. And I did. I spent an inordinate amount of time playing a game nobody has ever heard of, fittingly introduced to me by McLean: Chaos Overlords.

Chaos Overlords was a tile based game that honestly wasn’t that good. But it was very good at distracting me from things such as, in order of importance: school, the ex-girlfriend, and people. And it was very good at sucking away time and being very addictive.

It has been … thirteen years since that time, and to this day, whenever I hear a song from III, I immediately think of this moustached face from the game Chaos Overlords.

Today, I went on my walk. Pandora selected Gallows Pole from III. I thought of the moustached person known as “Henchmen” and Chaos Overlords.

I laughed. And then I kept walking.