The year: 1981. The specific day: beats the hell out of me. It was cold out, that much I remember. This was the day that I was going to solve the Rubik’s Cube.
A few weeks prior we’d met up with some of our distant relatives from Norway. Two of them were younger boys around my age, brothers, methinks, and they were visiting Minnesota to sing in a boys choir concert. There was a definite language barrier so we didn’t talk too much, but I watched in complete amazement as they busted out their Rubik’s Cubes and solved them within a matter of minutes. One handed a solved cube to me. I scrambled it, gave it back, and his hands went into a complete blur. 2 minutes later, poof – all of the colors were on their respective sides. Bastards!
*******
I was sitting on the floor in my bedroom, one of my KISS records most likely playing in the background. After seeing the Norwegian kids solving the thing in seconds flat and spending dozens of hours twisting and turning that sonofabitch trying to figure it out, today was going to be the day I finally solved it. I’d just gotten back from K-Mart with my mum who was kind enough to buy me a How To Solve The Rubik’s Cube book. It was a thin paperback with a dark green glossy cover.
I opened it up and got to work. There were a lot of perplexing illustrations of cubes with little arrows surrounding them to study, none of which made any sense to me. The more I studied the book the more confused I became. After about 10 minutes I’d had it. I went and grabbed my mom’s small flathead sewing machine screwdriver, pried the f**&kng thing apart, and put it back together so that all sides matched. I did it, I DID IT!!
The 7th ditty in my ever-expanding collection of weird little songs done with my Fishman TriplePlay pickup was recently born and a tribute to that fateful day. I heard this slow drumbeat and staccato blip-bleeps in my head a few days ago – this is what they grew into. It reminded me of how annoyed I was with my Rubik’s Cube and how relieving it was to rip it apart and put it back together again. I never did learn how to solve the damned thing and that’s okay.. some things just weren’t meant to be.
CRANKEDY CRANK IT.
