It's 1992. Pearl Jam has given us permission to listen to Rock and Roll again. They've given us the all-clear, assuring us that Madonna and Aerosmith will not try to dry-hump us in our sleep anymore. Oh, sure, it was Nirvana that started the whole alt-modern-grunge-rock thing. And it was Jay McInerney who made literature cool, too. But it was Bret Easton Ellis who gave us the naughty bits we wanted. And it was Pearl Jam that made us friends with other fans when we bought their CD. Cool things, CDs. We buy the CDs 'cause they're easier to copy onto cassettes. For our Walkmans.

Cameron Crowe has made a movie, and of course, we all go to see it. Singles. We have to. We're newly 21, officially adults, more adult than the 18-year-olds we sneer at. We're in the middle of Kansas, the heart of the USA, America's de-facto suburbs. We want desperately to be cool but we don't want the scars and the bruises that people collect on their way to coolness. So we talk about the tattoos we would get if we didn't live in such a bass-ackwards state, we get piercings because they can grow out if we ever decide (never!) to vote Republican. And we all flock to see the movie that has Pearl Jam in it!

And Campbell Scott (who?) and Kyra Sedgewick. They'll be old people in 2005. But they are, now, what it means to be "in-your-20s." They live in Seattle for crying out loud. And we watch that movie. And we dream of a utopia, where every Thursday thru Saturday everyone between the ages of 15 and 27 flocks to din-darkened venues to see undiscovered, amazing bands. Their names are a mantra we spit between gritted teeth every time we're forced to listen to top 40 music. Pearl Jam Nirvana Soundgarden Alice in Chains. Pearl Jam Nirvana Soundgarden Alice in Chains. And on days when we're really cool we like the Screaming Trees.

Sorry, Cameron. We misused your movie. We honestly thought you meant it when you put so much great music in there. We didn't realize that someone who knew actual people from the Sub Pop label would use music as marketing gimmick. Your movie was about that second coming of age, not the one at 13 when you find your pubes and wonder why you secretly like the way they stink--no, that other coming-of-age, then one when your sense of economics and the real world goes through puberty. When your screw-ups are all your own, to do with as you wish. When being scared stops being a thrill, and starts to be a slowly pepticising ulcer.

(You crafty devil. You made another coming of age movie, 8 years later. But we saw through your marketing gimmick that time, knew you were just using the music to sell another semi-autobiographical bit of nostalgia. You were 43 when you made Almost Famous. Eeek! Midlife crisis! I can't wait for the film you make when you're in your 60s, the one about how music helped you out of diapers and into big-boy pants.)

It's 9:30 PM at Easy Street Records, the biggest baddest-ass used CD store in Seattle, the heart of the alternative rock phenomena, and therefore, the biggest baddest-assed used CD store in the world. And it's not in the heart of Queen Anne, no, because that would be too Cameron Crowe, that would be too Singles. Alternative went main-stream and so the new alternative is alternative to alternative. Easy Street Records is at the foot of Queen Anne. I mean, come on. The clubs on QA hill suck. There's something esoteric and slightly ethnic blasting on the speakers. It's not so esoteric, though, that I can get away with asking the face-pierced cashier what the song is. I don't want to injure her, anyway, because some of that stainless steel would probably make rolling her eyes a risky endeavor.

I'm looking for something. I don't know what. Thanks to Kurt and Eddie, and then Cameron, alt-rock exploded in '92 and there were subsequently more one-hit wonders than you could shake your return-to-the-seventies long hair at. I've been carrying around a snippet of one of those songs in my head for years now. And now is 2005, the year of the iPod, MP3s and their cousins WAV and AAC. I have been searching for the song, and in my searches I am finding so much else I left behind when I moved from Kansas California. San Jose, where they finally got it right, and made the entire one-million-person town a suburb. Where parking is plentiful and no matter what color you are, you're white. And you work for Cisco. (Yeah, sure, "Top 40" Microsoft up in Seattle made computers for everyone, but "Grunge" Cisco made them talk to each other.)

This snippet won't go away, and so I assuage my addled post-punk brain by grabbing everything else from the nineties that I can find- on the internet. Catherine Wheel Candle Box Collective Soul. Letters to Cleo Portishead Belly. The Squirrel Nut Zippers... they didn't even play guitars! Chumbawumba. And okay, fine, the Spice Girls. I've always had a thing for Sporty.

So I look at CDs. I have a list in my pocket, but iTunes says I only have to pay 99 cents for the tracks I want, so even 4 bucks for 1 track I want and 12 other tracks I don't want is too much. Ooh look, the Spin Doctors, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, only 3 bucks, and I want two of those songs. Nah. Hey, it's the Kids soundtrack, that has two songs I want too. Ick, the case is all resiny. Smoke outside before you hock your CDs for more weed, ass. I flip through some of the 90s compilation CDs. A name jumps out. Sparklehorse? Does that ring a bell? Could it be the band I am looking for? Have Eddie, Kurt, and Cameron finally come together and helped me out for a change? I'll go home, to the internet, and check

But I'm not leaving empty-handed. I descended from the suburbs, from bowling night, just to be here. I find an old CD of Doug Stanhope, a favorite comedian, so I pick it up. But I don't want to use a credit card for a 5 dollar purchase. Of course in 1992 I was lucky to have 5 dollars at any one time. I have the cash in my pocket now--I could pay with cash. But I'm saving that cash for Burgermaster. (Yeah, they take Visa at Burgermaster, I know, but Dick's doesn't take cash, and if you can't be with the one you love, honey--its a Zen thing, trust me on this.)

So, what the hell. I'll get the Singles soundtrack too. I used to own it, of course. Back in '92. And I listened to it for year, all the way past the big move to California. But when the new millennium came, I had to get rid of all that nineties stuff. Got rid of my nineties girlfriend, gave her all my old nineties CDs, dropped out of my nineties education... Eventually I got a job at Cisco. And eventually, I moved to Seattle.

That's a little something that a Grammy-winning Canadian would call irony.

Did I dream, 13 years ago, of living here? No, not really. I mean it was nice to fantasize about the clubs and the music and they way everyone's long hair, somehow, never reeked of cigarette smoke and ditch dope. But I was suburb boy, and Seattle was too much a city. I had no idea what being, you know, thirty, would be like.

What I didn't realize, and now I do, living in Seattle, is that we suburbanites pump vital lifeblood into all that stuff the hearts of cities makes cool. Cause we got the cash. The hip kids make it cool, but we take it, and we pay for it, and we talk to each other. You might've had 100 people at your show, Kurt, but if they hadn't gone back to the 'burbs and told their polo-wearing, Saab driving friends about it, you never woulda gotten famous and blown your head off. Eddie wouldn't have gotten fat. Cameron, put this in your next movie. A bunch of suburban kids give the city life a try and decide, nah, it's too frantic just for the sake of being frantic. I mean, if you don't have a bit of entropy, how do you know you've had fun?

The nice girl with the braces brings me my cheeseburger. The guy who flips the burgers in there has a Pearl Jam tattoo on his shoulder. I know because I've talked to him about it before. He was 8 years old in 1992. I take my cheeseburger from Burgermaster--the suburbanite's Dick's--and drive on home. Since I live only 3 blocks away, I have to sit in my garage to hear the rest of track 2, "Breath." Goddamn, but Stone Gossard knows how to work a guitar. Or is it Mike McCready? Same diff.

It's 10:45 PM in a computer-lit bedroom. I can crank my music as loud as I want, because I live in something called a house which means I don't share walls with anyone. I can play any one of my 2800 MP3s at full volume if I want. If I want, I can play just the 90's songs, back-to-back, at top volume, and it would last literally an entire weekend, some 60+ hours, before any song is repeated. But I don't, of course. This is not 1992. I am not 21 years old. I'm 33. I'm the same age Jesus was when he died. ... Hmm. What do you think, would Jesus have been Soundgarden kinda guy, or something a little more obscure, like Mudhoney, or even Motherlovebone?

I look for Sparklehorse on the internet (thank you Cisco!). I listen to a few tracks... nope. Not the band I'm trying to remember. They're sound is a little too Paul Westerberg-having-sex-with-Corrosion-of-Conformity for my tastes. Oh well. I decide, just to be silly, that I 'm going to use one of the free iTunes downloads I won from a Mountain Dew bottle cap to grab a copy of "Heavy Metal Poisoning" by Styx from their Killroy Was Here album of 1983. I was 13 then, coming of age for the first time. That song fuckin' kicks ass.