Lines of obsessive strangeness converge at one point

The great thing about having roughly a krillion things going through your head at any given time is that you often get to test the laws of probability as a result of obsessing over some morsel from yesteryear.

Lately, I've been wanting to listen to some of the music from my youth. The classic 80s stuff and the early 90s grunge are well-spoken for in my music collection, but there's a gap of a few years -- when I graduated from middle school and started high school.

I tended to buy my music on 45s; I didn't have a CD player (nor did most everyone I knew at that point; they were still new and expensive), and I didn't know enough about the rest of the songs on the albums to justify forking out the dough. So the albums I listened to were from my parents.

So now I'm tracking down records that I ordinarily wouldn't go looking for on my own. One of them was Kenny Loggins' "Back to Avalon." Found that one OK; I asked my parents if they had it on CD and they did. Score!

This leads me to Mr. Mister. You can barely pick up some 80s compilation without getting "Kyrie" or "Broken Wings," but because I like doing things the hard way, I was looking for the album after that -- "...Go On."

I think one of the songs, "Something Real," got some airplay on MTV, but very briefly. Still, I have fond memories of being on a weekend trip in the car, reading a recent week's comic books and listening to that tape on the car stereo.

It seems that the only way to exorcise the song demons from my head is to acquire the songs in question.

But iTunes didn't even have the album. I envisioned having to scour used CD racks to no avail. And then I got smart. Remembering how I got the Kenny Loggins album, I phoned my mom, who had indeed procured the Mr. Mister CD -- via the used CD racks.

I went out to pick up the CD today and meet my mom for lunch so she could see Brody. I arrived a bit early, so I decided to kill time by hitting a thrift store. I like that I can pick up entire albums for a dollar or less. I scored another K-Tel compilation, "Hot Tracks," which features the unforgettable "Mr. Roboto" from Styx.

I pored over the cassette tapes in the same bin and picked up one that was put in backwards so I could see what it was.

Mr. Mister "...Go On."

And this, only days after I found Cherry Pez when I wasn't even looking for it and about a week after I finally found the apple chips I was looking for. Do you think I bought enough?

These are the things I need to remember when it feels like the whole world is out to get me.