Ever since I saw Contact, I think often about the long, graceful opening sequence that threw some viewers. A burst of sound is heard, like a radio rapidly changing stations, as we glimpse the earth, and then we are drawn further and further away through space as the sound begins to simplify and coalesce into things we can recognize. We pass the planets of the solar system, head out into deep space, then pass other stars and galaxies, and finally we drift into deep, black space, and that's where the radio signals end. In the radio signals we hear our recent history - our successes and failures, but mostly we hear the things that simply entertained us.

I like to think about that because, while this is obviously simplified for the film, the idea is real. Out there, somewhere in the deepest reaches of space that man may never visit, are the ambassadors of the human race: our radio and TV signals. For good and for bad, the first impression any alien civilization is likely to have of us will come from what we've blasted out into the universe from our TV and radio stations. And, out there in the darkness, in all that mess of music and television signals, are the things that touched us in some way. I know that, somewhere untold billions upon billions of miles from here, the most important music of my life drifts unimpeded toward the unknowable.

As a teenager, I never went to bed when I got in bed. I would always lie awake for another hour or so, listening to something on my Walkman, trying to time the moment when I would become irrefutably sleepy with a particularly good song, the rationale being that whatever was the last song in my head before I fell asleep would be the song I'd have in my head the next day. There's no better reason to make sure it was a good song than that - no pressure, of course. I never actually fell asleep to the music. I just allowed it to take me up to the edge, where, hopefully, I'd found just the right song, and then I'd quickly set my Walkman and headphones aside and attempt to get to sleep quickly while the song was fresh in my head. I can't say it ever really worked, I don't remember actually having the "last listened to" song in my head the next day, but I sure tried.

More often than not I listened to a cassette in my Walkman, preferring, as I do now, to hear an album over a bunch of songs that the radio has to offer. But once in a while, I'd listen to the radio as I drifted toward sleep, hoping to hear something good, if not something new. On a rare occasion that something new did pique my interest, I'd hope against all good sense that the DJ would actually come back in and tell me who that was that I'd just heard, lest I be damned to possibly never know just what that song had been.