By the turn of the millennium I had pretty much given up on popular music. It had been a long-brewing shift, which started roughly the first day I got to Austin, when I heard Son Volt’s Tear-Stained Eye on KGSR on the radio. Later that year I’d be introduced to the Butthole Surfers, the sensual Goth of The Cure’s Disintegration, Failure’s Magnified, Björk’s Post, and would start toddling down a decidedly more European and/or Texan path in my music choices. By the time 1999 rolled around, I was listening to Lucinda Williams, Johnny Cash, and Edith Piaf more than any hot performer I could think of.

But in 1999 I happened to be living in a house with a Radiohead fan who introduced me to OK Computer. Also, my friend Mike had kept his ear open to the voice of the times, and thanks to his generosity, I wound up decamping to the West Coast for the first time with Tool’s Ænima and the double gift of Kid A and Amnesiac.

Over the years, I’ve never stopped thinking about Kid A.

As an elder technologist, there’s the danger of sinking into old habits and never updating them. I didn’t see anything wrong with tmux, and there still really isn’t. But some (younger) colleagues told me about some of zellij’s features, and I adopted it. I saw ghostty and thought it was terminal emulation done right. And while the blood and tears I paid the git gods are the definition of sunk cost, Jujutsu (jj) has become my daily driver revision control solution.

And even some of the oldest and most venerable parts of my toolkit got a freshening. I have been using nvim happily after over two decades on vim. But something was troubling: I couldn’t get the color theme to be readily readable. Read on to find out how I got the color scheme in the featured image.

Recently, on his podcast “60 songs explain the 90s,” Rob Harvilla covered the Bush song “Glycerine.” Rob’s earnest and enthusiastic coverage and warm reflections about the music of our shared teen years gave me pause to think about this song, and I realized: it’s always there.

Imagine summer in the late ’90s: I’m laying in a pool on a floaty in the backyard of my childhood home and, from the wall-mounted intercom repeater, alternative radio station plays Bush’s “Glycerine.” In the home, upstairs, hours prior, I had seen the video play on MTV. In the home, hours later, I will see it again. And even later, after the sun goes down, when my friends and I are piled into a car and the radio plays “Glycerine,” we will not change the channel. We won’t hoot and turn it up, but it will be given its runtime.

Sometime in the aughts: I’m driving down the twisted backbone of Highway 101. It’s too late after a night of whatever in San Francisco. Alternative radio plays Bush’s “Glycerine.”

Sometime in the 2010s: the woman I will marry and I are driving through Austin. Maybe we’re tired of our iPods and we put on the local (101X!) radio station. “Glycerine.”

The test of time should always earn respect — even if it’s only grudging. I have to concede that I’ve been “look[ing] at this photograph” with Nickelback for a very long time; I’m not happy about it. It’s OK, I had to watch alternative dudes reckon with my fandom of Rush back in the day when I pointed out that “Tom Sawyer” was 16 years old.

“Glycerine” is double that.

It’s time to admit, then, that Bush have withstood the test of time. With nonsensical lyrics, phoneme gumbo elocution, and Gavin Rossdale’s himbo good looks, it would have been tempting to write Bush off. Many did. But you can’t square that circle against three decades of airplay. So I’m going to start from the other end of the argument: What’s great about this song and what has helped it exist in frequent-enough airplay through my entire adulthood?