Today I got to work and realized I had changed my system password yesterday and then promptly forgotten it.

I immediately went into one of those panic-driven fugue states in which the very realization I have forgotten makes it impossible for me to remember anything.

I once forgot my locker combination at the Y and had to have the door pried open with a crowbar. To this day, I have no idea what the combination was, even though I had the lock for several years.

Today was not so bad, however. I managed to track some mental breadcrumbs and remember the password. Shaken, I wrote the password down on a mini post-it and turned over my keyboard

(WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. IT IS AGAINST THE RULES! Virtuous people do not write down passwords and hide them in obvious places, according to my IS department. This has been a message from the Council for Better Password Management)

only to find another post-it there, with a password from long ago and far away.

This feeling of doing things over and over again without even realizing it plagued me throughout the day.

By day's end, the soundtrack of my life was playing back the greatest record you never heard, John Giorno's "Put Your Ear to Stone and Open Your Heart to the Sky." It's not really a song but a recording of Giorno reciting a poem, multitracked and repeating key phrases two or three times each until it gets a rhythm of its own.

Twenty-one years old now, the recording doesn't seem to be available online, alas. Every so often I pull it out on my way to work, enjoying the banality

I'm standing by the sink washing the dinner dishes with a plastic sponge

or the well-articulated outrage at some unseen listener

and if there's one thing that drives me crazy it's stupidity

or the small, distracted details of compulsion that everybody knows, but nobody wants to talk about:

You're standing by the refrigerator spooning into your mouth Sara Lee light and luscious yogurt chiffon cherry pie, and you almost finished the whole aluminim pie tin all by yourself

I also get that bland ironic thrill of appropriating old-skool hipsterism to articulate early 21st century yuppie angst. This is OK; it seems to be part of my recommended daily allowance, like calcium, or guilt about the environment that can be mostly assuaged by recycling.

Can't get enough? There's a little Giorno material at the Barcelona Review and also at UbuWeb. And to bring it all back home, Bloomington's The Pin-Up runs periodic "time warp" features including this review, as well as flashbacks to local appearances by MX-80, Patti Smith, and, uh, The Make-Up (for memory-impaired mavens who miss the mid-'90s).

And me? I have done as the man says. I have put my ear to stone and opened my heart to the sky, and the only thing I have ever heard is myself, and possibly some air in the ductwork.