Social media's immediacy deserves a massive chunk of the blame. I'm forever grateful no one was pointing a recording device at me, ages 16 to 22. I'm still shivering from memories. Who wants video evidence?

A few years back, I watched in horror a clip shot on a jam-packed Strip. Students spoke candidly about sex, with an openness I don't think even my closest friends and I have ever shared.

I'm not a parent, which may be apparent, but I am a godparent, and friend to folks of various ages. My Inner Dad roars up when I see These Kids Today not wearing enough sunscreen, so imagine my flustered fremdschämen (second-hand embarrassment) at hearing this child blathering on about a letter that was not A, B, C or F, and how often she had sought and experienced it that semester.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

"Satisfaction." Three notes. The roll of that particular rock stems from timing and timbre; primal distortion covers a lot. Overdrive level: 8.

"Takin' Care of Business." Bachman-Turner Overdrive, a band that looked like it sounded, and vice-versa: Buncha Canadian dudes in hockey jerseys, smothered in sickly-sweet maple syrup, far as you know. Overdrive level: 11.

"Sweet Home Alabama." Any drunk calling for "Freebaaard!" doesn't expect you to play it ― all the more amusing when you introduce the reggae, punk or ska version you just invented ― but "SHA"? Oh yeah. They want it. Overdrive: Perhaps 2, under an out-of-phase Strat sound.

In early bands, I was strictly rhythm. Though I did wish to make it cry or sing, I was merely a vocalist who played a bit. Later bands created originals, or took the odd cover to pieces, reconstructing them in our own particular, um ... idiom ? So learning rote solos has never been a priority. Inventing them on the spot? Sure.

In rock, you rarely play a solo the same way twice, unless it's something like George Harrison's "Something," an iconic series of bends and trills that feels as crucial to the song as its melody.

It's not just that breaks are a natural spot for improv. One of rock's chief values is its chaotic unpredictability, the tightwire or haywire hopes it may implode (likely), explore upward (less likely, but possible) or transcend (don't hold your breath, unless you're a deep diver).

So for the first time in ― What? 30, 40 years? — I consciously listened to an old girlfriend with whom I'd long ago achieved closure. In "SHA," there are two breaks, one brief and stinging, the second both more languid and more notes-per-millisecond, plus assorted riffing atop the plucked D-C-G everyone knows.

Dissecting: It's admirable, for musical concision married to lyrical ambivalence, fed sweet riffing by Ed King. As with Mark Knopfler, there's much to be learned when a player makes it sing.

Narrator: Never as easy as it sounds.

At the concert, there were no vocal mics, so we just shout-sang over drums, bass, pianos and electric guitars. Bumped into one of the TASPA parents at Wednesday's demonstration calling for the University of Alabama to cut ties with those who deal in war, and in an utterly un-controversial chat, found "We could hear YOU." Hey, if you can't sing over an insufficient, or even not-existent, sound system, to Mamet-rachet it down: Who ever told you that you could rock with men?

In the interests of non-sexist rhetoric, during "TCB," I changed the lyric to "... get in with the right bunch of people," which does not sing as well as "fellows," and certainly doesn't rhyme with "mellow." If I'd thought of "players," I could have backtracked to "sounds hard and ...." Layered? Minored and majored?

Balance is hard.

Mix these lovely young folks with sweet families I observed at a recent cookout, and kids I work with in The Rude Mechanicals, and it's jarring to know there are still, in fact, some potentially awful young folks, though perhaps that's just a common and temporary malady, from being teen and released on your own recognizance.

That on-the-Strip video made me cringe so hard I broke a chair. I couldn't stop fretting about her parents — and everyone in the world — being able to hear this probably ordinarily fine person yakking like something out of — archaic reference alert ― Penthouse forum letters. If the videographer had any decency, he'd not have shared a young person's drunken rambling.

Return of the Son of Fremdschämen: Watching young men ― mostly young white men — making jerk-off gestures, shouting obscenities, "Take a shower!" and the geopolitically confusing "Go back to Russia!" (Isn't current MAGA thinking that Putin is a swell guy? That whirring sound you hear is William F. Buckley's corpse doing the death-of-irony rhumba) at demonstrators Wednesday.

To an optimist, the Middle East situation feels like evidence of hell. Not the people, the beliefs, the differences, of course, but the seeming impossibility of any solution. Of peace.

But prolonged despondency cannot be a reason for failure to try.

In this miasma of uncertainty, one thing is near certain: Opposing those standing for peace, yelling slurs and obscenities, offering nothing in the way of ideas or efforts? Spitting knee-jerk, red-faced refutation?

There's a name for that locale: The wrong side of history.