Someone Wake Me when It's Over

Ever feel like your life has suddenly become a bad dream you can't seem to wake up from? Ever feel like the people around you are suddenly strangers, like you don't even know who they are anymore? Ever feel just completely and utterly alone and irrelevant? Ever feel like your mere existence is a sandspur in the underwear of someone's life? Yeah, me neither.

Sometimes, when your heart is breaking, there's nothing like a cheesy old love song to get you through. When I'm at a loss for words to convey my feelings, somehow, someone else has already done it for me. Helps to know I'm not the only one. Those are for the sad times. Sometimes you just have to let yourself feel the pain before you can get past it. So you wallow a little in your grief. But I find it's best to temper the wallowing with some inspiration. You have to pick yourself back up and face the world again. There are songs for that, too. For me, they're generally equally as cheesy. Here are two of my favorites here of late, for your reading pleasure, for anyone who cares to know how I feel. I wonder why I expect that anyone else will care when I'm not even sure I care how I feel anymore. I think I'm fresh out of give-a-shit. At the very least, I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Wake Me When the Day Breaks

 So I was a band nerd in high school.  From an early age, I acquired an appreciation for music of all sorts, and even after I gave up the piano lessons and the French horn, that love has not left me.  Music has always been a powerful influence in my life, from writing to singing to praising to mourning loss to simply sharing and thus doubling my joy, I have always enjoyed music.  My tastes have run the gamut from Chopin to Milli Vanilli (shut up, you know you had that tape, too) to Pearl Jam to Simon & Garfunkel to Tchaikovsky to Snoop Dogg.  There's nearly no genre that I have failed to explore at some point, and very little that I've been unable to find at least something to appreciate about.

But there have been a few pieces, composers, or groups throughout my life that have just moved me.  Moved my soul.  Opened my mind.  Touched my heart.  Hopefully, you know the kind of music I mean.  A song that you can hear anywhere, anytime, and from the first bars, your heart skips a beat.  Like a deep breath after being underwater too long.  You inhale its rhythms, its melodies, its words… and somehow all is right in your world again.  It speaks to you – says everything you wish you could say and more.  It is almost tangible, this feeling.  You feel the music inside you.  You can't help but move.  You can't help but sing.  For me, sometimes these experiences have been songs of praise in church.  Sometimes they were a beautiful classical piece I was playing on the piano, or in band.  Sometimes it was an old CD of Simon & Garfunkel belonging to my parents that I discovered when I was barely 14.  The Beatles make me feel this way.  Sometimes it was an unexpectedly phenomenal concert.  Sometimes it was just the satisfaction of seeing the joy said music brought the ones I love.  But most recently, my friend Scott played a CD by The Black Crowes on New Years Eve at our house.  It was a relatively old CD.  The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion album.  Around 15 years old.  But from the moment the song, "Thorn in My Pride" began to play, the second the organ kicked in, from the first "shhhhh," I was taken to another world.  I was tired, it was late, and I just laid back and let the music soak in.  He and Dave were dancing in the living room, with looks of such sublime satisfaction on their faces as they sang along.  I felt like I had taken a sudden, much needed plunge into a warm bubble bath.  And then I heard "She Talks to Angels".  I know I'm way behind, all this is so old, but, oh how it moved my soul. That's what music is about.  Music is more than something you hear.  Real music is something to be experienced.  Something you feel, something that speaks to your soul, opens your eyes, opens your heart, leaves you a different person than you were even the few minutes before you first heard it.  I love these experiences.  And I never forget them.  I will never forget that night, the first time I heard those songs, and the looks on the faces of those I love as they danced about and sang along.  One would be hard pressed to come up with a better gift than the gift of perfect song.

Music is one of life's greatest pleasures, one of our greatest gifts.  Seek it out.  Feel it.  Sing it.  Share it.  Experience the bliss of a perfect melody and lyrics that speak to your soul and the feeling of completely letting go and just letting the music move your body as you dance in a world at least temporarily all your own.  There's scarcely anything better.

The Sky Had Better Be Falling

So it's before six in the morning.  I finally fell asleep last night after 2.  A noise must have roused me, and then I freaked out thinking I'd overslept.  I was just too comfortable, something had to be wrong.  Well, it was.  Besides the obvious injustice of my being fully conscious at such an unholy hour, I heard what can only be described as the end of the world taking place outside.  It was the garbage truck that woke me, and excepting the fact that this makes the second time in a row we've forgotten to but the bin out (meaning we should be swimming in our own refuse by this time Sunday), I could have settled in for a few more hours of much needed sleep.  This was not to be. 

It was after a brief discussion with Chris about said garbage that the sirens started.  We live near the hospital, so we do hear an occasional ambulance.  I've gotten used to that, and Chris hardly ever even howls anymore when they start up.  But this sounded like every emergency vehicle in Bay County had come out for a last-minute parade.  It went on for a really long time.  And of course, all 47 dogs in the immediate vicinity were duty-bound to join in the cacauphony. Naturally, if something big or particularly off-pissing is going on, I need to know about it immediately.  Gives me a chance to run from the invading aliens, or march down in my slippers and single-handedly put a stop to the ill-advised pre-dawn parade.  So I go to the trusty worldwideintronets.  And nothing. 

Now the noise has stopped.  My powers of deduction say this was no parade.  So I'm gonna go start packing canned goods, water, and all the toilet paper I can find so we can get the heck out of dodge.  Maybe head someplace warmer.  Like Canada. 

Stay warm out there, folks, and stay on the alert.  (And if anybody out there knows what that shit was all about this morning, why I am now completely awake and unable to sleep, please do share.)