Skip to main content

Music

A number of years ago I was at a low point. I was searching how to work through some issues at work. My two children were not sleeping through the night and I was struggling to be fully awake. My diabetes had just been diagnosed and between my work, my hour commute, my commitment to be a good parent and co-parent, I found myself before dawn each day at the local YMCA trying to lower my blood sugar.

I was very clear about one thing that day. The day before I had been tired and in pain; that morning I was tired and in pain; the rest of that day I would be tired and in pain; the next day I would be tired and in pain. That component of my life was ascendant.

As with many folk at the gym I brought tunes with me to keep me moving. I had just bought Steely Dan's live album Alive in America (which was released in 1995 but I might not have gotten it right away) and was still learning how the live renditions went.  Reelin' In The Years came on, a tune I had learned by heart as a college first-year student. Their live version had what I would describe as a reggae-inflection. It was familiar and new, it bounced, it lifted me up. I was smiling. I wasn't smiling much back then. I was smiling at the gym that day before sunrise.

Music. I am particularly susceptible to it's ability to lift me out of the abyss.


A few years before that my first child was born. It was by emergency C-section, 6 1/2 weeks early. I spent the 36 hours before his birth lying to my wife that I knew that everything was going to be just fine, smiling that lying smile of mine that I can do as needed. Everything did work out fine despite my deepest fears of losing both my wife and son.  The lying took its toll though. When running an errand out of the hospital after his birth I had to pull off the road and spend some time sobbing.  I got it out of my system but I had John Williams playing a classical guitar piece by Peter Warlock on the car stereo and part of the bargain of that day was that I can't listen to that piece any more. When I do it all hits full force and I start sobbing again.

Music. It has always been present at my times in the abyss.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Standing Your Corner

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Momentum

In my youth my primary social justice commitment was through Amnesty International. As an affluent white male I enjoyed freedoms that I thought ideally everyone should share; in the 1980's we had had the vine of United States support for repressive regimes that were nominally anti-Communist bearing cruel fruit and I in my small part of the world wanted to do something about that.  It was a more active support Amnesty International sought back then; nowadays they just ask me for money. We members were encouraged to write to foreign government officials to urge them to take care of political prisoners that we named, the idea being that as long as they knew that they were seen the cruelty would diminish. One letter per prisoner, because they were all human beings, not just a faceless group. I have no independent way of verifying if the hundreds of letters I wrote eased any suffering; I know that they changed me. Selfishly I am grateful. At the time I made a point of reading journalism...
Post a Comment
Read more