Forty-two

I am listening to unfamiliar music and finding it the same as I did when I bought my first record album at age 11 or so. Unsettling.

For someone who feels music pretty deeply and fully, I don't really buy it very often. I tend to shy away from that as a "frivolous" expenditure, which is odd considering that I will toss any amount of money at impulse purchases of other kinds. I think I just forget that one can have new music.

People sometimes send me things that I like, and Boywich recently sent me a whole mess of things, some of which I just adored. But last week I bought this, because I'd watched a movie that had its title song in it, and remembered how much I liked that song. Anyway.

Half the album is lilting and good, and the other half sounds awkward to me, and I wonder if, after playing it into familiarity, I will feel differently about it.

I do the same thing with people, I realize. And with many areas of life. I feel uneasy with newness, in all forms, even new things that I might later grow to love. And I fall in love with people, things, and places after they become familiar. And in some cases, perhaps primarily because they have become familiar.

Isn't that weird? I keep wondering about life lately, not just the meaning of it, but the pace of it, the texture of it, what am I to take from it, and do I need to take anything? Do I need to leave anything? What is it? Some of these songs seem to be asking that.

Maybe all songs are always asking that, except the ones about love, which are asking that in the form of an assumption that successful love is the answer to that. Maybe that is all anyone or anything ever asks, in any form, at any time: art, commerce, war, feeling, everything we do and everyone we are, in every context. The world (and by that I mean nature) has either no answer or the very simple answer - you look at it, listen to it, and it just is. It's beautiful, but not gentle. It's beautiful and wild and terrible. Yeah, just like that. And that is how I always seem to feel inside.

The house still smells like acorn squash, from the one that was baking last night at 2am.

(Boywich used to call me the Master of the Nonsequitur.)