Music

Music

I was strange as a child.  Well, strange is relative.  In this case, I was a child which didn’t listen to music all that often.  Which is strange, because now I listen to music almost nonstop.  Of course, I was also on the skinnier side as a child, and brown as a nut because I was outside all the time.  Both of those descriptions do not describe me in the present.  So, obviously people change and people grow up and people become someone slightly different than the ones they were before.  And in the case of music, that’s me.

Yesterday I was at the dentist.  We got this new doc there, ‘cause the one we had retired.  So this new doctor is changing things up, trying to make the little practice his own.  Which in this case includes playing the radio lightly in the background.  This is a horrible combination for me.  If you know me well enough, you know that I can’t hold my tongue around music, and that I end up humming or singing along to whichever tune is there.  So when I’m supposed to keep my mouth open wide and still as the doctor scrapes away at my insides when I want to sing my heart out to whichever song it was playing… it’s a cruel and inhumane torture.

Which has something to say about the state of my memory, doesn’t it?  I can hardly remember the songs being played yesterday, even though I was singing them in my head.  If I can’t even remember the songs I wish to sing with how can I remember anything else?

The short answer is, I don’t.  I can barely remember other things in my life, like the inconsequential stuff.  And, quite frankly, unless someone has a photographic memory I would say that all of us forget that inconsequential stuff.

So then why do I listen to music on repeat sometimes?

It’s the same reason why I reread stories.  It’s the same reason why I rewatch certain movies.  I am trapped during that singular moment in a world that is not my own.  For that brief time I get to be someone else, hear something new, see someplace new… the list goes on.  And I want to relive that moment of being someone else, because that life is so interesting.

Not saying that their lives are more interesting than my own, but certainly more something than my own.  Perhaps that’s another reason why I write and muse and gather my thoughts into words and ideas and scraps of imagination: I get to create those singular moments in time for other people to do the same thing that I love to do.

Because while these moments and lives are truly fictional, they can and do change us.  No longer a skinny, sunburned child.  No more a man in his 20’s.  Onto something different, something new, something else.  To which, I’m not sure.  I can’t see the future, that’s not my job.