The Day the Music Died

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“He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.” ~Mark Helprin

“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.” ~ Judith Lewis Herman

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” ~ Oscar Wilde

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Doctor Bauer had a PhD in Human Growth and Development, and her graduate thesis was on Flow Consciousness. She was my first therapist of any note. It was in 1990 and I was being treated for depression. Prozac, don’tcha know. The reason I mention this is two-fold: I have long wondered if she saw the trauma (of course she did) in me, and I must remind myself repeatedly to aspire to Flow. It’s Monday morning on a workday, and I say why not, let’s do the Flow thing today. Would that I could . . . and maybe I can. That said, I am facing the welcome task of an early morning shower. Who knows – maybe I will sing Gordon Lightfoot’s “In the Early Morning Rain” in the shower. Sweet. See, music is coming back to me. Let me splain. The day of my tragic bicycle was on the anniversary of the death of Buddy Holly: the day the music died. Well, it did and it didn’t. But in the rock-solid freeze of all things neurological, which began on that day in 1984, I took that “the day the music died” ditty and flung it into my troubled heart for safety. The quote, of course, is from Don McLean’s “American Pie”, which was inspired by the death of Holly. I instantly believed that the death of music was of my own songwriting and performance. Yet now I know that it was an admonition to keep music in my soul, where it belongs. I recently have purchased Taylor Swift’s “Folklore” and Jackson Browne’s newest “Downhill From Everywhere”. Delicious music. The new Tears for Fears comes out next month. The first single released from that album blew me away! Just wow. Like Mister Helprin’s quote above about the horse who seems to hear music all the time. As I side-note, that quote came from Helprin’s fabulous novel, ” A Winter’s Tale”. I call that novel a must-read! Some of the most beautiful prose I have ever read. That said. it’s time to prep for work. Yeh, I hear the music. Onward.

Peace out, y’all. Goof gloriously.

A Manifesto for Beauty

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“Trauma, which is stored differently in the brain than memory, seeps out of us as warnings of worse to come.” ~ Anne Lamott

“Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.” ~ Bessel A. van der Koch

“In contrast to ordinary memories both good and bad, which are mutable and dynamically changing over time, traumatic memories are fixed and static. They’re imprints, engrams from past overwhelming experiences. Deep impressions carved into the sufferer’s brain body and psyche. These harsh and frozen imprints do not yield to change, nor do they readily update with current information. The fixity of imprints prevents us from forming new strategies and extracting new meanings. There is no fresh ever-changing now, and no real flow in life. In this way, the past lives on in the present.” ~ Peter Levine

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Grande beauté, n’est pas? I don’t know how long it lasted, or even if it simply stepped back behind the curtain so as to not impede – openly anyway – the oafishness of lesser pursuits. What I am talking about here is the addition of Wonder to Beauty, which seemed at the time to be eternal. It was enabled by force, but many good things are. The addition, through hard work and applied patience, was forged into a good medicine for melancholy and it’s more nefarious cousins along the spectrum. See, I was coming off of the truly terrifying high from head trauma of the deadly kind. I needed help but there was little if any of it around; we didn’t have Prozac yet, and the psychiatric diagnosis of PTSD was only a scant few years in existence. So Beauty it was, is, whatever. What brought this all on in the here and now is the really cool proclamation, in Paris, of a city-wide “Manifesto for Beauty”. I mean, how cool is that?! Look it up. I’ll wait. But seriously now . . . this story infused me with that good medicine when I read it this morning. Anxiety is running high. Coffee, all gone. The cat is whining to the level where I had to pull alpha and hiss at her. That was only marginally effective BTW, which is pretty good when dealing with cats! It’s a workday and shower time approacheth, with a call for alacrity, which I shall heed. Bon jour. Grande chance!

Peace out, y’all. Goof gloriously.

Chuckling and Dancing With Margie

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“I believe that this is the time to become warriors for peace and dialogue, not warmongers or mere worriers.” ~ Lama Surya Das

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“Once in everyone’s life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half-asleep.” ~ E. B. White

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“But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice… I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.” ~ Charles Darwin

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Adamant cat, perfect coffee, anxiety fixin to kick it up a few notches. Poor me. I likely will keep that ominous beast at bay. I know how. Yet skill is not the same thing as certainty. If I fail there is always Butterscotch Margie, and the new glass pinch-hitter pipe from the dispensary. Did you know I get a seniors discount at the dispensary? Just the concept of that makes this old hippie chuckle. I may do so on and off all day – chuckle and dance with Margie. Nah, just kidding. I must do laundry in the morning. After that, who knows, but I shall not neglect Margie. The inimical Robert Anton Wilson says that cannabis makes one “a one-eyed man in the Kingdom of the Blind”. Oh that Robert! Brilliant mind that dude had. Soooo, I s’pose I’d best be meandering along. Brother Phil usta to use that word: meander. Pretty cool, huh?

Peace out, y’all. Goof gloriously.

A Bowl, a Shot, and the X-Files

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“Grief is less like a predictable sequence and more like an amorphous blob of uncertainty. You can’t forecast your way out of grief, because there’s no way to determine when the next wave is coming. This may seem disheartening at first, but when you recognize that there is no structure for grief, you can stop trying to pinpoint exactly where you are on your journey. If there’s no road map, it’s impossible to be lost.” ~ Shelby Forsythia

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“It’s important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood or when the weather is wrong.” ~ John Ashbery

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“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.” ~ John Steinbeck

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Yesterday I noticed that with the holidays being over, retail workers have an air of relief while shoppers seem gently surly and gone sour along the way. Luckily the happy ones still outnumber the surly ones. Whew. As for me, I’m still carting around some bruised ribs and some MRSA wounds that are annoyingly slow in healing. That this slowness is in the nature of the surly (oops) bacteria matters not. I don’t feel sorry for myself. There’s no sense in that when I can cling to more proactive things like edginess. This being January 6th, the weight of the past two years sits like a metaphorical lead ballon gone flat from all of the puncture wounds delivered by Covid and right-wing morons. But bitterness aside – it is a workday for me. The cat is in her bed after some sweet lap time. But I’m glad she went to bed because I really wanted to write a blog post this morning. Surely my health issues have been an obstacle. As is the deep disturbance left by the past two years . . . and of course the next two, likely. Anyway, I had a phone appointment with my lovely Nurse Practitioner a few days ago and it seems all the blood-work shows that I am about in optimal shape. The mental and emotional issues don’t show up in the blood-work, of course. Ack! All in all I suppose that I oughtta get to my day. The cat is over there mumbling something about the lack of cat food at the moment. Honestly, I could go for a bowl of cannabis and a double shot of Wild Turkey and a continuation of the X-Files binge I’ve been on lately. Cheerio.

Peace out, y’all. Goof gloriously.