Small Gifts

Last night, my friend D brought his external harddrive over. It's filled with music. The small gray box, ugly in a utilitarian kind of way is filled with beauty. You can't touch the beauty just by looking. Instead you have to hook it up with wires to something else...that something else being my laptop...at least last night. I loaded soundbytes of beauty until my laptop really couldn't hold anymore. The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Jesus Lizard, Christian Death, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Front 242, Front Line Assembly all bands that become time machines on my ipod. When I plug myself into these sounds, I touch the past which haunts the present. The past exist in those songs, and the songs bring back images, only half seen, smells, emotions, states of being that remain buried inside me somewhere. Perhaps these memories, these remembrances are soul.

And of course there was the new too on that gray box. More A Place To Bury Strangers (because really can there be enough?), the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (still beating myself up over not seeing their show last year), Boris (another band I really should have seen last year), Jesu. Older bands that I had never heard of such as Iconoclast, Arab on Radar, Pussy Galore. These songs will all become part of that remembrance soul. Someday plugging into them will bring me back to this gray house in Charlotte, to a night spent drinking wine, and listening to music with D and H.

This small gift from D was really not such a small gift. I still feel a little glow when I open up my music file and see all that music. It may get me through this dry spell of no shows. I haven't seen a show since APTBS in October. And it was a good show, enough to get me through for a bit but I need something soon. We have tickets to see Morrissey at a small venue in Asheville (!!!!!!!) but that is in March which seems a ways off right now. I keep scanning the internet hoping for something exciting, something to push me through these rainy January days. But so far nothing has inspired me to make the two to three hour drive required to see good bands in North Carolina.

Music has become something vital in my middle age. My adviser told me jokingly that my midlife crisis was going to shows. And he's right I suppose. I didn't do many shows when I was younger. Clubs bothered me then, made me feel trapped and hot...self-conscious and vulnerable. Now I don't care. I just want to be in the crowd, swallowed up by music. And I listen to more music now, and I listen to a much wider variety thanks to H and D. Everyday is marked by a band, a song, a musical moment.