Ode to Music

I decided that now, while over 150 photos from my memory card are downloading onto my computer, I should write a blog.  I said that I would try, remember?  So here I am, blogging again.

I love singing in the shower.  It's a wonderful feeling, belting out your favorite Michael Jackson song and assuming that the rushing of the water is drowning your voice, although your brother assures you after you are squeaky clean that he could hear every word.  It's too bad for him that his bedroom is right next to the bathroom.  Every time that I step out of the shower, I write song lyrics on the foggy mirror.  They usually drip and bleed onto each other until they're illegible, but I do it anyway, just to write something, just to touch the cold mirror and hear the noise it makes when I press down too hard as I write.  That sound that no onomatopoeia will ever be able to capture.

Then there are the times that music replaces the emotion that I'm feeling.  It replicates it, then fills the hole it is making in my consciousness, lessening the gnawing on my mind.  It expands until everything has soft edges and I no longer think of anything but the thump of the notes against my eardrums.  It takes the words that are constantly running through my head and cages them for a while, so my brain is no longer frantically playing out 5 different plot-lines at the same time, describing everything in the room, making up a metaphor for the pen sitting in front of me.  Black as a raven's feather, dancing unpredictably in front of me on the snowy air of a sheet of paper.  But then I'm no longer living in me, I live in the music, let it do my thinking for a little while as I sit and absorb.

Most often, though, are the times that music speaks for me, when words are no longer enough, or they are so twisted and disjointed in my head that I can't make any sense of them.  That's when I need music the most, when everything is a muddle and I'm hammering at the great marble wall of writer's block.  Music has a way of turning the marble to glass, so that I can finally see through to the other side, finally find a connection or an emotion that I can resonate, that I want-to-need-to resonate for my muse to come back to me.  Then all I need is a swift penstroke and the glass shatters and the words gather back inside my head, a bit disgruntled and slow at first, angry that they had been kept out for so long.  But with time they're always more compliant, and we usually work out an agreement after I struggle to get the first words down in ink.  Then everything is easy street and I can turn the music down, lower and lower until I have no need of it.

Music is a human pulse to me, the attestation of another being standing close.  It's as unstoppable as the will to live, the will that keeps the heart beating even when we fell that it can't anymore.  It's innate in every person, a tendency for music, to hear and react to and be encompassed by it.  Why else would we dance, or sing along, or start crying when we hear That Song?  You know, The One That Always Makes You Cry.  We share feelings, share thoughts, share ourselves when we share music, which is why it's always stressful to me when someone goes through my ipod.  Because I love all of my music, care for each song because it has a place somewhere in my life.  And when people berate my songs, I feel crushed, as if they have just berated my core, who I am.  Some songs, I'll admit, are for the general populous.  For those people that I know are going to listen to my ipod, and I know what it is they'll want to listen to.  But a lot are secrets, things that people will listen to but not understand, because the songs are not a part of their lives like they are mine.  I always feel disappointed when that happens, when I watch someone skip through songs on my ipod until they find the one that they want, the one I placed there just for them.  

I feel like they're flying past an undiscovered world, something wonderful and magical that I've explored at length, but just because the grass isn't green or the sky isn't blue, they go past it.  I don't believe in liking only one genre.  It's like seeing only one type of person.  African-American female, 50s-60s, crooked and skinny with a nasty temper.  And you only see that person, are not interested in the millions of others that are passing by you.  Music, like people, is meant to be listened to, to be appreciated, to be loved by some.  I'm not saying that you have to like every song that you listen to.  You don't like every person that you meet.  But I'm saying that in the billions and billions of songs in the world, don't single out one group, and wall yourself in with that group and turn up your nose at everything else.

Sorry, that was preachy.  Well, so am I.