9:16 a.m. - Monday, Aug. 11, 2003
Dancing in the Kitchen
On the other hand����.

I�m not completely wasted. I�ve learned a little bit about squeezing a little joy out of life.

I can�t believe I�ve gone so long without listening to music. It wasn�t very long ago that I was grinding back and forth between Mississippi and California in my old van. It was a hundred degrees in the desert and I had no air conditioning or radio. I drove sometimes fourteen hours at a stretch listening to nothing more than the roar of the wind and engine as they tried to rise above the noisy thoughts in my head.

When I did listen to music in the last few years, it almost always turned out to be the old songs that are more familiar to me. That was a mistake, because the old songs resurrected my old life and I almost always ended up either drunk or crying� or both as I relived and regretted my mistakes and the cruelties of the past.

Here�s the secret:

I�ve found a new taste in music. I still listen to the old voices, but more and more I�m finding myself discovering new music and it�s music I love.

Bluegrass, I guess is clawing to the top of the list. I�m finding a simple purity in the sounds of bluegrass old and new. I have no memories from the genre to flood my emotions. Bluegrass lets me have all new emotions, new memories, and more often than not, a new dance� but more about that in a minute.

Related to that is country music in general. There�s always been an ethic in my head that people who grew up with Simon & Garfunkel and the Moody Blues are just too advanced in their thinking to be able to enjoy the beer hall rhythms of country & western music. Wrongo Pongo. Country music is smart. More than that, it�s often wise. If I ever had any doubt of that, it was erased last Saturday night as I was driving to New Orleans and listening to �Movin� On� on the country radio station. I found myself sobbing as I listened to Rascal Flats describe my life.

Of course, I�m not letting go of the blues just yet, but I�m finally discovering exactly WHICH blues I love. I wish I could have known Mississippi John Hurt, a local bluesman who lived his life mostly in obscurity. He knew what the blues were about.

Well� you get the idea. I�m listening to music a lot these days. The blessing that came wrapped in my big computer debacle is that I have room on my new hard drive for every song on every CD I own. And I�ve discovered dozens and dozens of internet radio stations that play every kind of music describable. I�ve enjoyed re-discovering music so much that last month I bought a pair of headphones.

The walls in my apartment are thin and I�m up at all hours of the day. I can�t just turn the speakers of my computer on and crank up the sounds. And I quickly found that being hooked to the computer by wires running to my head wasn�t really acceptable either. So I cut loose with nearly three hundred dollars for a top of the line, newly released set of high frequency radio headphones. Spending that much on myself didn�t hurt much more than I imagine it would feel to skin myself alive but I got through it. Now I�ve forgotten all about the money as I wear those phones and dance in the kitchen at three in the morning.

Do I know how to party or what?

Happy Thoughts, Deep Breaths

Just Leslie

�

�

previous - next