Category Archives: Music

Entering the fall of one’s life is not something that usually happens without incident or reflection, and finding myself not-so-suddenly at the age of 48, I realize that there are probably more days behind me than are ahead of me. Cresting over this hump of middle age is, somewhat strangely, not something that has caused much consternation or worry. In a number of distinct ways, the overriding feeling is one of gratitude. Honestly, I never thought I’d make it past thirty – there were so many moments fraught with willful self-annihilation, so many times when I gave up on myself, when I actually set out to destroy the young man I couldn’t quite stop myself from becoming. 

A song then, on the piano, for the boy I used to be. (All those years of piano lessons, and still I could never play like this.) A song, too, for the man I’ve somehow become, in spite of my weaker efforts, and because of my strongest. 

One doesn’t reach a place of gratitude from mindfulness or meditation alone, or from the luck of leading a very charmed and privileged life. One has to suffer a bit, go through a few things, build some character, and maybe approach oblivion couple of times. The debilitating struggle of not feeling like you belong, of not feeling wanted, of not being understood at the most basic level – those things chips away at the innocence and exuberance of childhood. If you’ve only ever felt you were at the margins of life when you were a kid, you never really quite feel like you belong anywhere – at least, you don’t until you can find yourself, and find your own worth. It’s that shaky and unsteady ground that many gay people feel themselves on at one point or another – that moment when coming out might cost you friendship or love or life. 

Such a strange thing, that unsteadiness, and the dizzying lack of some feeling of belonging – and then of thinking you don’t belong anywhere unless you’re there at the center of it all, marching in some grand parade, embraced and hoisted on the shoulders not because different, but because you’re just like everyone else. You belong. 

Everyone’s eyes are on the spectacle of it – the music and the pomp and the majesty of a march – and we lose ourselves in watching it go by, not looking around to see all the people next to us – eyes only on the chosen few, missing the real connections, the true threads of life running through our journey. I thought I wanted to be in that parade. I thought that would make me belong.

So I made myself into my own parade – a grotesque, ridiculous, carnival of outlandish proportion compared to my trifling lot in life. It was but one of the many demons I conjured in the name of survival. A celebration of me to mask the utter lack of believing I deserved one. 

There came a time when all those demons became my friends, when they stopped fighting me and turned their formidable powers against the outer world. Suddenly I could charge ahead with a battalion behind me, a support system the likes of which I never knew or got when I was growing up. 

Like all demons, however, they proved problematic, deceptive in their perceived power, and ultimately deserting me when I needed them the most. Empty shells and vaporous ghosts, the scariest forms of imagined life, they were all in my head, all made-up and false crutches to get me through. Sometimes they did, but in the end they couldn’t do what I needed them to do. 

The parade marched onward, and I watched it go… 

In honor of Taylor Swift’s release of ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version), I’m posting my favorite track from the album (‘Blank Space‘ is a very close second, and on days when I’m feeling especially crazy it might be number one). But I digress, and must remind myself that comparison is the thief of joy. ‘Out of the Woods’ has what I consider to be the greatest bridge of any Swift song, which is saying a lot when you consider the likes of ‘Cruel Summer’. Still, I give the edge to ‘Woods’. And there I go comparing again… 

Looking at it now
It all seems so simple
We were lying on your couch
I remember

You took a Polaroid of us
Then discovered
(Then discovered)
The rest of the world was black and white
But we were in screaming color
And I remember thinking…

In celebration of the woods, we are revisiting the forest, where fall comes into its own with the following links. 

A meditative walk in the woods.

The Wood Witch.

Different kind of wood.

Wood, unfelled and feared.

Over the river and through the woods.

At the edge of the woods.

Morning wood.

Remember when we couldn’t take the heat?
I walked out, I said “I’m setting you free”
But the monsters turned out to be just trees
When the sun came up you were looking at me…

A walk in the woods.

When the veil is thinnest…

Where the veil is thinnest…

Why the veil is thinnest…

Walking in the Maine woods.

Red riding wood 1.

Red riding wood 2.

Red riding wood 3.

Red riding wood 4.

Red riding wood 5.

Falling into the past.

Are we out of the woods yet?
Are we out of the woods yet?
Are we out of the woods yet?
Are we out of the woods?

Are we in the clear yet?
Are we in the clear yet?
Are we in the clear yet?
In the clear yet, good!

The moon inspires many things, including lots of music. Sometimes it hides behind smog, sometimes it peeks out of November, and sometimes it appears after disappearing for decades. On this night, it danced with the clouds and the trees and forced me to stop in my drive home last night. I pulled over just to capture these shots, because it’s best to honor and acknowledge the moon rather than fight it. 

I’m lying on the moon
My dear, I’ll be there soon
It’s a quiet starry place
Time’s we’re swallowed up in space
We’re here a million miles away

There’s things I wish I knew
There’s no thing I’d keep from you
It’s a dark and shiny place
But with you my dear, I’m safe
And we’re a million miles away

We all see the same moon. Maybe it’s in shadow for some, maybe it’s brighter for others, maybe it’s barely discernible behind clouds, and maybe it’s the only thing to be seen in the sky – but it’s the same moon, the same body in the universe that everyone on earth gets to glimpse in some way. In that respect, the moon has always been a comfort to me, a reminder that we’re not quite alone. 

We’re lying on the moon
It’s a perfect afternoon
Your shadow follows me all day
Making sure that I’m okay
And we’re a million miles away

Before the official first day of fall way back in the year 1994, I was priming the seasonal pumps with my ‘Darkness’ project, in which I did a rather perfunctory examination of, well, ‘Darkness’ in an effort to strike some fun fear and silly scares in the hearts of my friends. Little did I know that real life would soon prove dark enough, and that all my writings and mix-tapes on such a theme would feel all the more silly afterward.

This song opened up the theme on the ‘Darkness’ mix I made for all of my friends. (Yes, a mix-tape, on a 90-minute cassette from the 80’s.) The grand finale to the month-long mailing extravaganza of my ‘projects’ at the time was usually the tape (which included chilling musical motifs from the likes of ‘The Silence of the Lambs’). This particular package came with a bloody knife wrapped in a bloody wash-cloth, to really get the point across. (The post office used to be a lot less stringent in what you get away with mailing.)

Love – nobody know just how it was born
Love – first came to me with the radio on
Jumped up in my body with an attitude
Kissed me on the mouth and said “Your leader take me to”

‘Twas like thunder all thru the night
And a promise to see jesus in the morning light
Love say “Take my hand, it’ll be alright
C’mon save your soul tonight”

The package, and the entire project itself, brought mixes reactions. One of my friends reported it, while Suzie and the Cornell Crew opened the package, shrugged, washed off the knife and added it to their questionable collection of kitchen utensils. Back then, I considered it a success based on those disparate reactions alone. Clearly, I was still finding my footing as far as creative expression went. 

The stories that accompanied the ‘Darkness’ project were designed to disturb and scare, and thankfully I no longer have any of them because I’m sure they read as more ridiculous than terrifying. (The only one I partially recall is a fantasy on torturing my annoying roommate at the time – a broken light bulb was going to be inserted into his, well, you get the idea.) I wanted to illuminate all the ways that Darkness can make us do things we wouldn’t normally do, things of which we would never be proud, things that turn us into lesser-versions of ourselves. I accessed the darker corners of my psyche and let it all play out on the page, taking my friends along for the ride whether they liked it or not. 

Love’s kiss was running all thru my veins
The bed started shakin’, I don’t know who to blame
Me or this flower right in front of my eyes
Is this my sweet savior or the devil in disguise

‘Twas like thunder (oh) all thru the night (all through)
Promise to see jesus in the morning light
Love say “Take my hand, it’ll be alright
C’mon save your soul tonight”

It was my attempt to keep myself in their minds while we were miles apart – my biggest fear back then may have been being forgotten. It worked almost too well, and I came up against the prickly lines that vacillated among notoriety, derision, and disgust. Alienating friends was the art form I was unintentionally perfecting, and the solitary stance in which I found myself may have fed into my behavior that fall. Sometimes I think darkness begets darkness, and once you start rolling down that hill it’s very difficult to stop, much less right yourself. The best you can do is slow down a bit, and hope that any impact at the end won’t kill you outright. 

This song by Prince and the New Power Generation, from the brilliant ‘Diamonds and Pearls‘ album (which remains my favorite Prince album, as much as purists may scoff) brings me back to those thunderous days, when fall felt like the most fitting season for the tales of fright I was intentionally crafting and intentionally living. Fall was rife for drama in that way, and I courted it unabashedly, conjuring the tension and emotions required to make an impression and a memory. I would burn everything down before they could forget me. 

Now that feels all so silly and futile, and the only ones who remember anything of my ‘Darkness’ project are myself and the small smattering of friends who got that bloody knife in the mail. Oddly, and wonderfully, those are the only ones who still matter. 

The wind rustles through the weeping willow, and the sound is more redolent of fall than summer or spring. On the bank of a pond, water birds stand sentinel, their shadows only outlined silhouettes. Remnants of a hurricane echoing along the Northeast coast have drifted inland, and the boughs of trees sway and shift in the temperate night wind. 

Something spooky is in the air. Is is really there? Or is it just this time of the year, when change is in the atmosphere? Witches might be flying above the cloud-cover, or that might just be the echoes of the hurricane – who can truly tell? And if you believe the former, wouldn’t the effects of the latter simply back it up? One misguided belief leads to another. The truth, in its infuriating way, refuses to be anything but elusive. Why it should be so hard to pin down is one of life’s more unsatisfying mysteries. 

When faced with such a mystery, I find it best to set it to music, and this particular selection straddles the strange undulating border between summer and fall, when chilly nights bleed into striking days, and questions survive only in a world of blue. 

Isn’t it too dreamy? 

Watching the swaying of the willow branches, I’m brought back to those mysteries of life. In most instances they can be traced back to mysteries of love – all the stories somehow come back to love. For some us lucky enough to find escape in the stories we read as children, the wind in the willows sounded a portal to a different world. I still believe in such magic, even if the method to attain entrance is markedly different, and more a better of perspective and mindfulness than actual doors or wardrobes or ships of seedpods to other realms. When the vessel is merely a matter of mind over material, it opens up worlds not limited to the imagination. That expands things to an extent that makes many uncomfortable. 

The willow tree is no longer just a willow tree.

It’s a big furry monster that will either warm you with a big embracing hug, or devour you with tendrils studded with thorns, pulling you into a mouth that is only darkness and impossible pain. 

Fall will light it up soon enough, one way or another. 

“The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.” ~ Thomas Mann, ‘Death in Venice’

This will be a strange, feverish post. I begin it without knowing where it’s going – never a safe beginning, often a riskier middle, and always an ending of doom. So many doomed endings, so many little deaths – all the deaths of a day. This blog post will suffer its own series of deaths – when it is read, when it is unread, when it is forgotten, when it becomes buried beneath other posts, when the antiquated machinations of this WordPress madness cease functioning, when this blog itself goes offline. So many ways it falls apart, deteriorating and diminishing and dissolving, like some unfinished, half-hearted sentence…

The arrival of today’s mail escaped our notice, so I ended up going out to the mailbox after it was dark, listening to the frogs and insects in the very last days of summer sing their slightly sad songs. This day dies to make way for the night, and the night will be gone as well to make room for a new day. Every day a little death indeed. 

“Only incorrigible bohemians find it boring or laughable when a man of talent outgrows the libertine chrysalis stage and begins to perceive and express the dignity of the intellect, adopting the courtly ways of a solitude replete with bitter suffering and inner battles though eventually gaining a position of power and honor among men.” ~ Thomas Mann, ‘Death in Venice’

Summer’s demise is happening as I write this. It was there in the chill of tonight’s air, and the official switch of seasons will take place on September 23. Another summer will arrive, and it will be the same, as much as it won’t. Its heart and essence will scream ‘summer’ but it will still not be the same, even as it takes the same name, even as it goes through the same motions. Summer is summer is not summer is summer… 

I knew this post would collapse into itself, and imperfectly yet impeccably designed it to do so, like those empty buildings so intricately laced with dynamite at all the right locations that upon explosion almost too neatly fall in on themselves. A million little deaths then – of doorways, of windows, of halls, of secrets whispered, of sighs unheard, of winter footprints stained into carpets, of bathroom tiles once peered into while random men found relief at urinals – all the deaths of an average day in an average building. 

Then there is space, littered with dust and debris that will be carted away, ground that will be leveled again – space that will form home for something else, something new. Space and time, both extending and continuing, bound to what came before, bound to what will come after, connecting and separating in infuriating, impossible contradiction. An infinite conundrum that something like Buddhism would only dare hint at resolving, and then it would somehow shift the perspective into something that approached mindfulness, contorting basic laws of science and nature into mere perception, and offering little in how to practically navigate actual survival. Obviously I know little to nothing about Buddhism, or mindfulness… and the last four years of meditation might not mean all that much either. More little deaths – of dreams, of understanding, of plans – and more music by Mahler. I won’t drink to that. 

Three more days until summer falls…

“It is probably better that the world knows only the result, not the conditions under which it was achieved; because knowledge of the artist’s sources of inspiration might bewilder them, drive them away and in that way nullify the effect of the excellent work.” ~ Thomas Mann, ‘Death in Venice’

The Carpenters don’t have a song sad enough for when the rainy day also happens to be a Monday, and such is the conundrum in which we find ourselves this final week of summer. Is there a more gloomy and dreary scene than a dim, rainy Monday morning? It unfailingly saps a bit of the soul when it happens, yet rather than fight and wail and rail against it, I’m attempting to lean into the gloom and doom, to let the soul feel its sadness and disappointment, to pause and hopefully to heal. 

This classic song by the Carpenters is almost too trite to post, but sometimes you don’t need to get too deep to resonate with such rawness. The Carpenters always managed to straddle that line between earnest and cloying – and today I’m erring on the side of earnest. 

Talkin’ to myself and feelin’ old
Sometimes I’d like to quit
Nothin’ ever seems to fit
Hangin’ around
Nothin’ to do but frown
Rainy days and Mondays always get me down…

What I’ve got they used to call the blues
Nothin’ is really wrong
Feelin’ like I don’t belong
Walkin’ around
Some kind of lonely clown
Rainy days and Mondays always get me down

Funny, but it seems I always wind up here with you
Nice to know somebody loves me
Funny, but it seems that it’s the only thing to do
Run and find the one who loves me (the one who loves me)

What I feel has come and gone before
No need to talk it out (talk it out)
We know what it’s all about
Hangin’ around (hangin’ around)
Nothin’ to do but frown
Rainy days and Mondays always get me down

Funny, but it seems that it’s the only thing to do (only thing to do)
Run and find the one who loves me (ooh)