“And it starts, Sometime around midnight, Or at least that’s when you lose yourself, For a minute or two”
-- Sometime Around Midnight – The Airborne Toxic Event
Sometimes I close my eyes, a song plays and I just start writing. It’s not very often that I actually try and keep up with the feral waves crashing down upon me. But sometimes I do.
Most times it just ends in frustration, as I jump from thought to ephemeral thought … never staying with anything long enough to actually form something worth holding onto. But make no mistake, at all times, in my head, there is something, something simmering, something down there that a song touches.
“Sometimes Around Midnight”
“With or Without You”
“I Might Be Wrong”
“The End of Innocence”
And a few other songs will take me somewhere else.
Or they will so acutely put me in the moment, a place and time I’m trying too hard to dodge, trying so hard to not even think about. For what ever reason the song commands my thoughts to sit up and be heard by my conscientious.
Cigarette dangling from my lip, head phones crammed into my ears, slouched over my deck, a bit untethered from equal measures of the crash of guitars, the bass of the kick drum, flowing bourbon, and my swirling emotions. Mind abuzz and confused with thoughts. The music, my emotions – I can’t make it loud enough.
Not loud enough to hear it … not even loud enough to drown out my own fucking noise. My fingers rise up to bury the ear buds deeper into my tympanic membrane, make the music louder, make the noise stop. My own symphony getting in the way.
My signal to noise ratio is off the charts.
I’ve never had vertigo. Oh sure, I’ve had those moments where I’ve stood up to fast and went dizzy for a moment, but never actually had the prolonged feeling where everything around me was spinning while I stood perfectly still.
Except in my head.
I can’t even begin to explain how often it feels like in my own head everything is twisting, like some sort of particularly evil Nor’easter. And I’m desperately trying to grasp on to anything. Just to feel stable for a second. Hit from all sides — the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
And then someone has the audacity to say, “Get over it.” “Move on.” “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
And maybe I will, but maybe I won’t. You won’t hear me either way, so it’s of no consequence.
It’s so hard to make sense of anything when everything seems so strange. To calm the storm for just a minute, to be able to make something, anything, make sense for just a second.
And it twirls, and it twirls and it twirls…
‘Cause nothing in the mind is easy, nothing straightforward. Everything in the world seems to follow a crooked road when all you desperately want is — just for a few steps – the road to be straight.
And the winds whip, the rains fall … you take the best cover you can, and still you end up wet, cold and lonely.
“And then you walk, under the street lights. And you’re too drunk to notice that everyone is staring at you. You don’t care what you look like, the world is falling around you.
This post was originally published on my website at: http://warriorinthegardens.com/2013/05/04/sometimes-around-midnight/