Writing With Music: Day 3
Maybe it was peace at last, who knew.
I very often write these articles, and many important writings, while listening to music written by songwriters that feel a lot and convey a lot of emotion through their songs.
I fuckin forgot about this little experiment when I decided to take a friend out for local street food tonight on our last night in the city before returning to the dreaded mountain where white rice occupies all my plates and all my nightmares.
Too many things to do now and I won’t get my 8 hours of sleep, that’s already lost so a slow tremble will replace whatever peace comes at the end of a day well planned and well executed.
Hello love, my invincible friend.
I’ve never said I love you so many times in my life as I have the last month. It’s all I can say and I wish there was a better thing to say like I want to tattoo your face into my eyelids or drink the sweat off your skin after a hike in humidity or put my nose in your mouth first thing in the morning and take in the condensation of all your organs and matter and broken teeth through my nostrils and into my brain where you become a part of me because your breath and my breath are now the same.
I ate some spicy street food and now my farts hurt. I have to pack all my shit again. Pack in and pack out. Would be fine if I was packed for only a few days but I have 3 giant suitcases carrying all my equipment and enough snack food to keep me off the ledge when the alternative is drinking milk that likely came from a deer.
What happens before we are born? The 22 year old Malaysian with a rat tail walks into the room 3 times because we have asked them to fix the air conditioner. He walks in with his head low and does a job so unsatisfying that I can’t actually watch him press the buttons. I feel sick for him and sick about myself that I am able to travel the world and complain about the wait staff in my Bali villa because the eggs were cooked a little too runny while I was swimming laps in our personal pool.
This isn’t a feel bad for the starving children sickness. This is the fact that something happened before I happened and I’ll never know what. Someone shifted the scale and made me me instead of making me him. Guilt and gratitude can cancel each other out but what is left is a knowing that the world we’re seeing every day has nothing to do with all that is happening in the glitches between the things we see – objects and people that operate in patterns so repetitious that no one notices when the seams split and that you can stick your hands in and start to drag yourself through to another version that exists without the ever present doubt that the walls are forever and always coming down on you.
He just walks in and turns the a/c on and off all day.
“Hello.”
“Yes?”
“Air con in the ballroom please.”
“OK.”
And then he’s back with the remote and his hair and not the slightest idea that gluten is inflaming his gut and affecting his ability to have pure thoughts. He talks through his walkie talkie and says the air has been fixed and then he walks out. And he has done his job. And I think about how many minutes that could be my job before I tied rocks to my shoes and jumped in a lake.
I try to tell him thank you every time. I try to say hi to him in the hallway. But to be honest I can’t really look at him in the eyes.
So what happened before I was born? Who did I talk to? I could be him. There’s no reason I’m not him other than the lottery. Who set the game?
*lyrics from Ben Howard’s – “I Forget Where We Were.” This song carries me through.
