The lights go down...music rises from the silence. My head begins to spin. A tumult of sensation overwhelms me, and I'm helplessly off my feet and whirling, whirling through time and space, the lights too bright and the sounds too loud, round and round the maelstrom as I'm tossed ever lower, down into the depths...
Opium dream? Satanic attack? Bad NIN concert flashback? Nah, just a really nasty influenza virus that managed to get under my defences and kick my sad butt this week. Worst I've had in a long time...I can understand how epidemics of this stuff carried thousands and thousands off to the underworld, I felt like I got pretty close. I swear I think at one point I saw some guy in Plutonic robes smiling and beckoning me in, but I started swimming towards the surface and got away this time. Now I'm weak like a little kitten, and it all seems like a strange, very painful nightmare...must buy more oranges.
Looking at my folks old editions of encyclopedia, the Britannica and the good ol' World Book, I used to just thumb through those for fun. Now, amazingly, the same amount of information can just sit in a few GB of your hard drive, or even live accessibly out somewhere in cyberspace for instant retrieval. Although somehow I feel I trust Wikipedia less than Britannica, and I know I can't just open it up and read at random the same way (although I must say I use Wiki all the time). It's like I can't really get a charge buying music online the same way I do when I'm in a (now sadly rare) really good music store, I can't wander around the same right-brained way, stumbling into strange and wonderful stuff accidentally...or by hanging around jawing with the hip Record Store Guy. I was one of those once, by the way...not necessarily hip, but a Record Store Guy. I don't miss all of it, but I do miss turning people on to cool music...
Playing music in a state of high fever is an odd experience. You can't really get anything done, but sometimes you get really strange insights. Running through some chord arpeggios and scale sequences while practicing a tune, and suddenly the patterns of "notes available while passing through time" became really clear. I could see the various interlocking scales and chord tones incredibly clearly, and how various choices could lead to different melodic and harmonic outcomes...and how of course that this is only the very first step. The next goal is to completely assimilate those patterns so that there are infinite options...and then, the transcendence of those patterns and into real freedom. If that sounds a bit Metaphysical, it's because I think it really is! Mastering music as a metaphor for the Spiritual journey...yeah, you've heard it before, but hey, it's my cosmology and I'm stickin' with it. But anything can have that metaphorical cosmology I think...what about that Zen butcher? He did his job so perfectly that his knives never got dull, and his focus on his actions was clearer than the monks in the monastery. But I'm stickin' with the music thing, you get shiny guitars and the chicks dig it.
Perhaps I'm still recovering a little...my mind seems to be wandering. Sometimes that's actually a pretty good thing, and I wonder if maybe a little stumbling around in the right side of the brain might not be just the thing in these strange dark pre-Spring weeks. But I'd much rather do it without the incredible sinus and joint pain, thanks!
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