And It Was Good.

Music is one of the very few things in this world that makes me absolutely certain of the existence of God.



Sitting here in Place Where I Work with two computers running FileMaker on all cylinders, I leaned back in my chair and listened to my iTunes on shuffle for a few minutes, and ran across a Jeff Buckley song. And I got to thinking: you know, humans have come such a long way. From the original music--banging on rocks and stretched-out animal skins and blowing into reeds--to the layers of guitar and effects on a song like "Forget Her"...Yeah. That's a long walk.



I always wanted to be a rock star, but in my family, that was like saying I wanted to be a writer--only worse. Writers were at least respectable, or could be--rock stars, no way. Drug addicts, the lot of them, and deviants of the worst imaginable sort. I took guitar for a couple of years when I was about 9, with a middle-aged classically-trained type who managed to suck all the fun out of it--well, him and my mother, with her constant admonitions to practice. There was no rock-n-roll taught here, no power chords, nothing even remotely fun; it all seemed kinda random, really. (I have to resist the temptation to believe that I would have understood it better if there had been theory taught along with the simple little traditional songs; my theoretical side really didn't develop til I was an adult, so it would be revisionist at best to believe it would have made any difference when I was 9.)



I gave up music when I was 11, figuring I had no talent; it's unfortunate to go through life loving so much something you know you can't do yourself. I didn't even have the comfort of having a good voice; for the most part, I sound like hell. (When we sing Happy Birthday here at work, I just move my lips. No one's picked up on it yet.)



Briefly, while I was with JP, I gave myself permission to indulge in music even if I did suck, and played bass, which we'd picked up at a pawn shop. I even sang a little when JP and I were together; heroin has the wonderful effect of relaxing all muscles, including the vocal cords, so my voice took on an interesting whiskey-and-cigarettes tone that made me sound worldly and less horrible.



When he died I gave up singing, but in a doomed effort to carry on his dream, I bought myself a guitar (as his most cherished possession, JP's guitar had gone to his brother) and tried to learn what I could. Which was not much, mostly because I was trying to drown myself in work and vodka to numb the pain. After moving back from North Carolina, my guitar was pawned for fix-money while Lou and I were together...along with the amp and JP's four-track recorder. I just gave up then, and never got them back.



CR, a few months before he left for good, talked me into buying him a professional keyboard/synth--the ones with all the sounds, the ones that need a stand all their own because they're so huge. I loved that thing, and used it more than he did, but of course it was HIS, and he took it with him when he left. What was his was his; what was mine was also his, and I had to hide the distortion pedals that I'd kept from JP's things, to keep CR from taking those too. He had the nerve to use that against me in one of our last conversations--that I'd had the nerve not to let him have something, to keep it for myself, just because it had belonged to JP. By that time, trying to avoid anything that could trigger CR into doling out one of his patented Everything You Love Is Shit Including Me emotional abuse spiels, I'd gone so far inside myself that I never even listened to my music anymore; it was just Something Else That Was Gone. I hated CR for taking that away too.



A few weeks before he left, Layne Staley from Alice in Chains was found, dead and decomposed in his apartment in a litter of used needles, crack pipes and spray-cans. It hit me pretty hard, really; Layne was part of my JP memories, one of our renegade heroes, the exception that proved the rule that All Junkies Die Young. They said he was practically skeletal when they found him, at least two weeks after anyone could remember seeing or hearing from him. The night after it was reported, I remember being holed up in the bedroom, where CR hadn't slept for weeks, and watching JBTV on cable. JBTV was another part of my JP memories, and watching it now wasn't easy, but it was comforting. They played this Sonic Youth song that I'd never heard before--"The Diamond Sea"--and something in me woke up, a little. I'd sworn off journal-writing a couple of months earlier, after the wedding from hell, but that night I changed my mind. Layne is dead, I wrote. But I am not.



It took a few years, but I took my music back--and lately I've been thinking about getting myself a guitar. Or maybe a new Macintosh, with GarageBand (because god knows I've been getting just TOO much done around the house lately ANYWAY, and need a new computer-based way to fuck around and waste time. That program could do more to erase my productivity than the Internet ever did. The damn thing is like crack for music geeks.)



I know I'm too old to be a rock star now, but that doesn't mean I can't still make noise.