Human Mind Becomes Archaeological Dig Site Following Discovery of
Tiny Funk Band Competing with Commuters and Train Over Inner Ear Real Estate!
A few weeks ago, I wrote about recognizing the signs that your life flashes to keep you on the right path. Sometimes the signals are so faint, they often go unseen. In those circumstances, what results is an unstable isotope known as the American dream. Basically, instead of recognizing one’s own path, he or she defaults to what the ‘White Demon”(more on this asshole later) has spent the last hundred years telling everyone. I am unfamiliar with the inner workings of this default path, but what little I have heard, sounds truly awful. Evidently it involves traveling long distances in a vehicle that the White Demon rents to you, while wearing expensive, uncomfortable clothes that the Demon let you put on your credit card. Upon arriving at this default zone, which most refer to as their Jomby or something like that. JayObe? Geobe? I can’t remember all the nonsense lingo used by those folks. You are made to do all kinds of nasty tasks while being timed. When you’re daily usefulness is consumed, you are sent back to your default family and rented dream, to resume the charade of success and happiness that you are so proud to owe to someone.
My own path could have easily been defaulted. I would carry on, unaware of the other way. Once it is clear that there is no chance for sign sight, you are relieved of any and all of the visceral and agonizing emotions that are required to follow your path. You carry on ‘Happy” and ‘Successful’, proud of two paid weeks a year…….I admire the discipline and selflessness required to live on that path. I have proved incompatible and disruptive on that particular dimension. For many years I viewed my inability to function on that path as a character flaw or a disorder. No I know it to be a gift.
Elvis can’t Hold no Groove
The most recent sign on my path was a service announcement stating that muffled and energetic music that I have been hearing in my head and unable to identify since age five, would be available to me in real time from now on. Did that just say what I think it did? The music in my head is not just a funky jingle that I memorized somewhere along the way? I knew it.
For my entire life, from the age of 5, I have been hearing a certain kind of music coming from somewhere in my head. My uncle Patrick told me that it was my theme music when I was around 7 or 8. I was only ever able to catch a couple of measures every once in a while. It was very muffled and cloudy sounding, like it was behind a door. The inside of my head sounds like a convention of murmurs and chatter all the time. It’s very distracting and discouraging. I have never in my life heard silence. These few bars of indecipherable music had a tendency to increase in volume and clarity during times of hopelessness and exhaustion caused by all the murmuring and chatter. Often times saving my life. I always secretly thought that if I could just figure out what this music was, maybe I could learn a few of the tunes on guitar. There have been countless failed attempts at recreating it with bands. I was never able to hear it clear enough to categorize what style of music it was. Never able to convey it to anybody. I have heard a few bands over the years get very close to the sound in my head. Have ever been to a music festival and witnessed a guy in the audience that seemed to be dancing like he was on drugs or electrically connected to the music somehow.? Usually a crowd forms around this guy and eventually the whole place becomes a pulsing sea of smiles and joy. If I could identify or recreate my theme music, I bet it would cause this effect with lots of people.
Now all of a sudden there is a sign telling me that I can hear this music whenever I want. Count me in and Thank you very much. Your path doesn’t have actual signs. There is never a plank on a stick with letters painted on it. They could be anything. The sign about the theme music came to me shaped like a Mexican gardener. This Mexican gardener was in fact, a Brazilian artist that I will call Mex.(not his real name. His real name is Luis Torres, but he wouldn’t want me using his real name) Mex is what I refer to as a serious musician. I live close to a town that is awash in hipsters carrying gig bags full of emotional expressiveness who call themselves musicians. If they are using the word musician, then I need a new word to describe Luis, I mean Mex. Serious Musician. His quest is unrelated to fashionable trends and is more akin to dimensional exploration. Harmonic bliss. A little over a year ago my path led me to the middle of fucking nowhere, and shut off the light. When the light came back on, I was somehow inside the music inside my head. During a particularly dark and discouraging time in my life when the murmurs and chatter was an orchestra in mutiny, it was Luis that heard my theme music. With a little elbow grease and lubricant, he forced open a big steel door in my mind, subsequently silencing the evil murmurs and releasing a sweaty funk band with cosmic grooves a plenty, a cool guitar player, and a scrawny white ex-junkie that sings like he ate Al Green.
The Burden of Tone 