Consider Me Captured

The old axiom is that music is universal - things human beings feel on a deep level are often relived through the media of music. A chord can capture a story, a song can cut you on many layers or heal you on all of them. BS, I say.

As someone who engages in his fair share of self pity (let's be honest, more than my fair share), I think people who cling to music are making a personal mountain out of something that can never be anything other than a mole hill to everyone else on the planet. It's why all pop songs that appeal to mass audiences are so empty - they're trying to say something so simple everyone can understand it. It's why every single song about heartbreak is about YOUR heartbreak, while every happy song somehow sees into your soul. It's the Bob Dylan thing, it's everything and nothing depending on whether your glass is half full or half empty with a chip missing out of the rim where you drink.

At least, that's the way I usually feel. Music is a diversion, I say, not a pursuit. It's one beam of light on the way to truth, not anything approaching truth itself.

Sometimes, the combo of music and lyric really can hit you hard and turn the glass from half empty and grimy, needing another rinse cycle to half full and full of cold, crisp water after a long drought. It happens a lot to some people. It hardly ever happens to me.

But today, boy did music catch up with me, so allow me to pontificate on why my own private mountain might be more of than a mole hill to somebody else. God, I sound pretentious. Every onward.

In the middle of the workday, the episode of "Filmspotting" (a great podcast full of intelligent dialogue about movies, you should listen to it) went into what would be their commercial break if you were listening on terrestrial radio. On came some guy playing an acoustic guitar. I didn't bother to learn his name and don't much care to, but he hit me with this lyric.

"I've sailed this far with my boat on fire."

He went on to some truly lousy rhyme about "failing to expire," and tried to turn the whole thing into a life affirming piece. To hell with that, it was the nugget that interested me. The perfect line landed like a kick to the face you didn't see coming and all you can do is fall to the floor. What a great line. I wish I'd written it.

I wish I'd written it because it's not just the way I've been feeling lately (I'll get into that in a bit) but the way I know a lot of people feel. This phrase is part of the reason I'm not a conspiracy theorist, because it's a universal human condition to feel, at some point, like you're faking everything in your life and you don't know where the hell you're going, how the hell you got where you are and where the hell you're going to end up. But what are you going to do? Sink? Quit trying to put out your sail? Hell no. I've sailed this far with my boat on fire. Why not a little further. Sometimes the heat from the sails is kind of nice.

I'm in a boat with no idea where I'm headed. This weekend, I got to spend some time with my parents and my sister, and after a few drinks and 2/3rds of a chess match my dad and I started talking about this sort of thing - direction and decision and how damned futile it is to try to figure these things out. Turns out, when I was the age of my oldest daughter and my sister the age of my youngest daughter, my dad had a really rough go of things. He fought with my mom and backed himself into a corner and had to fight like hell to get out and there was no light at the end of the tunnel for a long time. He sailed further than most with his boat on fire, and apparently came out on the other side. His reward for sailing was certainty in the winter, a somewhat peaceful sea at the end. Have I beating this goddamned metaphor to death yet? Yes I have.

I guess that's what I'm hoping for, to be able to live with my mistakes when my life closes out. Right now, I'm in a position where the bed I've made is unacceptable to me and there doesn't seem to be an end to what I'm fighting. The mistakes I make are the mistakes my father made are the mistakes my daughter will likely make. How depressing is that.

Stupid song lyric.