Fortress of Solitude


     Don’t let the titling fool you…  My fortress of solitude is a LOUD place.  It is an isolation from everything I need a few minutes away from.  The hour I spend in the car every day with enough entertainment to DJ a block party.  A lunch break with the above-pictured devices.  It is never enough to simply see earbuds as a deterrent of extraneous conversation.  The car makes it obvious; announcing that I won’t hear you three blocks before I ever even alive.

     But on the ground, out in the world?  That will require some closed-back cans.  It needs to be obvious that I am not ignoring you (or am I?).  It needs to be apparent why I just can’t be bothered right now.

     It creates a space where I am around people who speak my language.  People who talk about shit I want to talk about.  People who enjoy things that I enjoy.  When I am with my music, I am in a space without the disappointment of general human interaction.  I get to choose my spots, I get to explore things and never revisit the ones that rub me wrong.
I have always told people “the existence of God is proven through music and the smiles of babies.”
My daughter notwithstanding (and only because this piece is not about her), the fact that God can be found in the art, in the presentation, in the trips that a good song or album can take you on.  The experience is felt differently by perhaps every single individual to feel it and even THAT is a source of the peace I find in music.

     I know people from many different walks of life, a lot of us love the same things and the different conversations we can have on the same shit is fun to me.
I tend to write to music.  I like to think I can look back at what I have written months or years later and clearly identify what it was I was listening to when I wrote something.

     Or perhaps it is all a visit back to the only moments in my childhood where I felt unjudged…  The words and sounds of a complete stranger are comforting in the space of them having thrown it out to the ethereal for you to consume and enjoy, or not enjoy.  I always envied that kind of freedom, it would unfortunately take me DEEP into adulthood to find it in my own writing and into my late thirties to truly feel I am doing the right things with it.
“Driveway moments” where I am simultaneously allowing my radio a moment to sync its applications while in my WiFi (yes, it reaches the end of the driveway) but at the same time drinking in my last couple of moments before the key hits the lock, that tumbler clicks and adulthood domestication commences.
Getting a new album and listening to it until I know every word and adlib (whatup Skyzoo!), and still listening to it as attentively 6 years later as you did on day one.
Remembering where you were the first time you heard or understood something.
Typing a blog post on Saturday night with your big phones on while a TV show you have no remaining interest in plays in the background while planning to spoil the four women in your house with breakfast in the morning.
Music. Is. My. Peace.
There are times I cannot find it in literally ANYTHING else, not even those which I love the most.  I don my big blue headphones and sit down to a computer and start hacking at the 108.

     So yeah, my “fortress of ‘solitude’” is a LOUD fucking place and I would not have it any other way.

I don’t envy people who don’t feel what they’re choosing to listen to.  I actively DETEST people who seek music they don’t have to try and feel.  Me? I need this shit!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

True Story©... Get Out Of Jail Free!

Ghetto-ass names; they're my birth control