You know how you sometimes have days where nothing can save you? You just lie in bed morosely, utterly devoid of energy, unable to do even the simplest of things, and you just watch the hours slowly drift away, hoping against all hope that tomorrow will be a better day?
That was me today. In all honesty, that's me so very often, but today I just couldn't muster the energy to do something productive. Not even music seemed to be of help. I decided to ride that wave of no-energy until it ran its course.
Spent most of the day in bed, blinds partially drawn, with scant sunlight coming in. What sunlight did penetrate was already filtered through some heavy set clouds that threatened rain. Turned on the TV, turned it off shortly afterwards. Don't have what it takes to listen to people speaking, at least not today. Thought about picking up a book, decided against it. I knew I wouldn't absorb a single word, no matter how many times I read and re-read the same page. Eventually fell asleep, and dreamt an old dream.
This dream, I can't tell for sure if it's a dream I had as a kid and somehow became semi-recurring, or if it's an actual memory. It's set when I was very young, so early 80's. I have vague impressions of it being near christmas time, but I might be wrong. I'm in the dining room - the very same where I ate my meals every day as a kid - and I'm naked, jumping up and down on the sofa. In another room, adults are speaking, and I can't quite understand what they're talking about. The telly is on, and there's a commercial playing - I want to say it was for a beer, maybe Carlsberg - and the music they're playing in the background would haunt me for years, the anvil chorus of Verdi's 'Il Trovatore'. Still on the sofa, I stop jumping and edge towards the end of the sofa that's nearer to the wooden bookcase that we had then, and that I still have now on my bedroom. It looms large in the distance, a towering castle, with the floor serving as a makeshift moat, the space between sofa and bookcase an immense, yawning chasm that would surely spell my doom should I fall down.
But victory is within reach, because I inch closer and finally open a large drawer, large enough to house some records and some of my parents alcoholic beverages. All I know for sure is that somewhere in that sparse collection of records, was one that I was absolutely terrified of. I rifle through the records, slowly, my fingers running deftly through the spines. It is never in the same place. I'm reaching the end of the collection, and I'm yet to see it.
Outside, in the real world, some children are yelling, as children are wont to. I wake up, and still drowsy, I check my phone to see what time it is. Still thinking about the dream, the words started flowing.
I can fault my parents for much, however, what I cannot ever fault them for was the lack of culture at home. This came mainly from my mother, a learned and intelligent woman, who instilled in me a love for books and reading. From her, or mostly from her, I would inherit a certain liking for music. It helped that she worked at the time for the national TV company, and as luck would have it, we always had movies and TV shows to watch - the perks of working for the company also included being able to record pretty much whatever she wanted and take home with her. Yes, I understand how you might feel that security was lax and whatnot, but really... it was just a different, way less complicated time. One of my childhood's holy grails is something that I saw only the once, which was the series bible for a show called 'He-Man and the Masters of the Universe'. Goddamn me if that still doesn't haunt me..
As I said a little bit back, my parents had a fairly small selection of records; though memory may be sketchy here, and it could be that they had more than I remember. And even so, I can't seem to remember very many of what they had. Out of the top of my head, I can recall Santana's 'Abraxas' (the record whose cover I was terrified of in real life), a Bruce Springsteen live boxset, some Queen, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd for sure, and a bunch of classical music cassetes my mother collected. I also have fond memories of the soundtracks to Dirty Dancing and Ghotbusters. CDs came later, maybe around '88 or '89. There's one in particular that I may or may have not played to death - Dire Straits's 'Money for nothing'. A funny thing is that by now I'd already started to have a few records of my own, and my brother also had his own set of records. From him I got to know about the alternative bands of the day, bands that back then we called vanguard, but nowadays are called 'post-punk' or 'goth' or what have you. It comes as no surprise, however, that my most used form of media was the good old tape, and in time I would amass a collection of various hundreds, a collection that I would one day throw away in a fit of lunacy.
I always had music by my side; and even though today was a day where not even it could awaken my soul to joy, writing about it surely lifted my spirits a bit.
Tomorrow I'll be back to our scheduled programming, and I'll rant a bit about these hard times we're living right now.
Be pure.
Be vigilant.
Behave.
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