Tuesday, February 13, 2007

The song remains the same

There are two things that keep me sane when it all seems to have gone wrong (again): Annie Lennox and writing it all down. The latter isn't terribly practical, at least not in a public forum. Who wants to be one of those people of dubious mental stability on the subway, scribbling in a little notebooks and looking balefully at their fellow passengers? I try to keep my level of overt instability down to a shout when possible. So in addition to being the more discreet and portable option for sanity maintenance, Annie Lennox is more eloquent than I am in matters of emotional exposition. And Scottish, which also counts for a lot.

Last night, as I was shuffling along yet another street on another night, surfing another wave of familiar melancholy, "Cold" came up on the playlist, the one I specifically engineered for walks such as this. Not exactly the Walk of Shame, more the Dramatic Stride of Pretending This Is Your Montage Sequence. It is very cold and I am sick and I felt well entitled to my flagrant wallowing.

This playlist which has so often gloriously exacerbated my dark moods has its genesis in a mix CD that I first made during my last year of high school. At first it was one volume and then two. I wore it out, I had to remake it. Sometimes a few of the selections changed, most made the transition. When I got my first iPod - the one that weighed 4 lbs and only had 15 minutes of battery life on a good day - the first playlist I made was comprised of those songs I felt were in it for the long haul. It even kept the same title as it's predecessor.

Quite obviously, the main advantage of a playlist over the mixtapes of yore is that playlists are infinitely fluid, adaptable. You can add and delete at your leisure without sacrificing $20 worth of blank CDs. Your number of tracks is limitless. Gone are the limitations of physical media! Nevertheless, this was one playlist to which I gave strict guidelines. It would be serving a highly specialized purpose, as it had in its original incarnation. It was the Navy SEALs of playlists. I've added things to it, but only after careful consideration - "How much this really make me want to cry deep, wrenching sobs of despair?" In reality, though, the same songs that I painstakingly burned on that mix CD almost a decade ago have served me well all this time.

But last night a strange thing happened as I began my shuffle of impending montage. Instead of settling into the comforting sit bath of self-imposed depression, I had a startling jolt of clarity. I had walked down a different street on a different night, surfing a different wave of righteous self-pity over a different mess. I listen to this same playlist each time that I go screeching into the brick wall of reality and begin to think that my best option is to hurl myself in front of the M6 bus, hope that reincarnation is real, and start over again. Hopefully not as a spider monkey or an Arquette.

Last night, the playlist got a little fed up with me.

"Don't be a silly twat," said Annie Lennox in her dulcet tones. "This too shall pass."

I'm not going to mess with Annie Lennox. She hasn't done me wrong yet.

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