Winter Melody

One of the ways in which I am a True American is in my emotional weakness for shitty music. Don't get me wrong, I like good music better than shitty music, but I am susceptible to the charms of crappy pop songs, overwrought ballads, dad rock and various other musical vagaries that would shame any self-respecting music nerd. I've memorized way more Bob Dylan songs than Billy Joel songs...but that still means I've memorized a shit ton of Billy Joel songs, I ain't gonna front. That's the thing about music, any music. If your guard is down and you run into a melody--even if you're not really sure how it goes, but it's sad and it's sweet and you knew it complete when you wore a younger man's clothes--you're gonna feel the impact. And my guard, more often that I'd like to admit, is prone to slippage.

Sixteen years ago on brisk winter night in Orange County my uncle died. He was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in August and he was gone by late December. I had spent much of my time in the intervening months at his side, along with others in my family, in what I can now recognize as the most intense emotional period of my life. Driving home from the hospital, on my way back to Vista to tell my mom that her brother was dead, "A Long December" by the Counting Crows came on the radio, with lyrics about "the smell of hospitals in winter" and so now that song is part of me, and that's just the way it is.

I take refuge in art and love and the simple pleasures of a Sunday morning, but I also cloak myself in a layer of emotional armor that can block out the light and I wish I could stop doing that. I wish I could lay down my weapons and study war no more. But the rawness of a December night can still cut me to the quick when I take out the trash, no matter how happy I am, no matter what joy and beauty wait just inside the doors of my house, and when that happens I get scared, so fucking scared, and I find ways to chase it off. But I want to stop fighting it. I want to feel it, to become who I am in that and every moment and in so doing persevere, bloody but unbowed, despite the absence of armor. That's what I'm after, and in that regard here's hoping that next year will better than the last.