Music is a seductive creature, capable of arousing, angering, and inducing various states of consciousness. It always attacks me the same way a vivid memory does. The perfect song seems to place itself in the perfect memory, that one night you were looking for where the action was at, and you finally found it. You spend the rest of your life trying to reconstruct this thing but you’re never quite there, because the people, spaces, and dramatics cannot be duplicated. At best, you find something similar, maybe somewhere else, far away in an unknown time zone. Then just for a moment, you get to touch it and it runs away from you at a speed so fast you realize you’re just talking to yourself. Life twists its residents into a constant flux of fucking the past, attempting to fuck the present, and inducing fear of what will be fucking us over in the future.
So let us give thanks for being fucked-up strangers in a fucked-up new world crashing into each other. Blasphemy breeds independence and noncompliance gives premature birth to pretty creatures. The gift of rummaging through the dumpster makes us consume the failure of superficiality while collecting the remnants of unused genius. Treat yourself to a brisk walk afterwards, take a left at the next corner, and stroll down memory lane. Maybe you’ll see a new face there, one you’ve never seen before. You might find an unknown someone to help you chase “that thing” and realize it never left you.
Kevin P McGovern, November 2013
Fear and Loathing in Long Beach
