Sometimes Thom and I exist in such a thick fog of stillness that I am unable to locate my self and my thoughts.  Let alone express them.  I was just musing to myself how sad it is that I really don’t have anyone to talk with about the things I truly think and feel during the course of my day.  I feel like Thom often listens unenthusiastically, sometimes without so much as a nod in reply.  And I don’t really have many other companions who are on my wavelength or available for regular discourse. So here I am, lost in the fog.  Until I remembered the blog…

It is apropos that I begin with music.  Today I located an album I’ve been hunting nostalgically for for months.  Leonard Cohen’s “Live Songs” is one that my father played for me years ago, one that he had bought on vinyl during his youth.  Some of this music I heard and internalized while growing up left such a deep imprint on my consciousness.  The Beatle’s “Abbey Road” is another, songs that live in my head without me knowing them until randomly they return to mystify me.  This Cohen album was recorded in Berlin and not really released in the States.  It is filled with raw melancholy, the same sort of stuff that fills me.  Today it was a much needed treat.

Along with my excitement over the album, I also finally made my way to a novel I’ve been meaning to read for 15 years.  Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” leaped off the shelf as I meandered around my favorite used bookstore.  There were literally three different copies in three different places and I could not ignore it any longer.  I will admit that my generic sensibilities had me thinking about this book as one that may help me in my latest collaboration with George (more on this in a minute), and so I was primed to notice it.  So far I’m 100 pages in and haven’t met much that has engrossed me beyond the aura of Plath herself and her all-too-perfect-for-literary-fame tragic death.

And about that death… So I’ve decided to write about suicide for this latest collaboration.  I’ve been dwelling on the concept lately, mostly out of respect for some of the novels I’ve been reading and their troubled authors.  I also seem to have a very surface flirtation with the concept of taking my life, not in any bout of depression but more just random fancies which find me trying to imagine how it would play out.  Or why.

A brief note of self-analysis: I link this suicidal fancy of mine to my other impulses in moments of stress to just abandon the situation and begin anew.  Changing jobs, relationships, cities… The only disconnect with this comparison is that suicide does not allow you the chance to begin anew.  Probably why I can’t ever actually see myself thinking about it as anything more than a concept.

But it should be ripe for exploration with George in our latest musical piece.  I see it as a cross between crazy emotion and oddly stoic and pragmatic behavior.  I want to tap into the mindset of someone who is making, or has made and is planning, the decision to take their life.  I think the words mixed with orchestration will be powerful.

And that, my dear anonymous reader/friend, is all that is on my mind.