Frank

Sitting in class the other day, finding myself caught in the crossfire of Ranjit and Trevan's History of Rock travelogue, I kept hearing the opening verse of one of my favorite songs, Chris Smither's Leave the Light On:

If I were young again, I'd pay attention
to that little-known dimension,
the taste of endless time.
Just like water, it runs right through our fingers
but the flavor of it lingers
like a rich, red wine.

I was sort of reminded of when I was much younger, and my mind was then, as these men's minds are now, a vast rolodex of current and historical music and entertainment factoids. I reveled in it, and the available influx of information was a priceless commodity.

But for whatever reason, I've lost a good bit of that part of myself. It's not that I don't enjoy music any more, or that I feel like there's some haunting void where that pursuit once was--it's simply been exchanged for other behavior and interests, I suppose--but I'm not exactly sure how it happened.

I suppose the military is the primary culprit. Not only did I go from listening to music pretty much throughout the day to not hearing much at all most days, there were also plenty of situations where there was no music to be heard for days and days and days and days.

I understand that one's brain more or less becomes rewired--just as kids (or "shitheads" as I tend to think of them) who are raised on massive amounts of television go through a physiological process in which the neural paths of their brains are literally conditioned to need constant, shifting visual and/or auditory stimulation in order to pay attention to anything, I guess that being divorced from all that leads to a physiological change as well.

I like to think it's for the better, but who knows. It's not as though I've achieved some sort of blissful, zen state of inner tranquility--my mind is typically filled up with just as much racket as it ever was (more, actually, as I don't tend to use mind-numbing substances the way I used to)--it's just that now it's all of my own invention. Which would be great, except for the writer's strike that's apparently been going on in my head for the lst four years. Honestly--it's nothing but Who's the Boss? reruns in here.

As a little digression--I picked up that Chris Smither CD around November of last year, and listened to it on an endless loop as I headed into the final week of the fall semester. I was cranking out a 35-page paper, analyzing LBJ's word choice and speech patterns in press conferences during the Vietnam War, and the album had taken on the trance-inducing quality of a Buddhist chant for me. Luckily, the music isn't permanently tied to the memory of that ridiculous research project.