Cold Comfort

Most of the time, music is the only thing that gets me through the day. The only thing. Times are desperate (and nearly completely hopeless), but music helps.

What doesn’t help is feeling like a prisoner in my own home, avoiding all conversation whenever possible for fear of running into an unnecessary and unprovoked dispute over Barack Obama, health care, and the book of Revelation. I do feel like a prisoner here, cut off from any peers, living with people who are offended by so ridiculously much in this world that I have to say nothing at all to have an easy night.

Do you know what I miss? Do you know what I really miss? Those long, deep talks I used to have with Aaron Marx those last few months of Bowling Green, Ohio. Back then, I had some modicum of grace and wisdom when it came to philosophy and the execution of a personal creed. Back then, I was a respectable human being. Presently, I just want to be left alone and avoid talking about philosophy and religion at all costs.

I just want to move into a one-person apartment with a buffer space from all my family members so I can drink Scotch, get some music written and performed, and maybe do naked kata like the villain in Die Hard 2. Yes. Naked kata. I am all about that!

I digress. The point is that I have an almost Calvin-esque escapist ability when it comes to music. That, combined with the deep, plentiful well of memories within me, provides me with what little comfort I can find in a bad day.

I was listening to Hook and the first Narnia the other evening while doing errands, thinking of how we all got screwed out of fall and jump-started November. I was thinking of the futility of looking for jobs, how I had just posted my resume on a Kansas City local job site, which will certainly yield nothing but another false hope to help me sleep at night. Hey, whatever works.

Anyway, those two scores made me think specifically of how all I want to do is go to a coffee shop and do nothing. I was thinking of the coffee shops I turned into my sanctuaries, both in Kansas City and in St. Charles. After a certain point in the evening, Picasso’s makes the switch to candlelight. It’s cozy. A cold night, a hot cup of coffee, candles, and the reliably comforting iTunes for company to make up for no matter how hard your day was. Same goes for the Crooked Tree, Scooter’s, and Grounds for Thought.

Sometimes the simplest form of relaxation is taken for granted. And then one hard day you realize you’d give anything for just one perfect hour.

Interesting how coffee and whiskey are interchangeable to me in this regard… Hey, take whatever comfort you can get. There’s nothing like single malt Scotch if you can swing it. I can’t, but maybe you can.

Man it must be nice to not be a total loser…

Music helps.

It’s been dreary this week. All week, up until today. Rainy, ugly, chilly, forbidding. I have been listening to Klaus Badelt’s magnificent score to K-19: The Widowmaker on the drives to and from school. This music is oppressively melancholy, but somehow in a good way. But for some reason, it makes me painfully aware of my removal from the orchestral “scene.” In my mind’s eye, I see all manner of guest composers getting magnificent works performed before adulating students. I take some small, cold comfort in knowing that if push came to shove I could conduct passably. Badly, yes, but passably. Badly according to the standards of real musicians, but no one around here would know the difference.

I used to be a passable musician, way back before I was a total loser.

I have no sanctuary anymore. That’s my problem. Well, that’s one of my problems…

Music helps.

After the funeral, I couldn’t help but relate to a few of the emotional situations among the Mandalorians and clones in Star Wars: Republic Commando: Order 66, the fourth book in the brutally realistic series by Karen Traviss. You’re skeptical, I’m sure, but I tell you this: I have read a lot of books, and I have never read anything this gritty and dark. Karen Traviss uses her experiences as a combat journalist and holds nothing back in this richly cynical and bleak portrayal of the Clone Wars. The characters, though engineered merely to be expendable copies of Jango Fett, come into their own and break your heart time and time again. Order 66 blew me away.

Now, if you’ll permit me to make a leap… there are obvious similarities between the Republic Commando series and Halo, though the Halo books are hit-or-miss. Anyway, the leap I am making is that ever since the funeral I have been finding unexpected catharsis in the Halo scores, in a weird way largely due to the brothers-in-arms sort of protectiveness Kal Skirata feels for his clones in Star Wars.

I told you it was a leap. But I listened to Halo 3 almost nonstop when I was in Columbia last weekend. I already have the music from the whole trilogy, though I just received the scores to the spinoffs Halo Wars and Halo: ODST from Amazon. I’m ripping them onto iTunes right now. I am looking forward to absorbing them into my psyche. Incidentally, I’m also rereading The Fall of Reach. “When I bite into a York peppermint pattie… I get the SENSATION… that I am picking up my assault rifle and heading the counterassault against Covenant Brutes in the snow, just like in the trailer to Halo 3…”

I don’t know what I’m saying here. I’m just trying to squeeze a little pleasure out of a horrible, horrible month. Call me an optimist. Music helps. At the end of the day, it’s what separates me from the average rural zombie. It looks now like I could be “waiting to live” (oh, what folly!) for a long time to come, so I take what I can get. Cold comfort, to be sure.


Ten Scores for the week:
K-19: The Widowmaker (Klaus Badelt)
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Harry Gregson-Williams)
Hook (John Williams)
Halo 3 (Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori)
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Howard Shore)
Backdraft (Hans Zimmer)
Merlin (Trevor Jones)
Band of Brothers (Michael Kamen)
Schindler’s List (John Williams)
Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace (John Williams)