Something short about music

I can arrive home, pissed off, pissed about, pissed, and not really know how to deal with myself. Enough things can happen during an average day (and especially a below average one) to make you question everything. From whether you should really be eating junk food for lunch to whether your place on this earth is justified.

Nothing should be off topic, nothing should be left on a shelf for another day, like that can of strange veg you really don't have a dish to put it into.

And that's when music kicks in.

You can party to the samba beats of a Brazilian partyathon or feel like the Sultan of Dire Straits' Swing or twang the Adagio For Strings; it can make you feel where you need to feel. If you can't use music to direct your position in life, at whatever time or occasion it needs to, you are missing out. Seriously.

Sitting, cross legged, listening to an Irish folk singer, telling a story about missing his recently passed Dad, the emotion in that passage of musically backed poetry in how it's sung. It's more than enough to bring out tears, and that's not a bad thing. I sit there, seriously resisting the urge to wipe the tears running down my cheeks, dropping saltily onto whatever is below. Society tells you to ignore emotion, to hide your weaknesses. They're not weaknesses. The weakness is in not believing or allowing that you have that emotion. You do.

To go from emotionally numb to so emotionally heightened that a Bluebottle smacking your bonnet could make you turn to religion obviously, helps. The trick is allowing it to have some freedom. Nelson Mandella your emotions (maybe without the early life terrorism, though). Guildford Four your emotions. Let yourself accept, cope and enjoy the sadness that might be in your life, in the same way you absorb the happiness.

If you don't appreciate those -5 winter mornings, you don't tend to apppreciate the 30 degree summer ones quite as much. Both have their place.

What's really amazing, though, is billions of people having passed through this small dot in the Universe, before us, telling their stories with music. For every situation, from the maniac who's been dumped by his duped lover, who happens to be a Labrador, to the insanely grief stricken lover about to take enough pills to kill a small horse as his love has died, in amazingly poignant circumstances, someone has been through, and described with great hilarity, angst orunexpected indiference, the situation you're going through, right now. It's like your favourite pick and mix with speakers and an amp.

Whatever you do, hide away; hide your fears, hide your anger, hide your porn under the bed but, whatever you do, don't hide your emotions. Let them out, let music be the conduit. Enjoy your fear, hopes and dreams equally.

This one is dedicated to the people who want to beat me up because they don't understand very much.