On Blues and Us

"Why did I come here? I am trying to study Differential Equations, but now all I want to do is crack a bottle of 
whiskey open & go on a Tom Waits binge. Damn you Tom, for being so fucking good."

This above is a comment on YouTube below the Tom Waits video ' Hope I don't fall in love with you'. I felt it very accurately captures what blues does to people. I love the music. In fact, I love any kind of music. While I am playing with my laptop keyboard on these lines I can hear the soft but brilliantly moving OST from Godfather playing in the background. Makes all the difference in the way my thoughts are moving. It does. One may not know it but it does. 

I have not done any experimentation on this but I have seen the way people react to music at all levels. It may have a lot to do with the fact that music expands your soul. It takes you to another realm of existence. Before a speech, before a meeting, before an interview before any of the million rigorous yet not so important tasks that we do if we listen to the music that you love it moots a massive change in behavior, approach as well as attitude.

Every time I listen to John Lee Hooker, any of the Chess record guys - Howlin Wolf, Muddy waters, Chuck Berry, Eta James. I am stuck in this forlorn mood where a beer in hand and pain of past lost loves and the need for a little twinge and loss becomes evident. If I have lost someone recently and then I am listening to blues mostly, I go deeper into the throes of human nature and find solace in the guitar plays and the resonance of the gravel voices. The words cut deep within me and I love the cuts, it aches, it does not pain. It creates this wonderful world where the lowering of the spirits and the senses takes you into a hole with the good lord. Funnily, it is never with the devil it takes you to a place of silent rumination and a sharp, clear vision emerges in front of you that helps you to go back to the very same places that has hurt you a million times but that hurt has only made you a better person and made you understand life beyond all its happy failings and sultry daily monotony.

Tom Waits did that to me the other day. I was having a happy, frolicsome day and I was reading 'On Writing' by Stephen King, of course in the morning I was reading the Coca Cola Story by one Mr. Pendergast, and I was brimming in confidence and enthusiasm and that is what books do to you. And i was just passing through various songs on You Tube and Tom Waits came up on the side list and I was induced to click it. I mean the guy is a genius and the voice, OMG; I mean where does that come from, if the devil has not gifted him that then what does the devil do good. I clicked and guess what Mr. King and Mr. Pendergast kind of left me and in came the hurts of yesteryear rumblings; Mr. Bukowski, Mr. Elliot with his Wasteland, my own thousands of wastelands, the wounds I have caused to my own and also to others, the joys of understanding through suffering and the utter disgust of how life is now in the early part of 21st Century. 

What blues says or does is pure human nature with its millions of ups and downs. As you sink into your chair and hear the music bellowing from the room it makes you want to stretch and the animal instincts of what we really are settles in. We want to get free, we want to let go, visit the oceans, get the sun to hit hard on us, meet people talk to them about wondrous journeys and other people, we want to gossip about what is happening in our towns, in our neighborhood, we want to talk about long lost loves and all those things that never happened, we want to share in the beauties of the landscape and terrains and the hills and the valleys of our lives. That blissful journey towards what humans need to be. 

The new age fast track, fast paced lets-get-shit-done and tell the world by uploading a photo does not make for great communication, it does not make for any communication. It bestows to the mind the thought that there is communication but in reality, somewhere in the corner the devil whimpers with a snide and laughs bemoaning how the good lords creation has lost the most beautiful of human relations of sharing and enjoying the nature that surrounds and believes he is doing so with his holiday packages, his sun lotions, his cheap tickets, his stationery observance of sedentary places with their ever-photographed monuments and blip-and-you-shall-miss rivers and grandeur and taking images of all of these for the world to envy and feel green and how in among these visions the mind is conjuring up the payments that await when one returns and the work - the daily grind of routinized inelegance- shall set him back to middle ages. He is worried but he has to continue and he has to seek solace in the cold, unsavory delight his eyes has gathered and get back to working on that camera and sharing on Instagram, Pinterest and I dunno where all.

As the comments on my latest updates settle in, I am listening to Magic Sam's boogie... this is taking me further away from my time into a journey of solace and comfort in the Sun, among the stars with the wild unrelenting expanse of the sky... I can feel the wind on my bald pane