Survival Discs
After an outing eating at the very expensive Texture, on Portman Street nearish Mayfair (decent but not worth the price), I came home and finished a session listening to some of the discs that brought me much comfort back during my days of deep(er) obscurity.
Most readers will not be able to understand what I am about to say, but for those that do I am sure that these discs will come as great comfort to you.
Back in the early 1990s I was in the middle of a long bout with graduate school. The wife was constantly hammering me for studying rather than working full time, and for a long period pretty much all I did was study my physics and EE and work a couple of part time jobs. During the winter in particular, when the ice encrusted the NYC streets, I felt like I was pretty much a forgotten entity in the world. I felt I had missed my best and most creative days, and I really couldn’t imagine a good future. I was locked indoors, stydying crusty old booksn and preparing for exams.
But late at night I’d plug in my AR self-powered speakers into my wonderful RadioShack CD player (they made at the time which was hailed as a classic for its sound). And I’d listen to the discs I list below. All of these discs seem to have fully accepted the inevitability of death, and that we were all actually doomed to perpetual obscurity as a result. But when I’d put on one of these discs, I felt a tremendous sense of comfort, like I was coming to terms with the real fact that everyone is essentially alone and will die that way. And yet, in all these discs, the courage to find a little joy while in full knowledge of life’s transience.
So maybe you are in such a place right now. If you are, I hope you will get ahold of these discs and play them through one dark night. Let yourself fully accept your own feelings and the reality you are facing right now and know that, eventually, you will move past it. BUT, you will not move past these feelings until you learn to accept them and work through the reality they reflect.
Here you go:
Joy Will Find a Way
Bruce Cockburn
In the Falling Dark
Bruce Cockburn
Night Vision
Bruce Cockburn
Can’t Buy a Thrill
Steely Dan (Midnight Cruiser!)
Countdown to Ecstacy
Steely Dan
Acadie
Daniel Lanois
Shuffletown
Joe Henry
Enjoy. Don’t despair: When you get through this time, if you are able to look human mortality and aging in the face and then keep moving, you will be far stronger than most human beings in the world, who live in denial of their own true and mortal reality.