Tag Archives: SAD

Billy Joel, thanks, dude

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I know that there have been dozens (or more) of articles and blogs about how music can evoke memories.  You know, the song that takes you back to the year you got your driver’s license, or back to your senior prom, or the song that was playing when you broke up with a serious girl or boyfriend?  For years I couldn’t listen to Bryan Adam’s Everything I Do (I Do For You) without getting sad.  I am not sure why it had such a powerful effect on me — I assume it had to do with the rough patches my ex-boyfriend and I were going through at the time Robin Hood was released.  Now I can listen to it with no problem.

Myrtle Beach Amusement Park
http://youthguy07.blogspot.com/2012/08/remembering-myrtle-beach-pavilion.html

Joan Jett singing Crimson and Clover takes me to the amusement park at the Pavilion at Myrtle Beach and a ride there, where the song was blasting and I felt as good as I have felt.

Then sometimes a song captures the feelings that you are having right now, rather than bringing back emotions.

That’s what happened to me today.

The best way to describe how I’ve been feeling lately is like time is passing and I’m missing something.  I think there are several things driving this feeling:

  • I’m having a mid-life plight.  Not a crisis — a plight.  Let’s get that straight.  But I am pondering how I have spent the last 20+ years and if I want to spend the next 20 doing the same thing.
  • My sister and I closed our dad’s estate last week.  I wasn’t expecting it to make me as sad as it did.  And it also made me think about what a person leaves behind when they pass.  The material things are not important — it’s the stories and the memories by which my sister and I feel most blessed.

So, today, when my iPhone music shuffled to Piano Man by Billy Joel, two things happened.  First, a Billy Joel song took me right back to my adolescent and teenage years.  He was one of my favorite singers when I was growing up.  Second, the lyrics of the song hit me in the gut:

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday
The regular crowd shuffles in
There’s an old man sitting next to me
Making love to his tonic and gin

He says, “Son can you play me a memory
I’m not really sure how it goes
But it’s sad and it’s sweet
And I knew it complete
When I wore a younger man’s clothes”

Billy Joel http://www.billyjoel.com

Oh, Billy, you say the best.   Time is passing, and sometimes the memory is just out of reach.  But I can take comfort in the fact that the memory is sad and sweet and it was mine.  And I’ll have sweet, sad (and happy) memories from this stage of my life, too.

Now, I just have to find the music that will bring me back to now.

Hey, Matt — let’s buy those tickets to shoot zombies with the paintball guns.  And let’s play some rockin’ music while we do it.

Let a little light shine on me

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I have written in the past about having depression and this time of year is always hard for me.  This week my doctor told me to get a light box to help fight Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).  Starting tomorrow, I must spend 30 minutes sitting, reading, getting ready for work, etc. in front of my light box, bathed in 10,000 lux of light (whatever the hell “lux” are).

I am hopeful that the normal winter blahs will not be as bad this year with the light box.  But as with most things like this, I always think about what they used to do “back in the day”.  You know, the day before there was a pill, a machine, an app, a super-dooper widget to help you with whatever the problem is.

I read somewhere once that if you could take a time machine back 200 or more years, one of the things that would be the most surprising and disorienting is just how dark the night is.  No light pollution–no street lights, no utility lights, car headlights, house lights, etc.  I have experienced a little of this when I have traveled out West, in some of the less populated areas.  Dark is dark.

What did people do when the sun went down and the nights lasted 12 hours or more?  Sleep from the exhaustion of the hard labor of the day?  Read by the dim light of the candle?  Pray for summer and longer days?

There are a lot of times that I wish that I had been born in a “less complicated time”, but then I really think about it and realize that God put me exactly in the time that I needed to be.

___________________________

On another note, Matt took this picture of a sign in Ireland.  I think it is excellent advice at all times, on a farm or at work.

Always be on the lookout for the bull