My disposition, she said, is less prickly than a lot of other things…
Author: Michelle
My early life in songs
Music has always been part of my daily life. Always. For as long as I can remember. I drive with it. I write with it. I read with it. I knit to it. I have music in my head when I wake up and when I go to sleep. I hum. I sing. I probably irritate the crap out of the people around me. Yes, I know. I irritate people for a lot of reasons. Today music is my topic though.
“Do you even realize that you hum incessantly?”
Well. I hadn’t before. Now I do. I made it to the age of 35-ish before someone pointed it out. I have to make an effort not to hum or sing at work or in other public places where people expect me to behave like I’m civilized.
It all started between the ages of 1-6:
The sound tracks from Hair, Hard Days Night and Mary Poppins.
This explains a lot about my personality. It really does.
Does it explain why I got busted for masturbating instead of sleeping during nap time in nursery school? Possibly.
My grandmother once yelled at my mother because I was running around singing songs from “Hair” at the lake. It was “Ain’t Got No” as I recall. One of the lyrics is “ain’t got no underwear” and that was my favorite part.
Later in life, I got yelled at while on a choir trip for singing “Sodomy” on the bus on the way to a competition.
It goes like this: “Sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty. Father, why do these words sound so nasty? Masturbation can be fun. Join the holy orgy Kama Sutra everyone.”
Someone remind me again why I had such a goody two shoes reputation…I was a singing sexual bandit from an early age.
Mary Poppins? Oh, well. That was probably the cause of my generally sunny disposition. I am not kidding. Listen, I smile all the fucking time. People in Italy told me.
Age 7:
In which I kicked a boy in the face because he kept singing “I Think I Love You” to me, and then got on his knees and tied my shoe.
In my defense, before kicking I did ask him not to touch me. He touched me anyway. I don’t think I was generally a mean little girl.
Yes, I was serious about what I said before about having a sunny disposition.
Age 9:
A friend and I were supposed to sing “Strangers In The Night” or maybe “I Left My Heart In San Francisco” at some sort of school talent show. For some reason, we decided to pretend we had stage fright and we hid. We came out when we heard them calling us on the mic. There were not two children less likely to have stage fright than the two of us. I do not know what possessed us. Normally we acted like the stage door brats we really were.
Age 10:
“Seasons In The Sun.” How I loathed it. It was the only song on the fucking radio for a year. Goodbye Michelle, it’s hard to die. Every hour.
The soundtrack to “Free To Be You And Me”
I looked forward to seeing it on TV for weeks. Then for some reason I got in trouble that day and was not allowed out of my room when it was on.
Trouble and music do seem to go hand in hand.
Elton John starts taking over the world at roughly this point.
Age 11:
I think this was the year I fainted during dress rehearsals for the Spring concert at school. I went down face first right off the risers, just like a board. My mom took me to the doctor that afternoon. Yes, I sang that night. I think I had a solo. I wasn’t about to let someone else sing it.
The songs of the year in choir were “Time In A Bottle” and “Killing Me Softly.”
In choir.
“Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” with the BJLR quartet. We must have sung at every Eugene/Springfield civic function and nursing home in town that year.
Riding the Freedom Train from Salem to Springfield on my birthday, the Mayor’s wife sat across from me and recognized me. I felt like a rock star.
Age 13-14:
“Do You Wanna Know A Secret?” The Beatles
First love. First song lost to heartbreak. Losing a song is terrible.
It eventually came back.
James Taylor, Queen.. A lot of sitting on beds and singing. And not singing.
I remember sitting in my parents’ RV during a football game, listening to the radio with him and trying to decide what our song was going to be. I don’t remember if we ever picked one.
This is also the period when the One True Elvis came into my life when I heard “My Aim Is True” at a friend’s house.
Age 15:
“Love Of My Life” alternating with “Death On Two Legs” both by Queen. Heartbreak and anger. First love doesn’t last forever.
Age 16:
“My Sharona” and “the Stroke” in Sharon’s blue Pinto. Pop music and cheap champagne.
Age 17:
Driving around in a Celica singing along to the soundtrack to “the Rose”
Listening to my neighbor play Deep Purple and Pink Floyd on his bass every day. Every. Day. If he wasn’t keeping me awake playing them in his room, he was playing REO Speedwagon in our pool room.
Meanwhile, my cousin and her boyfriend were playing Elton and Queen.
Age 18:
At college, homesick, heartbroken, crying to “Eleanor Rigby.”
Of course, that’s the same month I went to a toga party at Harvard. When someone introduced me, the whole room broke into “Michelle” which was a probably the most impressive entrance I will ever make.
Music is a powerful connection to the past
You hear a song and it pulls you back to the place and the people you heard it with. Good or bad.
One song is so strongly attached to a certain sexual encounter that I blush any time I hear it. Thanks to the person who can make me blush in abstentia even 20 years after the fact.
If only I could get the full physical impact back just by playing the song…
Maybe I am just not listening hard enough!
Thoughts and focus
L’enfer est myope autant que le ciel
On t’avait dit que tout se paye
Regarde bien droit dans le soleil
–Détroit/Droit Dans Le Soleil
Did you ever wonder why you see things so differently from a camera? You discriminate. A camera doesn’t. A camera will see whatever is there. You will focus and interpret. A camera puts everything in the frame and doesn’t have the ability to choose not to see like we do.
The other day I read that people with compulsive disorders like OCD don’t have any different thoughts about suicide, violence, sexuality or whatever than other people do. They just think about the thoughts differently. Dwell on them. Make them their focus.
Thoughts out of balance are not better than anything else out of balance. Balance is such an asshole.
Most of us think about the exactly the same things, but we gloss over the disturbing thoughts. I might think “what would it be like to drive my car off a cliff” or “I wonder what that girl would do if I walked over there and kissed her” or “I would love to poke that moron in the eye with a fork” just like someone with a compulsive disorder. I know I am not suicidal. I know I won’t really poke anyone with a fork. I know I’m not gay. Well. Mostly. My feelings about straight/gay/bi would be a different blog. Anyway, the thought passes because it’s just that–a passing thought. (Except that I’m writing about it instead of just letting it pass. Shut up. I know. It’s not the same thing) I don’t worry that I have these thoughts. I know that most of us do sometimes. Someone with more compulsive tendencies would worry about what the thoughts meant, worry about being suicidal or gay or violent, and generally magnify the thoughts and let them take over.
Today I was walking to a meeting, and the sun was coming up. I hate 0700 meetings, unless the sun is already coming up. I still hate the 0700 meetings, but I do enjoy the sunrise and the birds singing. On the way there, I could see the sunrise through an ugly chain link fence around a shitty industrial parking lot strewn with broken bottles. It made me think about how layered everything we see and hear is.
Stopped in traffic, we look out the car window at the river, and the city lights, the mountains beyond. There are bug splatters on the window. Streaks from the windshield wipers. Telephone poles, trees, electrical wires. Con trails from jets that passed overhead. There’s a rearview mirror right in the middle of the window. The freeway, and all of the cars in front of us. Maybe our hair is in our eyes. We don’t see any of that. We focus, if we choose to, on the sun coming up behind Mt. Hood. Or the fog over the Willamette. We don’t even see the rest of it.
If we took a picture, we might wonder why it looks so different from what we see in our head.
In your mind, you only really see the thing that you want to see.
But the ability to focus, which is such a positive in some ways, can be a disaster if you can’t turn it off.
Most of us can see the sun through the chain link fence without having to worry about not being able to look away soon enough and maybe scorching our retinas. We can control the amount of focus.
Brains are our biggest blessing and our bane.
For the record, I’m not really so sure about the fork thing. There are times when it is REALLY hard not to poke certain people. Maybe not in the eye, but in the arm. Not all the way through, but enough to make myself understood.
