The Name is Music.

Recently my energetic and always in-motion brother the Texas Diplomat gave me a hand-me-down Mac Book (I know, my life is really hard). Aside from the general awesomeness of such a super thing, there is a specific awesomeness here and it has a name.

That name is music.

My music situation has been quite sad for the last few years. When I moved to LA I had a beautiful and wonderful music library. It was esoteric and exotic and just the right amount of pop-y. It was so massive that it lived on an external hard drive. That hard drive crashed and I lost it all. Photos too and a lot of writing, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that I lost a life lived in music.

The years after that were a meager time for me. I was both poor and busy and only able to rebuild in fits and spurts.

I had an old (very, very, very old) Compaq that did its business but didn’t do it swiftly or elegantly. For college I bought a little HP netbook that I love because it is the nearest digital equivalent to a pen and paper, but it is such a simple device that I didn’t trouble it with music.

Well now I have this white totem, this sliver; half plastic and half Steve Jobs’ soul. Today I moved over the poor, starving scraps of music that I had left, and then I re-logged into my iTunes account:

And it was glorious.

For literally years I have been scribbling the names of songs down on post-its, hoping that one day I would have a functioning music system that would allow me to find them again.

Well tonight I have gone back and found them again.

Yes, that's right: I am building a library. I have been building playlists! The art of building playlists is very much like writing, but with other people’s words.

So I’m sitting here writing this and listening to the first mix I have made in years. Literally years. Now I know that all of this makes you think that you are reading a blog post from 1999 (back when blogs were cool), which is roughly the last time I was cooking on a Mac, but to those of you soulless detractors who do not recognize that I am having a profound moment of musical re-acquaintance … well I have nothing to say to you. This is an irony-free post I am making right now!

I am very happy and pleased right now.

Music!

I love music and I feel that I have been without it as a force in my life for at least a year, if not slightly more.

I will not (right now) bother you with the details of the mixes and my particular tastes (laughable as they may sometimes be), for now I just want to encourage you to go click open your iTunes and find for yourself one of those songs - we all have those songs, those songs that are transcendent, that move us, that alter us – go find one of those songs, click play, close your eyes and just listen. Luxuriate in it. It is yoga for the soul. So go do that, you’ll thank me.

And I would like to once again thank my brother the Texas Diplomat: you sir are a man among men!

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