Thank you for the music

...the hypnotizing and the haunting, the cheesy and queasy, the infinitely memorable and the imminently forgettable (the latter amplifies the effect of the former, the former puts the latter to shame). Then again, taste is a subjective issue; my favorite band sucks, now so does yours.

Say what you want, think what you will, they're the best thing to hit a note (or graze it) while striking a chord within us since that first rhyme you ever beat into the ground and your family over the head with. You may have trouble remembering those all-important memos and messages, the birthdays of the near and dear, the text you'll be tested on tomorrow (and you've gone through that damned thing 27 times over the past 72 hours), but how many 80's (or, fill the blank) songs do you know by heart? Start counting... Uncanny, isn't it? Scary, actually. And only human.

Songs that make you happy to remember, tunes that make you wish you could forget. To dance, to play, to sing, even if only by yourself; think of it as a gift. It is a gift. Everyone on the planet does it different from you. Someone may even do it better than you (yeah, we really love to hate them). But no one in the universe does it exactly like you.

Thank you for the movies; the ones I watched only once and will never be able to watch again because I cried over whose brilliant script was tossed to make this mockery, or because they were so dead-on, true to life, painful and poignant I bawl my eyes out merely thinking about how they made me feel. And they made me Feel. Those I will carry with me always, like little jewels I found. You might look at those pebbles and shrug them off as fool's gold.

Thank you for the books; the disturbing and the inspiring, the uplifting and the mind boggling. So many beautiful languages and voices, some centuries old and indestructible, some young and formative and fragile. False friends, old friends, true blue friends. You wish you would have written them. You only wish no one would have come up with some of them. Where's a language policeman when you need one? But those that flow...they make your spirit sing.

Nature is perfunctory and evolution the ultimate in waste management. They are the final word and judgment on art: we need those chords, those images and words. They nourish us and console us. They bring us together just when we start to think it would be easier to let it all fall apart. They shake us up when we start to believe that maybe we won't get hurt if we sit tight and play dead.

They reach out and transcend all barriers. They remind us that we are not alone, that there is life out there. And that there is life and fight and laughter in us yet.