During lunch, I usually find a nice, quiet spot, such as a secluded park and set myself underneath a canopy of trees, to read/write, contemplate/rest my eyes, and/or engage in handheld gaming to live and die as a fierce Viking storming distant iron shores, or to go for a drive and listen to music way too loud, often times the same songs over and over again, lacing my soul with their fiery incantations. Recently, it has been Love and Rockets’ “It Could Be Sunshine,” the Cure’s “Disintegration,” and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Head On,” “April Skies,” and “Reverence.” I just listen to those same songs religiously in a closed loop, over and over again to the point that my mind expects “Head On” to follow “It Could Be Sunshine,” “April Skies” to follow “Head On,” and so forth, such as how many of us have been cultivated to listen to the British releases of the Beatles early albums versus the American releases which just seem wrong and put together haphazardly. Anyhow, the songs become my North for a couple of days/weeks to guide, fortify, and kindle me.

Sometimes, or should I say oftentimes, this religious exercise involves only one song, such as when I first told my high school best friend I wanted to be more than friends only to be rejected and I listened to REM’s “Everybody Hurts” on repeat imagining I lived a torturous life and was among the wretched faces with downcast eyes in its black and white video, or when I split from my first girlfriend and listened to Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” while singing, “And if I could be who you wanted” as a mantra that reflected my eccentricities, or when I was in the deepest of depressions and listened to “(Nice Dream)” over, over, over again, contemplating suicide and jumping into the Atlantic while being trapped on an amphibious assault ship, the sound of the crashing waves a siren call from my black goddess, or that time on an airplane when Tool’s “Pushit” gave me the strength to realize the end of a dead-end relationship. Such was the case last week when I listened to the Cranberries “Linger” on repeat, O’Riordan’s voice a ghost haunting the teenage madness that continues to swim and swell within my soul. There was no special reason why I decided to revisit the song. Like many, the song was a break-up song for me in my adolescence and as many of us can contest, such events were end-of-the-world experiences. I think I heard it in a dream and I just woke up having the need to listen to it. It was like greeting an old, disheartened friend, only this time, while singing along the words no longer had the sadness that would normally drown me. Obviously, I am no longer that person that would ache with ever affliction of her broken-hearted voice. Still, the beauty of the song remained, the potency of the spell still enchanted, still satiated the hunger for profound sensations. And now to discover that her voice will no longer beguile and enrapture the senses, heart, and soul, I am left with a sense of emptiness, a terrible sadness that threatens to suck me in within its black hole. I feel that I am always at that razor edge, but somehow I push myself through versus out. Such is the wisdom that 39 years of desolation and bitterness has afforded me. Still, we are left with O’Riordan and the Cranberries’ music that will forever outshine in the glare of 90’s plastic, radio-friendly, shrink-wrapped rubbish. She will always burn and never fade. God rest her mighty soul.