Monday/Tuesday, 09/10 May 2022

Another sleepless night. Woke up at 0030, or “zero dark thirty” for you poetic souls, from a drunken slumber with no aftereffects, no expectations, no regret. Wide awake. Dear reader(s)- am I am having a midlife crisis? Lauryn Hill’s honeyed voice floated somewhere within my darkness, laced with the ever-present fog of anxiety that is my comfort blanket. The night before whilst having a night cap and a cigarillo (yeah, “whilst” is British, let me feel my oats), I was listening to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and had a deep itch to give “Killing Me Softly” a spin. Strange how some songs can cast away the heavy curtains of memory revealing hidden feelings, regrets and traumas like a mirror you shattered ages ago made new to haunt you. It is up to the individual to see it as a specter of contrition or contemplation. For me, it is both, the two faces are two sides of the same coin (forgive me the dead metaphor), tied together as an element of reflection, an impetus for deep soul searching like an intoxicated surgeon with a scalpel. Still, at my age, memories are askew, filtered through a fun-house mirror out of mental deficiency and/or self-censorship.

Hence, “Killing Me Softly” is tied to memories of the days following my high school graduation. It was a time of great promise, of striking out and destroying the world and reshaping it into my own design. I remember hearing the song wafting through the humid and stale aisles of Galvan Music store during my search for a guitar. I took piano in middle school and I was moderately good at it (maybe my self-evaluation is far too charitable), and I thought to myself learning guitar couldn’t be that difficult. As a way to say, “Congratulations- you’re a high school graduate with all the prospect of college debt and/or working class with minimum wage,” my grandmother gave in to my whims and bought my very first and only acoustic guitar. I was going to start a band and call it Sodom + Gomorrah (because I was a goddamn, proud sodomite) and debase organized religion like a motherfucking assassin. And man, there was electricity in the air that raised the hair on the back of my neck, and I felt the shiver in my bones, the quake of my soul. I was going to murder it for christ sake- a bona-fide “cereal” killer. I really was. Well, it was during this hunt that I first heard the sweet, dulcet voice penetrating the amber of the scene, singing, “Strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words, killing me softly with his song, killing me softly with his song, telling my whole life with his words, killing me softly with his song.” It was a timeless voice, like the warm embrace of the summer sun after hours enduring the frigid air of a hospital waiting room. The music itself was inviting, the melodious voice and spare beat of the verses bleeding into a choral chorus of double/triple/quadruple-tracked vocals that lights the whole song in a warm glow, creating a space to disappear into, to unfurl the spirit and be free to be who you are. I could lay back, close my eyes and allow all the tension in my body to flow out through my extremities, shed off this mortal coil for the few minutes the reveries lasts. An eternal disciple of music, I was aware that the song was a cover of a cover (Roberta Flack’s folkish, almost flamenco-ish version is also brilliant, creating its own separate peace), but there is something about Lauryn Hill’s voice that elevates the song into the “starry dynamo”- timeless forevermore. Her voice has the kind of grit that seeps through the skin and settles into the pit of the gut, pregnant with experiences of happiness, love, hope, anxiety, regret, loss, and heartbreak and hardened by the harsh streets and the bitterness of a disparate life. Time stopped as I was baptized by the sweet fire of Hill’s voice and I could see all my possible futures, a reflection of a reflection of a reflection ad infinitum, but like the cosmic void, it was beyond my human experience. It shattered into an unfathomable multitude of splinters, back to dust, back to the endless desert of possibilities. 

Anyhow- like a Gordian knot, the song is wed to that seminal memory and when heard, continues to stir these sensations from the depths of my shadows, disturbing the ancient dust and raising it into the open. What promises there might have been kept on rising towards oblivion, the dream just a fantasy that was never given form, never acted upon, never realized. I never did learn how to play the guitar. I never started a band. I never became the python that lashed out at the world that was determined to drown me within its quagmire of social demands and expectations. I never became the leviathan that should have swallowed the world and regurgitate it into my own cosmos. I know- a whole lot of nevers for a song that still, to this day, continues to still the storms of my chaotic soul. Perhaps, this is an example of the dualism of life, the good and the bad, the sublime and the pain, the act of contemplation and of contrition. One cannot exist without the other. Yes, the song brings back feelings of deep regret, but it also brings upon an equilibrium that sustains me through my darkest days. Besides, they are not all dark. Perchance, the biggest tragedy is that I don’t even know where that guitar is right now. My grandmother and I lived off a fixed income that rarely stretched far enough. Growing up poor, a guitar was a supreme luxury and to disregard it in such a way is such a gross negligence on my part that I find difficult to forgive. 

Don’t misunderstand me, I consider myself a stable individual with deep lows and some highs here and there, and maybe I could use some professional help, maybe not. I have love, (yes, some people actually love me unconditionally despite knowing the real me and enduring my madness). I’m married to a man who is my holy trinity, I have the sweetest girl (a rescue terrier mix) who affords me nothing but loving and the greatest of happiness, I have a small circle of friends who are beautiful and true, and I have my heath (sort of). I’m just doing the best I can. Sure, I never realized my dream of fucking shit up with my art, but I turned out alright. I served my country for 24 years with pride. The Navy and the experiences of my 44 years have shaped me into an alright human being. I don’t need religion to tell me what is right or wrong, for I am not a sociopath and I don’t need to be told what to do. No, I moralize myself and I reserve judgment and drown it in the darkness within, like every good human should. Life is life, and everyday offers me a chance to burn this world to the ground.

Post script. Years later, Roberta Flack’s version will ingrain itself in my memories from watching and embracing the film About a Boy. A movie dealing with overcoming a mid-life crisis and building one’s world and family- imagine the possibilities.