The Scoring of My Life

My life is a movie. 

I do not own a submachine gun, drive a black van, or have ten uniquely talented friends to help me break into a vault, so my movie is kind of a Chick Flick.  I am obviously the main character, and there are many supporting roles and powerful cameos.  The best supporting role award, however, must go to the role of Music.

Opening credits. I wake up to the phonograph playing the music my parents put on.  Here Comes the Sun, so I open my eyes to look out the window because I am a child that believes in what I am hearing.  The Sun is warm and beautiful.  I hear about Michelle, and I wonder if she is warm and beautiful like the Sun.  I wonder about Love.

Almost every song I hear is about Love.  The Beatles put an idea in my impressionable preschool head: Love makes people sing.  And yes, Love makes people Imagine.

Act One.  I Imagine Love – and because romantic notions are an alien concept to me, I Imagine being loved by everyone.  I begin with imaginary friends, but as preschool turns into Grade School, I Imagine being able to earn the love of my older cooler neighbours... cousins... peers.  If I can be as cool as them, I will be Loved.

I stop looking out the window.  Instead I stare at the FM Radio, where a blank cassette tape is constantly on standby with the play-record-pause buttons pressed down.  At any moment, XB102 will play Tears for Fears, The Smiths, Care.  I have to be ready to spring and unpause, so I can steal their cool and show it off to my friends.

This is how I learn to download, sort of.  More significantly, this is how I learn to build a personality using the coolness of others – Whatever Possessed Me.

In this developing Mad World, cool was defined by a New Wave - after all, “new” is always cool... and Waves, definitely cool.  I assimilate the gelled hair of Curt Smith and that arm-flinging excuse for a dance that Roland Orzabal does.  Someone tells me I was born on the same day as Roland Orzabal.  I believe we are twins.  I am cool.

High School, towards the end of Act One.  I continue accumulating quite an impressive amount of cool.  I do this All For Love, and it seems to be working out amongst my peers... but what is the deal with these girls?  They don’t seem too interested.  Meanwhile, I am suddenly finding them extremely interesting.

I daydream about Michelle, except this time her name is Bee (not her real name).  I wonder what I would say to her if I ever got the courage to talk to her – to Say Anything.  I have not yet learned to Act Naturally, so my words will have to be carefully mapped out.  I want to speak plainly, but I need rhyme and meter to hide the fragile heart behind the composed personality.  I am not alone.  My peers are with me.  We are metamorphosing together: from Boyz2Men.

Like them, I struggle to be sincere, but just end up being cheesy.  I have no ambition, except to win affection.  I cannot imagine being in politics or public relations, but I harbour illusions of becoming a published poet.  This is supposed to make me happy and get me a lot of girls.

Act One ends. I never get a girl. 

Act Two. I am a college freshman, and a girl gets me.  This girl waits on a line of green and blue just to be the next to be with ...me.  (Technically not true, since she is the first to be with me.)

I am floating, flying, and as I experience getting to know someone deeply for the first time, the sounds of Motown play in the background.  I Heard It Through the Grapevine.  These are the songs from her own First Act, and she brings them into my movie.  She helps me find Reasons.  She brings me sunshine on a cloudy day.

I settle into the idea that I am (finally!) loved by a girl.  My Girl.  I made it.  The histrionic girlie-guys screaming for attention on stage can now afford to mellow out to sing More Than Words.

The mellow doesn’t last long, however.  I learned a thing or two from Boy Bands about expressing Love and enjoying its sweetness, but they never quite prepare me for the bitterness.  The Tenderness – or lack of it.  The falling apart.  The irrational behaviour.  The betrayal.  The disappointment.

I now find it impossible to believe that All You Need Is love – I am convinced that I need anger, and I need to use it to make the pain go away.  The cheesy introvert wants to learn to burst out screaming.

Candlebox strikes a chord and makes me want to leave everything Far Behind - I think that I am becoming more expressive, but I only become more aggressive.  Still, it helps me flex a newfound extrovert muscle.  I go out and meet new people.

I meet Eddie Vedder.  No, not personally.  But the more I hear his words, the more heroic he becomes to me.  He is able to make a point with what seems like anger, but is actually all the fury of a soul screaming with passion.  This new score opens my ears. 

Times are Black and I don’t see too well, but I hear Eddie and I am Given To Fly - how can Eddie Vedder take my cheesy loneliness and turn it into a moving and liberating experience of Despair?  I follow him and I fall in love with his Evolution: from angsty young underachiever to a messenger of peace and stillness.  From raging river to deep bountiful ocean.

I want his Evolution.  I want to know Who We Are.  I want to live in the Present Tense.

I swap infatuation for Evolution – Love of Self over Love of (Ex-) Girlfriend.  For the first time in my life, I begin thinking about having personal ambitions.  Along the way, I hear Counting Crows and think they are on to something.  Mister Jones and me, we want to be big stars.

I love the way Adam Duritz lets the rules fall away:  he doesn’t have to rhyme...he doesn’t have to shout...he often doesn’t even have to sing...some songs he kind of just speaks while music plays in the background.

He tells stories.

I want to tell stories.  I want to live like this – with music playing in the background while I tell my story.  To not have to be angry, or scared, or dissatisfied ...or cool.  To just speak melodiously – and, if I am not done at the end of the bar, to let my words simply spill over into the next measure - to never have to sing the same song the exact same way.

Adam Duritz makes me want to sing because he makes me believe that even I can.  If all I have to do is be honest and forget about performing, then I can sing.  He can get away with it, so I believe I will be able to as well.

Another hero who gets away with a lot is Dave Matthews - getting away with what, to anyone else, can be considered lewd – glorifying one night stands and hiking up girls’ skirts so she can show the world to him...asking softly, Lover Lay Down.

Dave talks about sex and turns us on everywhere but in our groin.  He gets into our heads and swims around in it with his childlike wonder.  How can he sing about the dreariness of Ants Marching and still make me prance about happily like life is so great?  Is it the sound of the lonely violin blending with the Joy Of Sax?

Dave Matthews teaches me to look at the Best of What’s Around.  This optimism helps me believe in myself, and in the power of joy.  This belief helps me achieve.  Where Boys2Men failed, he succeeds.  I begin to really feel like a Man.

I meet a beautiful girl and ask her to Crash Into Me, and she does.  With my confidence at an all-time high, I start a Rock Band, and it makes my new girlfriend giddy.  I am going to sing in public.  I am finally coming out of a shell I built from other peoples’ cool.  When this Boy-Turned-Man comes out, she is going to love me more than I can ever Imagine.

Except she doesn’t.  She dumps me for a doctor.  She leaves me at the beginning of my great adventure, but she helps fuel my journey with the energy of pure and painful emotion. 

I use it.  I use it all.  I use it well.

At the peak of my Rock Band days, Chris Cornell is the voice I want to have.  His are the words I wish I had written.  He sings not about love and lovers, but about needing a Friend Till the End of the World.  About Waving Goodbye.  About Jeff Buckley.

Jeff Buckley, who, like Adam, also breaks the rules by writing a song with neither chorus nor refrain... he starts the song, and keeps going till his Last Goodbye fades out.

He simply moves on, and he teaches me how to as well.

At the end of Act Two, this is the score: I am back where I started.  Heart, broken.  Head, in complete darkness.  Frustrated by the pain caused by the cutting – the ripping away – of yet another intimate partnership. 

Having a girlfriend is like rolling around in the sand.  It sounds like a quirky fun romantic activity, until I realize the sand is actually sandpaper.  And the sandpaper is actually flypaper.  By the time one of us wants to stop rolling in it, it is already fused to my epidermis and the only way to lose it is to be willing to lose my skin. 

To be willing to walk around raw and bleeding for a dark lonely year, waiting to rebound.

This is the time I write my own score, and modesty aside, these are some of the best songs I will ever hear.  This, at the end of Act Two, is where the “Falling Slowly” of my movie is unveiled.  This is where I write my own “Black”...

Act Three.  Eighteen months pass, and I am finally out of the darkness and back on my feet.  I meet the woman I will marry, and my songs take a backseat to hers.  The music she brings is not entirely new, but it is previously under-explored.  I knew Ben Folds Five but not Ben Folds.  At the mention of the Beastie Boys I sing about a Sabotage, but she sings about a Sure Shot.

I am under-explored.

Like the first time I fell in love, I let my life be scored by someone else.  I listen to things I have never heard before, and I do things I never imagined I would.  I dare to dream, care to travel, and plan a marriage.  I share everything with her – Eddie Vedder, Dave Matthews, Chris Cornell…

She says "life is great, isn't it?" ...and I believe her.

I Love, walking around knowing that everything is alright.  I Love, knowing I do not have to whistle a happy tune when I am scared because someone somewhere is going to play the right tune for me.

She plays me a medley of stand-up comedy acts.  After many years trying to learn to love, I realize that I forgot to laugh.  I laugh more constantly than ever.

I will need all that laughter, because this medley fades on cue.

I am the first person I know, personally, who got married in Las Vegas.  I am the first person I know, personally, to get a divorce.  I am cool.  But my mother constantly asks me: Where is the Love?

I am not sure anymore.  I am Setting Forth in the Universe to find it.  I am lost and alone in the age of the ipod and every song from every CD I’ve ever bought, borrowed, stolen, copied, or otherwise downloaded is playing all at once in random sequence.

Everything that had happened before leads to this, the end of Act Three.

I fight an impending feeling of doom: that the credits will roll soon.  My background music is a medley of reprises from all the songs from all the previous Acts.  I have to listen to every one of them to muster the power, wisdom, inspiration, and faith that I need to continue.

Garry Schyman’s Praan plays.  I have never even heard of this artist, but somehow I have this song.  It isn’t even in English – and I cannot make out a word of it – but it is one of the most moving pieces I will ever hear.  I do not need to understand, I just need to hear, and I know I can walk on...

Here Comes The Sun.

I pay attention to the Music and I know that this movie is not over.  The Score of my life swells up constantly, indicating moments of epic glory, even in times of tragedy.  It is the work of generations upon generations of genius and divine inspiration, and it is a work in progress.

I sing along with Billy Bragg.  I Keep Faith.