Title Pending

Arriving at the keyboard late in a string of internal associations can be awkward and, to the reader at least, confusing.  This is only made worse when the author is coming down (up?) from being overly drunk on home-made absinthe.

Age has both stolen from me, and gifted to me, freedom from passion.

For the romantic mind, passion is the source of all that is most precious.  The rational mind counters with the popular phrase "crimes of passion".  Personal experience reminds me that passion is the source of my strongest among weakening memories, some of them precious, many of them, at best, embarrassing.

For nearly a full year, my passion for music has been given a new life by one band, named "boygenius", and the prior solo and collaborative works of each primary member, Julien Baker, Pheobe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus.   Although I do not presume to know the full back story of each member of this trio, or to what degree their songwriting is autobiographical or fictional storytelling, their songs have a ring of personal truth that touches me more than anything has in several decades.

My history with music had thus far been almost completely male and presumably heterosexual, particularly given my proclivities towards "Progressive Rock".  Really, only Kate Bush had thus far broken that ceiling.  Then last year, at age 60, I saw and heard boygenius play "Not Strong Enough" on the Jimmy Kimmel Live show, and was instantly moved and enthralled by a band of queer girls.  Although I don't feel physically or mentally strong enough to withstand the experience of in-person live shows, I have listened to or watched little else in the way of music for an entire year, which went by very quickly.

I am not sure what else to say about, or what I have learned from, this. This post will probably remain an unpublished draft until I can find a way to craft it into a better... something.  The band itself, after winning some Grammys, has announced an indefinite hiatus, which I do not begrudge them.  They have been working very hard non-stop for a full year at least, and I could not ask for more except a concert film, which may yet come about since at least their Forest Lawn concert seemed to have been professionally recorded in both audio and video in full.  A professionally recorded single of the "boyfriend song" would be nice, too.

Perhaps the best statement of a lesson from this experience was spoken in the previous century by a minor human character in "The Muppets Take Manhattan", which was "peoples is peoples". (Yes, I am aware that the phrasing, characterization and delivery of that line was racially/culturally problematic, but the core truth of it, especially in context, is stronger than the superficial aspects of the delivery.)