Kind Of Blue in anticlimatic

Some mornings, whether or not there’s a reason for it, this long black claw emerges from depths forgotten to lampoon my heart and pull it down, down, down. Maybe there is obvious cause, but sometimes it’s unseen- some subroutine of the subconscious that’s been activated by dark omens my conscious mind missed, perhaps.

The tricky thing about being pulled down, even a little, is it generates inertia. Then momentum. And now we’re really spiraling. Suddenly the routine ‘quiet desperation’ of life feels like a prison. Then a jail cell. Then a coffin, already buried. Then I’m strapped to the rack, unable to move. Then a hundred people are jeering over me as the rack pops all of my joints apart and my screams turn to gurgles from someone pouring boiling tar down my throat.

Then we’re back again where we started, ready to do it all over, because going through the motions- anger, sadness, despair, acceptance- is just another subroutine, doomed to loop forever.

There is a genre of Jazz that I can’t say has a name, that I am wildly into. I call it “Taxi Driver Jazz,” based on the jazzy sax rift from that movie’s soundtrack. The most popular Jazz album that nails this genre for me is Kind Of Blue, by Miles Davis. The whole thing is exquisite- reminds me of time traveling to Old New York, on a rainy spring evening, watching drips roll off of old brick in the fog- but my favorite part of the album is the last quarter of it, called “Flamenco Sketches.”

The whole album feels like it begins at sundown, but the last quarter feels like it takes place after everyone has gone to bed. It feels tired, exhausted- but also playfully so. Whimsically so. Long pauses of quiet resignation are interrupted with the most serene and sublime little horn melodies. All of them with a kind of ‘wind down’ air to them. I can picture people sweeping floors with chairs on tables. Empty streets with just a few distant tail lights.