How did this never occur to me in all of these years? I am not a fan of the pan pipe trance tunes they play in spas. That stuff is supposed to be relaxing, but it isn’t to me. I get caught up listening to it, trying to decide what it reminds me of. Or it can be oddly discordant, which pulls me out of my meditative state because I get annoyed by it. Today, moments before I left the house to see Slow Hand, I had an epiphany. I have the power to ask for some other kind of music. And so I did. I didn’t have time to put together anything specific to take with me. I don’t keep anything stored on my phone. But I had Spotify, and had played my favorite album a few weeks ago, so I thought I could just link to it again. It didn’t allow me to play it in order, start to finish, and I don’t know why. I wasn’t about to waste good massage time fiddling with my phone. I got about six songs from the concept album, in random order and interspersed with other things by the same band, plus a few things that bore no relation to the genre. Next time, I will have it downloaded and saved in a format that I can control better.
The inspiration to play it in the room came from a random photo the Mr sent home. He was donating blood on the south side of town, and he came across a plaque that was strangely relevant to my life and he had to show me. I’ve had an obsession with magpies since my freshman year at CU Boulder, where I encountered them for the first time. By sheer coincidence, that was the year my favorite album (the one referenced above) was released. I listened to it over and over, most often at about five in the morning, when I would wake with severe stomach pain, and the spooky prog harmonies relaxed me enough that I could go back to sleep. In the cover art and in the lyrics were references to magpies, which fed my obsession. These were just two factors that led to me getting a magpie tattoo on my leg ten years ago. These days any one brief glimpse of a magpie on a fence post in the country out here instantly floods my head with associations of my youth at CU, my love of that music, my unique tattoo that I strongly identify with, and my friends who follow that band and who love those birds like I do.
Before I could get away from the news of the day, some stranger on Twitter knocked Childhood’s End out of my head as the ear worm that will haunt me in my sleep. Without me giving it away, can you tell from the pictures what song it was?
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