The Return To Innocence

Oh, hey, my long lost theme song.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/Wmd60Kk9Ljk

Gracefully she's circling higher
She has the wind beneath her wings
And looks down on us, she said

Robbed of my innocence
Had no more time to play
I sure got my feathers burned
But I'm stronger than the flames

Here she comes, here she comes
I've been waiting for so long
Here she comes, rose again from the flames
My little phoenix

Eternity is set in her eyes
Throwing sparks back at the world
That'll never die and I think

She was robbed of her innocence
Had no more time to play
She's only a little girl
But she's stronger than the flames

Here she comes, here she comes
I've been waiting for so long
Here she comes, rose again from the flames
My little phoenix

Here she comes, I've been waiting
For my little phoenix

You've got to get close to the flame
To see what it's made of
You've got to get close to the flame
To see what you are made of

Here she comes, here she comes
I've been waiting for so long
Here she comes, rose again from the flames
My little phoenix

***

This reminds me, fascinatingly, of chronic pain, invisible illness, mental illness, disability, and the struggles of marginalization for a bodymind that is full of monsters.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/yxPMc-XWOZ8

Phantom voices with no words to follow
At the mercy of the cold and hollow
I withdrew into my sanctuary of silence
My defense

In this moment I am just becoming
Liberated from my cell of nothing
No sensation there was only breathing
Overcome oblivion

Falling Awake
From a walking sleep
And all that remains
Is the dying memory
And now I can dive for
These dreams I make
Like I am Falling
I am falling awake

Waves of melodies once forgotten
Like a symphony across the ocean
Never knew that they could hear my calling
Deep within
Crashing in
Rushing in
Like falling

Falling Awake
From a walking sleep
And all that remains
Is the dying memory
And now I can dive for
These dreams I make
Like I am Falling
I am falling awake

There is no returning to that emptiness,
Loneliness
The dream that lives inside of me
Won't fade away, it's wide awake

Falling Awake
From a walking sleep
And all that remains
Is the dying memory
And now I can dive for
These dreams I make
Like I am Falling
I am falling awake

***

And this one, same thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdG3ECUC-mE

Whenever I wake up
I'm lost and always afraid
It's never the same place
I close my eyes to escape
The walls around me

And I drift away
Inside the silence
Overtakes the Pain
In my dreams

I feel Immortal
I am not scared
No, I am not scared
I feel immortal
When I am there
When I am there

Whenever I wake up
The shards of us cut within
Always the same day
Frozen all in the fringe
I surrender to the sleep
And leave the hurt behind me
There's no death to fear
In my dreams

I feel Immortal
I am not scared
No, I am not scared
I feel immortal
When I am there
When I am there

So far or right beside me
So close but they can't find me
Slowly, time forgets me
I'm lonely, only dreaming

I feel Immortal
I am not scared
No, I am not scared
I feel immortal
When I am there
When I am there

***

And for my new friends in disability and invisible illness, I present my number one theme song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJnCHctOeJg

Smash glass against the wall
Curse the music on the radio that the neighbours play.
Door slams, she turns her head
Watches through the window as he pulls away
Funny how your racing brain drives you so mad
When all the while you feel so numb
Too old to be clean far too young to be broken
Like an army we come

Cut back, left behind
I watched you self-destructing oh so many times
Shot down, once again
Sitting in a chair crying what am I going to do with my life?
Just learn to hide the way that you really feel
Never let them know that you're scared
But understand that you're not the special only one
Watch us now, watch us real close

How we all dance with this fire 'cause it's all that we know
And as the spotlight turns toward us, we all try our best to show
We are lost we are freaks, we are crippled, we are weak
We are the heirs, we are the true heirs, to all the world

Let's go build a fire down on the empty beach when the waves are crashing high
White heat purify, as the sparks fly up into the great black sky
Sacrifice these crutches to the crackling flames
Stand as silhouettes against the dawn
It's far too late to try to sleep now, seems I'm never tired any more

I want to dance with this fire 'cause it's all that I know
We are lost we are freaks
And we try our best to show
I am lost
I'm a freak ha ha.

***

Depression Monster is still wrapped around me, steel claws and silver grin, but I am fighting and fighting, and I have many spears.

Husband returned from New Orleans around one-thirty this morning. Rose and Jupiter immediately climbed on him and we all fell asleep in a snuggling pile.
Later today, errands! Petco Unleashed with coupons for Blue food and litter. Trader Joe's for cookies, whole milk yogurt, chocolate hemp powder, trail mix, pumpkin cereal bars, fairytale pumpkins. Dollar Store for calendars. H-Mart for produce and foods from outside North America.
Had a lovely chat near the with from a guy who was from Jamaica, who extolled the virtues of awesome iron-rich burro bananas and said that his grandmother, who ate them every day on The Island, was 130. She probably did lots of things. The man himself looked barely 40 but he could have been 50. I asked him which bunches of burro bananas looked best. Yay, snacks.
And we got a pure honey nut spread, roasted seaweed snack packs, tamarind paste, demerara sugar (4 lbs for under 5 bucks), black plums, pomegranates, red leaf lettuce, and stuff I forget now.
I have taken more medication to ease this pain, I have meditated with cartoon comedy to beat back the Depression Monster, and I now will get back to writing.

An old favorite. Currently extremely personally relevant. Various reasons. Stuff.
To quote the lead singer when describing the song: "There is always beauty in darkness."


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDJAMlRKgMM

*The first single from the Italian gothic metal band Lacuna Coil's sixth studio album, Dark Adrenaline, finds frontwoman and co-lyricist Cristina Scabbia singing about facing your darkest hour without fear. Noisecreep asked the singer if it is autobiographical.
Scabbia replied: "It's not an easy topic because people might misunderstand and take it as the wrong message like, 'Oh, you have to be dark in your life. You have to be negative. You have to embrace the darkness in your life.' The fact is that people don't think about the fact that life itself is made of ups and downs, of good and bad, so this song means, at least to us, the fact that you just have to obviously find the light at the end of the tunnel. You have to embrace the darkest moments because they are part of life itself and they could be good, even if it doesn't sound right, because they can bring out a different type of emotion. They can make you think about yourself; they can make you realize what you're missing or what you're achieved in your life. In your darkest moments, it's where you really sit down and look inside yourself and think about what you're doing because when you're happy you do something mundane, something crazy, but you don't really sit down and reflect."*

*cough* I'm sure we can all relate *cough*

Because I am always looking for myself: in the deepest waters, on the longest roads, across the steepest mountains, through the farthest galaxies, behind the strongest walls. Because those waters, roads, mountains, galaxies, and walls have been mine forever. One day I will really meet myself, and it shall be fascinating.
http://youtu.be/b5bTYSjYg_0

I am going to play this repeatedly until I am no longer insane. Or until I am a different kind of insane. Either way, I am going to SMILE DAMN IT.

So, I have been a fan of Tangerine Dream since I was very young. I don't remember when I first started listening to their music, but I remember being pleasantly surprised to hear them during the film "Firestarter" (I loved the book and was amused by the movie). I watched it as a preteen and then as a teenager, and I was convinced that Drew Barrymore would go on to do great things (I was right, yay) and that shooting fire with your brain while also moving everything with your brain was one of the best superpowers ever. In fact, the book and movie helped awaken my love for the idea of paranormal powers in humans.

When I was 18, in 1997, I found a cassette tape (you remember those, right?) of The Dream Mixes One. This instantly became my favorite album out of the one hundred plus albums that the group had put out throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (they started in 1967 and they're still at it, with at least a thousand songs). I instantly fell in love with the songs "Little Blond In The Park Of Attractions" and "Change Of The Gods" because of the fantastic danceability and the way both songs blew my writerbrain wide open so words would spill out and my levels of serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and endorphins would skyrocket and go dancing and it was marvelous.

After all the CDs came out, I bought as many as I could from secondhand shops, because when I was in my late teens and very early twenties, there weren't very many internet stores; Ebay, Amazon, and SSL encryption were just babies. I personally had Hotmail and AIM and that was all (which helped me keep my long distance with Adam as close as possible beyond phone calls). Yahoo had only been out for a scant few years, and I only used for backup email. Google barely existed and and Wikipedia didn't happen until after I graduated college. We even did all our studying with, like, real books and floppy disks video tapes and stuff. Ah, the late 1990s, how little we had.

Anyway. "The Dream Mixes One" was one of the dozens of CDs I bought and listened to while writing my short stories for my college writing courses, since my major was Creative Writing and I had to be Creative. The songs on that album helped me craft what would become the dark futuristic supernatural fantasy novel that I'm still working on.
So, guess what I found on YouTube after looking up Tangerine Dream's gorgeous rendition of the William Blake's "Tyger Tyger" poem?



This is ALL THE SONGS.

I. Am. So. Ecstatically. Happy. I just listened to the whole album and I want to fly. Those neurotransmitters are now spinning and dancing and raving like dancing ravers at a dance rave. I think I can kill this migraine I'm having just by laughing at it, I swear. I'm going to go WRITE. Because I am made of WORDS.

Granted, I am still in pain all over, but it's okay. Because music will help soothe it all.

Music really can heal. It just has to be the right music for you, the music you love, the music that you personally cherish. This is mine.

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"Harbor" by Vienna Teng
"Her Diamonds" by Rob Thomas
"Ever The Same" by Rob Thomas
"Ocean Rising" by Justin Sullivan/New Model Army
"Queen Of My Heart" by New Model Army
"Ballad Of Bodman Pil" by New Model Army
"Whole Of The Moon" by The Waterboys
"Universal Hall" by The Waterboys
"Desert Rose" by Sting
"Valparaiso" by Sting

I didn't pick specific lyrics for these songs, because each of these particular songs, as a whole, send shivers down my spine and hit me emotionally.