The Long Play

Today I've been tagged by @riverflows to write about something I feel bad about and need to forgive myself for. You can read her super heartfelt funky post about self-acceptance here. My post in comparison is not quite as large as hers in a way, I suppose. It's about how I don't make time to listen to music the way I used to now devices and health issues crowd my funny little homebound life. I do feel bad about how little music I listen to these days, and so that's what this meditation is about.

In my teenage years in the 80's we had big, cumbersome storage devices. The floppy discs I worked on as a typesetter were huge, almost as big as the LPs we played on our turntables. LPs were good; the cover art was big, lyrics were often supplied, so you could sing or read along as you sat, getting to know an album. I loved those times when, say, you'd listened to it three or four times and you knew you were committed, as if you'd entered into a new relationship. By then you'd be starting to distinguish each song from the others, each one shaping itself before you like self-moulding clay. That feeling when you knew you were falling in love with certain songs.

I've been thinking about those teenage record-playing days lately because I've been nominated to do one of those "name 10 albums that touched your life" things on Facebook. It's made me realise how little music I listen to intentionally these days. I feel nostalgic for the days when sitting with my cousin and spending an hour indulging an entire album was a regular occurrence.

Sometimes it was hard to put the stylus on the record without scratching it, it was so small - especially if we just had to listen to a particular album after we'd been out drinking the two cans of UDL vodka and orange that got us drunk for the night. I'm feeling nostalgia for those times not just because they're my youth but because that experience of music as the main act, with undivided attention, was woven into my life, regularly reachable.

It's not so much that I don't have the time to listen to music now. Unlike many people of my vintage, I have time in abundance. It's not that I don't have time to sit down and become intimately acquainted with an album. It's that I don't always have the energy (listening to music takes energy and you know you're sick, and it's a lonely silence, when you are too unwell to listen to it). Or if I have the energy, I don't have the willpower to put my devices aside. I need to put them down and sit, and become reacquainted with just sitting and listening. Why is it so hard when it is soooo fucking pleasurable? Listening to music as a meditative practice. It's become like an atrophied muscle.

Sometimes I wish we did not have these devices we can't put down. Actually, no. Sometimes I wish it was much easier to put down these devices more often and for longer. Yes, that's it.

Here is the sum total of my album collection. I had more albums than this picture shows. When I was living in Braybrook in the granny flat, I had them stored out in the garage. Stupid, stupid, There were my Mum's old original Beatles albums, Please Please Me and Hard Day's Night. There were others that were probably pretty good as well but I will never know because they have disappeared. I don't want to accuse anyone. It's just that the guy who moved into the house at the front of our shared property was an arsehole. He was a selfish prick who owed me 300 bucks for bills when I moved out, and just simply refused to answer the phone or my texts whenever I tried to contact him. So my bias would like to say it was Dylan who nicked some of my records, may the pox be on his house, not that I'm dwelling or nothing.

I also can't find a large stack of singles I had. Some of them were truly ghastly. Others were daggy one-offs that I'm happy to lay claim to, like 5705 (but there's no reply!) And who can go past the wonderful Ah! Leah! by the punctuation-loving Donnie Iris? Never heard of it? This three minutes of uncool pure pop/rock awesomeness from 1980 has been a love of mine for 30 years.

I have a plastic bag of cassettes in the cupboard that I've been too scared to listen to. They don't contain music. Well, actually, they do. Lots of hard rock stuff like Whitesnake, interspersed with talking from my penpal. We first started writing to each other when he put an advert in a music mag for penpals and I had responded. He had suggested we start sending audio to each other instead of writing. It felt weird speaking into a tape deck from my rental house in Noble Park. His tapes would come back to me from the Arizona State Prison. He used to pause the tape a lot, like when those iron doors were opening and closing. He used to whisper quietly into his tape deck's microphone. He drew a picture of me once from a photo I'd sent him. He used to say, "Mercy, girl," in his Arizonian accent and it was all so intimate somehow that I began feeling claustrophobic. It just started feeling ... I don't know, like suddenly it was a commitment to be writing to this guy. One day I just never wrote back.

I feel guilty about that. I'm planning on listening to those cassettes one day. Just when I can get past the squishy, embarrassed feeling I get thinking about doing so. I don't really know why. I wish I would hurry up and get past it though because the real reason I want to listen is all about me - those tapes are going to be like a time capsule from 28 years ago. I really only want to listen to them to hear what James from Arizona feeds back to me about what Sue from Noble Park was doing and thinking at that particular point in time. Because my memory about then, like pretty much most of my life, is a blank.

I've been thinking, too, thatI want to listen to them because it could possibly be a good idea for an essay, or for a post here on Steemit. I find that I can get myself to do all sorts of things if I decide I'm going to write about it.

Which is why I'm considering writing music reviews of my old albums. There is some awfully crappy stuff in there, like 80s Australian bands Geisha and Uncanny X-Men, and I was thinking of contrasting self deprecating reviews of my very female teenage albums with my partner's album collection, which is much more teenage boy and with way more stuff that's stood the test of time than mine. Stuff I didn't wanna know about in 1987, like Sonic Youth.

It would at the least be a way to get myself sitting down again, back in that music-as-meditation type space. A way to try to retrain myself, to get over the struggle to do something that is so pleasurable.