‘Alcoves’ forever goes with this clip now. It doesn’t matter that this has nothing to do with my piece. *Credit for this clip goes to the movie In Bruges. I did not make this video clip. The video clip is from the movie In Bruges; all credit goes to that movie and everyone involved with that film, none of them being me.

(208) Emotional Alcoves

I have emotional alcoves when I get overtired or stressed or happy or excited or basically any fucking emotion that makes me forget how trivially exhausting the daily sludge of surviving is. For the last several years, these alcoves have been little corners of relative mental kindnesses, like Netflix, a nice dinner, a shitty bag of Cheetos and a glass of red (your face is a weird combo), a cuddle with the dogs, a moment of being enveloped by the scent on a lone breeze from weather that hasn’t happened yet. Mostly, they are moments that take me away. They are little bits of time that let me fully feel the rest of myself, so that when I come back, I will process the stale, unrelenting grind of my daily a little more efficiently.

Lately, however, my moments have been all encompassing. They have still taken me away, but ‘away’ is less accurate now than ‘beyond’. These moments have risen unbidden in my quiet fetal moments of overload, and they have all, every single crystalline second, been music.

Here’s my moment for today, the solace that lifted me just high enough to cope, after the Slager bullshit and the unrelenting fight for native lives and the merciless bleed of medical costs and the pain of my friends, my family, myself, throughout this mess. Here is the melody, the theme — it is always the theme — that caught my mind and stilled it, willed it to breathe, and left me with more.

This is the Glenn Gould ’81 version (I’ve always loved the slower one more than the faster one from ‘55). All credit goes to Glenn Gould and the people involved with this recording. I was not any of those people.

*if you love this, check out the Triskelion string trio version with Martin Beaver (probably has to be purchased; can’t find it on YouTube). Shatters my reality and leaves me with a clean slate every time.