Some Jazz

I went to a jazz bar last Sunday night that I'd never been to before. The band was incredible! And, as I was hoping, I was inspired - though I often feel inspired. I hadn't written anything in a while, so I - without thinking much about rhyme-scheme (quite a change for me), word-structure or phrasing - started writing down, with mad speed and a streaming consciousness, the following. I didn't even care to give it a title. Very strange for me. I think I'll call it - The Need:

The need to find a connection,

The need to find a muse.

The gladness to find a location,

A place to suck and use.

These surroundings I need,

To some creativity to concede,

Too long without dispersing writ,

I love jazz.

Solos, tunes and notes,

A stream-of-consciousness rarity for moi,

Stop and clap,

Now a drum solo, like an unrelenting, mad beat of my heart while I fuck this adorable waitress that's been serving me.

I fucking love jazz.

This is no Sunday-night blahs,

Nor a June bug bitching,

More like swarms flying into my skull,

Oh, the obsessive thoughts!

A summer of languor,

Going by so fast.

To take it, or have it take me...away?...so lame...

So empty.

Can't help but love life,

To fall down before it...to give it my all,

I care not now for a rhyme,

Now the sax chimes.

So beautiful, like the ever-flowing, yet static, needs of my soul,

Play on, play on, great men,

Move me; I need movement.

I need my ardour to be morphed into something...

Something special, but what?

Such a horrid, clashing feeling of wanting to do so much, yet so easily embracing sloth,

To be and not be me at the same time...

What fucking gives?

Just like this oscillation between poetry and prose.

Is something wrong?

Intertwined with a guitar solo like this, everything seems so fine.

And now this killer sax...

I love...love jazz...

I went back there again last night, and this other band just blew everyone, including myself, the fuck away! Such musicianship. They were really loud, too, and I was reading Kierkegaard's Either/Or (1843), something I've been slogging through this Spring, because of how boring and pointless most of it is, which is a shame, because it started off so great, and I was able to get through more of it than I would have in my quiet room in this quiet house, within that same time-period. So then I came across a few lines in a paragraph that truly smacked of both coincidence and irony, and to me of, well, something I've been noticing about myself, and what calms the intrusive thoughts, due to my PTSD, which make reading (no matter how interesting) all the more difficult:

"You know there are neurasthenics who are disturbed by the slightest noise, who are unable to think when someone walks softly over the floor. Have you noticed that there is also another kind of neurasthenia? There are people so weak that they need proper noise and distracting surroundings to be able to work. Why if not because they have no command over themselves, only in an inverse sense? When they are alone, their thoughts disappear in the indefinite; on the other hand, when noise and hubbub surround them, this compels them to pit their will against it." - Soren Kierkegaard

I have never heard this term, "neurasthenia," before (mainly, I think, because it's no longer in scientific use). But what I know for certain, is that I am, indeed, a combination of both the former and latter type of whom he speaks of here. I need complete silence to concentrate even remotely, and cannot handle people even whispering and walking softly around me (let alone conversing loudly), but "proper noise," as Kierkegaard astutely refers to it here, like loud, fabulous music, will lock my concentration and will-power on what I have to read through like nothing else. And existentially speaking - and this book is foundational for existentialism - it's so magically perfect that as I was realizing all this about myself within the situation itself last night, I came across a few lines, within a very thick book, that elucidated it for me. Beautiful! Amor fati, Nietzsche would call it. - The love of fate.