I like to wander the internet. Clicking on links on websites. Clicking on links from links from links. Who knows where it might take me?

I came across a blog recently from someone who is Alone. She has friends. But she lives Alone and likes being Alone. But the Alone-ness sometimes creeps her out. But it’s what she wrote that caught my attention. Here’s me trying to be eloquent and literary with my Music of 2003 top 10, and then I read her stuff.

First things first.

Interesting thing about noise…it works backward. I think I’ve ranted before about how love and music are one in the same, let’s add noise into that mix too. It’s never quiet when it’s supposed to be, when you need the silence, when everything depends on it. And then in those moments that you just need to be reminded of sound, that delicate synesthesia, the silence is grotesque.

and then..

Music is important to me. It substitutes emotion.

My friends can probably tell (and some of them know explicitly) that “I don’t do people”. Music is emotion. It provides the balance to my life. It stops me from despair. I’m okay with working with people, as it allows me to provide an objective front. But actual relationships are a different matter. There are no rules, no degrees, no by-the-book courses that allow me to objectify them. Sure, I know people. I have friends. I even have 2 or 3 friends who I don’t need to speak to for a year or two at a time, then within 10 seconds of making contact again it’s like those months haven’t passed at all. They are my really good, really special friends. Ones that I can relate to. Ones that I’ve known for 15 years or more. Friends who truly know me. But that’s it. For emotion, for the whole gamut of relationship I always, and only, turn to music.

and then..

I removed you, you know. Some of you visit in dreams and do the things that we’ll never do in reality, some of you still irritate me, some of you tell me to die, and some of you have just forgotten. But you…you I removed. And I doubt you’ll ever care, or you’ll ever know, or you’ll ever see the things that I dedicated to you, and it doesn’t matter. Surgery sharp, and I had a whiskey night that needle day. You’ve been my landfill, and now I take it all back. I doubt you ever really happened anyway, I think you might have been one of my drunken illusions. Now I’ve got steering wheel hands and terrible daydreams, and I’m sure it won’t amount to anything, and that emptiness is comforting. There’s no room for disappointment when you have no expectations, and everything can be as simple as sips of absynthe on a rooftop with strangers or pouring vodka and leading the march to absolution.

You were right, hell is other people.

The final sentence, a reference to Jean Paul Sartre’s 1943 play No Exit, is a little contrived, thrown in as a literary wink. I was going to include some existential references in my review of Long Gone Before Daylight, chose not to, and then this turns up! My main point is I’ve read these sentences dozens of times over the past few days and they awe me. I scream inside ‘Yes!’ that’s exactly it. How it feels. And it takes a lot to do that to me.