TEARS IN THE RAIN

He prided himself on being able to choose the perfect music for any moment in his life. In this sense he was like a medicine man but with music instead of remedies. Even when young, canoeing down a forest river with his eldest brother, he could see the divine serendipity of listening to the old dance hall song 'Cruising Down The River' on their covert ghetto blaster tucked under their seats, their oars dipping beneath the water as they propelled their canoe forward with each stroke.

Ever since that magical moment, the young man actively chose to seek out the perfect song for important moments in his life. For one entire summer he played "Have You Seen Her" by the Chi-Lites and "Passin' Me By" by The Pharcyde on repeat whilst besotted with a girl; his friends often tried to change the tune, bored of his obsessions on both counts, no doubt.

Having his first profound moments of increasing awareness about the big themes of life, death, love etc around the age of twelve, he stumbled upon Richard Strauss's 'Vier Letzte Lieder', specifically 'Im Abendrot', and the universe increasingly opened up to him in both his heart and mind, broadening his emotional and psychological range like that of a giant keyboard, the type he imagined Bach composed his great organ works for.

Whenever he was down, though, he noticed it became harder to find the appropriate tracks needed to heal his nervous soul. It was as if the computer transmissions of his mind had been scrambled by enemy signals and he could no longer intuit the best music to play any longer.

Today was such a day and as he struggled to select a track for his anxious mood; he sat in silence instead. Silence was okay, but the anxiety gremlins of his mind threatened to fill that cathedral-like space of quietude with anxious thinking and catastrophic prophecies pretty quick, just like thieves in the night strong arming their way through the door and cuckooing him in his own sanctuary by using his own fears against him.

Scrolling through his various playlists including one called 'random mood', Alex finally decided to let the universe decide his soundtrack for him on this occasion and hit shuffle through over ten hours of music he'd previously selected. It went against his general ethos as he liked to be the one in control, but just as he'd seen those endless cringe personal development memes on social media saying "Let God" he submitted to a higher power of sorts (he tried not to think of it as a mere algorithmic Artificial Intelligence) and said "Let Music".

And as spacey electronic notes like giant rain drops filled the deafening silence of his room, the uncertainty inside of him began to disperse.  

If it was a higher power then it had chosen well.

And in his moment of weakness, his own rag tag assortment of music accumulated across decades had rescued him once again.