Amanda Palmer, though not my preferred siren

Sometimes a soprano with an acoustic guitar is the harbinger of hours or days of mental illness.

A song will klaxon blare through my head and will not stop. It is not an earworm but closer to the monkey on the back of a fiending addict. I want to hear this song, and only this song, on repeat to make it indelible. I have learned never to let myself. This urge cannot be appeased or satisfied, only encouraged to try again.

There aren't correlations between the songs, except that I had heard them recently. Usually, a woman is singing, though the latter could also credit the former; I listen to a higher proportion of female singers, so they are more likely to lodge in some nook.

I can sometimes distract the plague song by thinking of a less catchy one whose lyrics I know in full -- machine perfected Disney does in a pinch -- but the original song will come roaring back if I dare to go to sleep without meds. The song would like me not to rest before a few more plays.

It is among the reasons that I am sparing in listening to music. I don't know when my brain is going to adopt a song I had until then loved. Piano music makes me feel irrationally melancholy, but it's good to write to and can't get stuck in my head. No words, I can't read music, and I persist in being unable to remember the titles. I will just tell my smart speaker, "Play Frederic Chopin" or "Play Yann Tiersen," since it is a good bet that's what I was thinking of. They will affect me, but they can't get stuck.

It isn't as though I cannot begin to go crazy if there is not a song. I use this early warning to look at other symptoms and take it easy on myself by not crying to Laura Marling.

I don't understand how people listen to music without being mildly destroyed. I'm not saying this in pretention, as though I am better than the plebs because I crawl into a corner and sob when David plays a secret chord.

A year ago, the song that became lodged in my head was "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which I listened to at least ten times during my prep period at work until I was a wreck. Not only is the song not sad, but most of the lyrics are "Wait, they don't love you like I love you," "Oh say, say, say," and the word "Maps." I associated it firmly with a time in my life that both did not exist and would have occurred before this song was recorded.

Sometimes, there is an antecedent. I will remember the circumstances in which the song was at one point important in my life. It's not that I necessarily miss that time, as much as I miss being that person and having his opportunities. As I grow older, I have more resources and more literary flare, but the potential for other paths has closed. That is what music reminds me of.

I listen to "Molly" by Sponge, and I'm at my sixteenth birthday, where I got a sword, and I had this party in my grandmother's unfinished basement. I was duct-taped to a concrete pole, and someone tried to kiss me. I invited my then-girlfriend Sky, and she was going to bring her freshly ex-girlfriend Kate, a woman with whom I would a year later begin a long relationship. (Sky did not come, though I don't recall why.) That was almost a quarter-century ago. And I won't ever get to have the hope of that day again, the promise of what my life will be rather than the fact of what it became by degrees, all triggered by Vinnie Dombroski singing, "Sixteen candles down the drain..."

I like the song, and it would be easier if I didn't. The terrible songs that were the background track in my life are forgotten. Some were important, and they mean nothing to me when I listen to them now. They don't affect me as much as a song as that played as a woman I would come to love laid her head on my chest as we danced for the first time. This is even acknowledging that this song did not play in fact and only in memory because it fit the scene better in editing.

Amber is so busy that I don't want to burden her with how maudlin I can become over Cristin Milioti covering Robyn. This is even more reason that I'm startled that people can just go about their business listening to music and not ending up shattered.

I have told the story of titrating up on a med. I wasn't doing well at that dose. Or I was doing too well, in a way. Everything became vivid. Kissing, sex, being outside, food were ecstasy. However, I was unbalanced, and my thoughts were also amplified beyond my control. An acapella version of Carry on Wayward Son by Kansas played over my headphones as I did dishes. I wept against my refrigerator so frantically that I hyperventilated, wailed as I had not since the night after I acted as my grandmother's pallbearer. I could not begin to express to my horrified wife what was going on, why she was consoling me in muttering that there wouldn't be peace when I was done.

I halved my dosage after that.

Music is a minefield. Though I usually have earphones in while I am working or exercising, they are almost always playing a podcast. They cannot get stuck in my head, at least not in a fashion my mind can repeat back to me. (I do have a startlingly broad and shallow knowledge of things podcasters tend to discuss: politics, the paranormal, and serial killers.)

I would like there to be something miswired in my mind that doesn't equate directly to mental illness. There's a condition called misophonia where certain sounds deeply affect people -- often not for the better. It's mostly swallowing or chewing sounds. ASMR may work because people have sound-emotion synesthesia. If one were to look back at things I've written, would I have told on myself? Vladimir Nabokov had synesthesia, which is evident in his work. It does tend to make one more creative because one must figure out how to express a private and unusual experience.

Listen to musical feels like love to me, though I am not myself musical. Listening to someone sing or play feels better than some kisses.

I can tell when someone else is off-key, even by only a fraction. I can easily identify work I've never heard by bands I know well because I recognize the distinct elements, but I couldn't tell you what these are. Put an instrument in my hands, and I cannot promise you will get much from me that isn't a well-meaning cacophony. This at least puts me in less contact with dangerous women who can carry a tune.

Fifteen years ago, my then-girlfriend and I befriended a talented musician I know better than to name here. (That I named her in writing was among her complaints against me and why she may hate me to this day, which is her prerogative.) My girlfriend had a crush on her and suggested that it might be nice if we all kissed. We did not, in fact, all kiss. This woman and I held hands a little and once, accidentally, going for the other's cheek in a parting kiss, met in the middle. It was not, as these things go, a bad kiss.

Nothing more happened. My girlfriend was not bothered by the accidental kiss. However, when we went to the singer's show, and I nearly salivated, that was a problem. I remember my heart fluttering, almost unable to get a good breath in my lungs while listening to this woman sing. Having kissed in the parking lot of a restaurant was fine, but desiring the song so wholly bordered on cheating.

(I wonder in retrospect if this wasn't a nail in the coffin of my friendship with the singer. She became a threat, my girlfriend was a closer friend with her than I was, and maybe my girlfriend dropped a few words of discouragement in front of the singer that would keep her away from me. It is speculation, but it would account for some vehemence.)

I have this slight fear -- one that will likely never exist outside my head -- that someone will sing well to me. I won't be able to stop myself from loving them a little. (Or, at least, adoring her until she stops singing, at which point her thrall will abate. It is a tenuous spell.)

I can watch musicians -- it must be an acoustic set, not a music video -- and feel enraptured by them. I understand how people believed sirens to be, how one had to shove plugs into one's ears for fear of sailing into the rocks.

I made no real show of hiding that I indulged a multi-year simmer toward my friend Sarah, who once wrote a song about not kissing me but wanting to. She and I never managed to kiss. I do not think this was a mistake, all things considered. She would have decimated me.

Her song was something that I cherished beyond simple descriptions. Had she ever sung it to me in person, she would have had a chance to do a great lot more than kiss me. However, the Fates or what have you kept us apart when she could have done the most damage by strumming her guitar.

There are a few musicians who feel to me like ex-girlfriends. (I will keep this to Tori Amos for the sake of your attention span but understand that it is accurate for a dozen others.) I listen to Under the Pink or Little Earthquakes and feel I am back in high school, squeezing the hand of some dark-eyed waif as she confesses secrets between kisses, both clumsy and toe-curling. I am back in a half-child body, believing in the unquestionable rightness of my passion.

Even from the according era, most music amounts to nothing more than pretty sounds and maybe clever words. They are not music except by the dictionary definition. With Tori, particularly those formative years, I feel as though an intriguing woman I am sure I have unrequitedly loved from a distance has leaned over and whispered, "Hey, can I tell you something?"

Tori is visceral. Most of her music bypasses my ears and brain and immediately works on my nerves and glands.

Little Earthquakes is an introduction, flirtation, and some painful confessions to test the waters of my sincerity. But we do not more than hold hands furtively under 2am diner tables, and we both pretend we don't notice when she squeezes my fingers because to notice would end the moment.

Boys for Pele is intimate as sex. It is her showing up on my doorstep unannounced at three in the morning, teardrops of rain falling from copper curls, that smile in the corners of her lips as she asks to be helped out of these wet clothes. Pele makes breakfast the following day out of ingredients I didn't know I had and is gone without another word for months. Pele rolls into town, falls into bed, and is always incredible, with stories fantastic enough to be true. She isn't mine or anyone's, but I love her utterly for an hour and ten minutes.

How can I hope to remain an upright person when mouthing the right refrain pulls me out of my body? No wonder these songs hit me like rocks on the windows until it is all that I can do to snatch them from the air before they shatter the glass and let the elements into my room. How can I remain intact when my mind urges me to slam these songs against the walls until I am bloody and hate having loved them?

Soon in Xenology: My facility staying open?

last watched: What We Do in the Shadows
reading: Daimonic Reality