Readership, I hope you like me will take some time this week to stop what you typically do, and in your own way pay your respects to the victims of this devastating hurricane in Houston. For me, it didn’t feel right in such close time to keep with the shallow, sluffed-off exercise of music criticism, while all the residents of our fourth-largest city were in such a state of panic and suffering. Actually, for a couple of nights (I think Tuesday and Wednesday), I lost some sleep — I’d awaken at midnight or one and just lie there for two to four hours. Anybody who says there’s any music on the planet truly authorized to comment on the effects of Hurricane Harvey is definitely delusional. Without a doubt, in fact, I’d say we’re now one step closer to knowing just how the apocalypse will happen. With this being said, I am taking a brief one-week sabbatical from posting and will reluctantly resume on Monday, September fourth.
Last week, I was in the shower and a daddy-long-legs caught my eye up on the wall tiles — it seemed on a mission, scurrying down toward me, toward the meat, just like the cockroaches on my floor will often do. Stricken with disgust, I was still outweighed by my impulse not to kill a living creature, to try to make room for every waking entity, all the time. Half a minute later, after scrubbing some more, I looked down, and the thing was dead, curdled up in the water by my feet. Perhaps this is our only consolation in imbibing implications of a catastrophe the magnanimous effects of Harvey — that life all the time will have just been meat, and impulses. All I know is that now, if there’s still any American out there who thinks he or she is too good to listen to Collective Soul, I’d really like to shake that hand.