Guilty By Association

Happy to see these shoes again

I've been listening to the same music playlist while running, and the past two weeks I'm nagged by a need for variety. The memorized playlist is making time seem to slow down rather than go by quickly. I start my run with Florence and the Machine's "Dog Days Are Over." When Florence sings "Run fast for your mother, run fast for your father, run for your children, for yours sisters and your brothers," I usually kick into high gear, and do a jump, punching the sky, as I progress from my warm-up trot to a high paced gallop. 

Since feeling compelled to change up my running music, I didn't dig too deep for inspiration. I simply typed "Running Music" into iTunes, and selected playlists that were created by some person who lives in a cubicle at Apple headquarters. This introduced me to a lot of music I would not normally listen to, unless I decided to finally start waking up early for spinning class, or developed a panache for dancing at da' club.

The music worked well enough because of fast hypnotic drum beats, however, after a while, it gets boring. The fun is in the unknown; what am I going to be exposed to today. For example, Maroon 5 is on an Apple created playlist. It was raining, so I had to go to the gym, and running on a treadmill, while staring at a wall for an hour, makes listening to the lyrics easy. So Adam Levine sang a song called "Sugar" which embarrassed me to red faced blushing that was camouflaged by my red faced sweating. First of all, I have never heard anyone call a pussy "Red Velvet" before, and I think even Bukowski would find Adam Levine yodeling about eating Red Velvet raunchy.

The Apple playlists were not proving to be a longterm solution. I decided to type a familiar artist into iTunes. It was Gaslight Anthem, a group I obsessed over for a couple years, and then abruptly stopped. 

Last June I was hitting the booze hard, and I'd listen to Gaslight on my computer, crying, dancing or secretly smoking out the bathroom window. It was a group I leaned heavily on while going through some emotional shit. Then one day, I chose to move on and stop wallowing, so I cut my ties with that sadness, and I rolled Gaslight into that time, leaving it with the buried baggage.

When I listened to their album yesterday, I remembered, "I fucking love The Gaslight Anthem!" And I didn't feel like shit, or return to my 13 month ago self. Gaslight was guilty by association. I'm happy I went back and excavated them from the severed tie because listening to Gaslight in good times, makes me love them even more.

I looked at other things I shun because of bad times association, and knew it was time to absolve them of their guilt. I pulled my hipster shoes out of the back of my closet, where I threw them after a volatile night out, and put them on my feet. Walking forward.