A Study on Sadness (part 2.5)

The Magical Music Machine

You woke up at 4 in the morning. You had a rough night, hardly slept, deep sleep interspersed with violent rage, dreams a recollection of failure and regrets, memories resurfacing from a deep crevice of the brain, graves of sadness. Not even nightmares, no ghouls or unearthly beasts chasing after your life. At least nightmares are better, you know they’re not real, born from imagination, as soon as you wake up (which you usually will) they disappear, shoved down by the waking brigade to that deep crevice in your brain where all things unpleasant reside.

The world is dark at 4 am. You read somewhere or heard from someone that the world is darkest right before the sun comes out. You’re exhausted from lack of sleep. You want to lie down a bit longer, unable to find a good enough reason to let go of the soft embrace of your pillows, the only comfort you have at the moment. Suddenly, you hear a faint melody surfacing from the vacant air, startled at first, you look around the room for the source of this music invading the silence of early morning. At a corner of your room, on a wooden cabinet you bought just last month, beside the relic of a tv, now broken, huge and black with a blank for a face, a peculiar machine gives out a soft glow of white, red and blue, illuminating you room, light in the deepest dark.  On top of this machine, tentacles, soft but solid, glowing with a soft green light, at first a glimmer but sensing that you’re awake, the glow grows brighter. It’s the magical mucic machine, you set it to start at 4 am but forgot all about it.

The tentacles start swaying despite the apparent lack of air in the room. You now realize how stuffy your room is but instead of opening your window, you chose to suffocate, perhaps hoping this lack of air will induce a sense of euphoria, a sense common during asphyxiation (in other words, strangulation) or for a simpler reason that you’re too tired to get up and open the windows. The sway of the tentacles (with the soft green glow) has a very hypnotic effect, you feel calm and lazy,  still sad, not happy but more accepting of your current emotion. You understand that you’re sad and wishes to stay sad a bit longer. The machine understands you and you’re grateful for that.

You recognize that melody now, the incoherent wailing, hypnotic notes repeated over and over, monotony of emotion played out in a single track pushing you deeper into your shell of sadness, melodies some may mistake as a cacophony of madness but in truth a work of genius, electronics and percussions (bereft of the loud guitar) creates a sense of detachment, of travels in deep space, an alien world that exist on this terrestrial plane.  That melody is radiohead, the machine chose to play kid a and amnesiac acknowledging the deep sadness that resonates from these recordings. The effect you get is hypnosis. You close your eyes and drift into deep sleep.

You woke up, the world is still dark, you cursed the machine, what’s the point of hypnotizing if you can only get 10 or 15 minutes worth of sleep. You look at the alarm clock, green numbers glaring at you, you’re mistaken, it’s 1o o’clock in the morning, you’ve been asleep for the last 6 hours. You’re body aching, muscles tired of sleeping, joints eager to move, you woke up, got down your bed and made your way to the window. You drew up the curtains, the world is dark outside, you wonder, is it the end of the world? It’s raining. You open the window, a gush of cold wind brushed against your skin making you shiver, drops of water stained the front of your pyjamas, thunder roared, lightning flashed. You closed the window out of fear, out of care, careful not the let flood comes through the window or let the wind blows you away into a world of  gales, ice and stormy wheather.

You’re in the kitchen. You are boiling water to make a pot of steaming hot tea. You hope it might cheer you up, it always worked in movies. When you’re sad, make some tea, when you’re sick, have chicken soup, when you’re horny, have sex and when you’re tired of living your mundane life, take the blue pill and follow morpheus into the matrix. You took a stool and sat beside a closed window, staring with vacant eyes, thinking of nothing in particular. You can hear music drifting along the cold wind permeating the silence of the kitchen. The kitchen is suddenly alive, the pots and pans, forks, spoons,spatulas and ladles humming, rattling creating soft vibrations, sound waves so soft you can hardly hear them. You can hardly see anything outside, the world is covered by a veil of grey water.You imagine yourself seeing a field of green grass bending over the weight of cold water, unable to protect themselves against the heavy rain and in the background, tall tress swaying with the violent wind. This is the scene you imagined, a scene evoked by the music you hear, a scene depressing and cold but so natural, calm and beautiful. This is the music of sigur ros.

This tale continues in the next chapter………

Music featured in this chapter are as follows:

Obsessed (of Mariah Carey and Daphne Iking)

Have you heard the recent gossip about Daphne Iking’s (in case some of you are clueless who daphne iking is, she’s malaysia’s famous model, tv personality and actress hosting shows like explorace and ringgit sense on tv3 and was 2006′s #14 in FHM Malaysia’s Sexiest) husband suing another guy for “enticing or taking away or detaining with a criminal intent a married woman”, whatever that means. The trial had to be adjourned after the judge who was said to have recently recovered from a heart condition became upset after lawyers representing both sides started lashing out at each other in the middle of the trial.

Well, that was certainly uncalled for, so instead of turning this into a huge fiasco which only serves to embarrass both parties and tarnishes daphne’s goody- two- shoes image, i suggest both parties take it outside court and settle this dispute in a more gentlemanly way. Daphne could take the cue from mariah carey and her husband, instead of suing eminem for obsessing on her boobs, recorded a single called “obsessed” and tells the world how eminem is a fuckin loser. Since in malaysia you have to cut a malay single for it to sell, i have taken the liberty of translating the song obsessed for daphne and hope she considers this song for her first single (get that badass lawyer of yours to settle the copyright issue with mariah carey’s recording company). This song is called ” Terhegeh-hegeh”.

Terhegeh-hegeh

Kenapa kau terhegeh-hegeh kat aku?

So oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh

So ohX9, So ohX9, So ohX9

Dalam blog kau tulis kita jumpa dekat bar,

Aku langsung tak kenal engkau,

Cakap aku pergi rumah kau, naik kereta kau.

Kau dekat LA, aku kat rumah Jermaine,

Aku ada dekat A (A???????), kau memang tak malu,

Takde sape kat sini sebut nama kau,

Mesti kau hisap ganja, mesti sebab E (E???????),

Cause you be poppin hood, you get it poppin (i have no idea what that line means, so as the rest of the world)

Korus:

Kenapa kau terhegeh-hegeh kat aku, budak aku nak tau,

Kau tipu kau romen ngan aku tapi semua orang tau,

Sah-sah kau marah kat aku,

Akhirnya kau jumpa pompuan yang tak hingin kat kau,

Laki terakhir kat dunia pun tak mampu.

Kau dah jadi gila, kau memang gila,

Kau dah hilang akal,

Kau dah keliru, kau memang keliru,

Kenapa kau buang masa,

Kau makin panas dengan kompleks napoleon (is she sayin that eminem is short? or is his dick as small as napoleon’s?),

Boleh tembus kau macam mandi dengan windex (is that a brand of window cleaner?) .

Budak, kenapa kau terhegeh-hegeh kat aku?

So ohX9 , So ohX 9

Terhegeh- hegeh, terhegeh-hegeh, terhegeh-hegeh.

Kau buat keje kau, kau benci bangat

Tak nak bagi kau makan, biar kau kebulur

Kau sesak nafas, aku tolong kipas

Kau tak cukup nafas, jangan tunggu aku.

Bagi tau satu dunia, kau rindu kat aku,

Kite tak penah bercinte, nape kau sentap,

Kau mak dan bapak, aku syarikat besar,

Aku sidang akhbar, kau sembang kosong.

Ulang korus X 1

Kau sayang kat aku ke? Kau sayang kat aku ke?

A Study on Sadness (part 2)

The Sound of Melancholy

Whenever i feel sad, a part of me started becoming aware that i am at this point feeling sad. Some people feels sad but sadly unaware of their own sadness that other people notices their sadness but chooses to ignore them because in the case of sadness, an emotion which is not logical, the brain chooses to ignore it to prevent oneself from getting emotionally involved thus creating a conflict. This is the function of the brain called IQ. But through extensive studies in the fields of psychology, neurology, sociology and perhaps emotionology, scientist has been successful in creating a new terminology (perhaps driven by their own selfish needs to stop people from calling them zombies or frigid bastards and bitches) called EQ. This is a brain function that allows you to feel your own emotions and chooses to sympathize, empathize or simply ignore another person’s emotions.

When i’m sad, i sometime feel an obligation to continue feeling sad. To have this right to wallow is my sadness, feeling that aching feel of loneliness, the emptiness in the chest that sometimes choke you to the point of death. I allow this feeling to grow, turning every single minute of my waking life into a picture of melancholy, seeing everything through lenses of negativity and pessimism. I find music a great help in these circumstances. Music creates the right mood to enhance such feelings of melancholy, fueling it and sustaining it to a point where wallowing in sadness becomes a natural process.

I am sadly not an expert in music. Terminologies and descriptions of works by masters of yonder eludes me for i am not learned in musical history nor technology but what i do know is how to appreciate music and recognize which music tells me best how to be sad. It is also a very sad fact that the radio today doesn’t allow you to be sad. Radio fills the airwaves with one pop song after another and true to its name, pop being pop is all about popping the hood be it mariah carey or lady gaga or lady gaga and mariah carey. When you’re sad they scrutinize you with their bohemian ideas of psychedelic fun and sex day in, day out, numbing your senses, short circuiting y0ur brain. You are a product of the MTV brainwashing program, a generation of mindless, senseless, dumbass,*&@#^!()?><” generation who lives to party (pronounced as “paartay”) and paartay to be alive.

In this section, I present to you my own list compiled from the small number of cds i have in my possession. List of albums that have helped me through my bouts of depression. These songs did not serve to cheer me up and lift me above the grey clouds of melancholy but instead, allows me to feel this sadness, understand it, appreciate it and tell me it’s just part of being alive. I will describe this music to you but i choose to do it in a different way, not the pop way of creating a 10 top ten list of albums which is subject to endless debate, a marketing ploy to increase the album sales. This list is very personal and close to my heart. I sighed and cried listening to these albums. I have taken the creative liberty of using a fictional account of a melancholic man to tell of all these wonderful music. This fiction is called the magical music machine.

The Magical Music Machine

You have in your possession a wonderful instrument called the magical music machine. You can’t be certain how or when or even why you manage to procure such a peculiar thing but you know it’s in your possession and you have a certain attachment to it, in fact, upon careful rumination, you remembered that you love this machine more than anything you have ever possessed in your entire life. That is all that matters anyway. So, you wonder, what makes the magical music machine so magical?

No one knew who designed this magical machine. This machine is attached with sensors like the many tentacles of an octopus and like the octopus’s tentacles are able to sense its surrounding but unlike the tentacles of an actopus does not help this machine to move as it prefers to remain stationary. What does these tentacles do? The uniqueness of this machine is its ability to sense the owner’s emotions through its many tentacles, analyzes in its mini super computer and decides the best music to play in accordance to the owner’s emotion. This machine has a special blue tooth function which enables the machine’s computer to link with the owner’s brain and decides which music to play either to aggravate the emotion, pacify it or in the case of an owner who is unable to decide how to deal with his own emotion, chooses to play any music from a random selection of mood enhancers or mood dampeners.

So it happens one day, you became very sad. You tell yourself this is natural, you’re depressive cycle is setting in, part of you loathed it but another part welcomes it and the EQ part of your brain decides how to deal with this emotion. You decided to remain sad for a few more days and that is exactly what you did. You came back late from work, went to the magical music machine and set it to start at 4 am the next morning as this is usually the time when you wake up every time you’ get depressed. You showered and being too sad for dinner, decided to head straight to bed and true enough, you woke up at 4 am the next morning.

To be continued…………………