Personal Journal

Flamenco Music

I'm listening to a CD I haven't listened to in I think 4 years.
Gypsy Kings Live.

Music is where I store my memories, and I guess I'm ready to add some memories to this old album, or maybe just resurrect some of the old ones.

I listened to it when I first got into counseling for my first marriage to Renee (well I only had one, but I guess I do consider that Jean and I were married and at death parted). It was Christmas time, and I needed so much time to myself, but I didn't know it. That's when I started carrying my man-purse, because I needed to carry something to make notes on, and I needed to carry music all the time. I had to put headphones on all of the time. Constantly. I was in need of a serious look inward about Renee and what course I had accidentally set my life on when I married her.

And I can remember listening to this CD everywhere I went, and feeling the quiet as I let go of giving a shit what anyone else thought of me when they saw me. I think I found the self that I'd lost in 1994... but that's a story I don't even tell in my journal... not yet anyway.

What bonded me to the Gypsy Kings was that I only barely understand Spanish, and not enough to have much of a clue what any of the lyrics mean. So I could make them mean whatever I wanted them to.

All I had were my own emotions, which ran hither and yon like investigators at the scene of a crime (which I suppose they were, that's a colorful metaphor), and the beat of the flamenco music. Flamenco is simultaneously brilliantly free, and painstakingly precise. I love it. I lost myself from my life so many times listening to this, constantly, every day, for probably four months...

I do wish to be lost tonight.

I must search for what these songs are trying to tell me tonight.