Feeling the Blues: An Excerpt From My Story
My Mojo Rising
The following is a small section from my as of yet unpublished book. This is from the last chapter, and the section details regaining interest in who I have always been.
I do not know if it is, but it may or may not be hard for you, dear reader, to imagine how a teacher lost his mojo for at least ten years. That loss was complete. So much so, actually, that I had not realized it was gone until my reawakening. Indeed, I am twice-born like William James wrote about.
Like him, I lived through an existential crisis and lived to tell the tale. I have not used the word existential, intentionally, until now. Most good things begin with a boyish, naïve desire to explore the dreams we dream. That did not exist at all, and it would be inaccurate to say the Darkness alone perpetrated the crime. A little bit before, life’s pressures and endless petty matters drained our hero until the addiction disease delivered the killing blow.
From the D-word (divorce) event until roughly 2021, no need-to-know questions stirred in his head. His in-class time was a welcome respite from the numb deadness, and always too brief. Really, it was like filling my tank enough to teach, and doing that very well, and then going dry until the next time. Drinking worked along the same lines, as I reached record levels of drunkenness and then diligently sobered up, and then repeat. Mental illness, then, buried my good parts and let loose the Shadow self.
The guitar just vanished from my worldview for those many years. It simply did not come up in any regard, and that includes playing guitar and hearing others do so. Sure, there was music here and there, but not like it was when his boyish fascination with guitar held a voodoo-like spell over him. As I am positive you know, Depression cancels those activities that enable enjoyment/excitement.
For me, it was a little more diabolical, as Depression caused my hobbies to be especially and doubly odious to me compared to all else, at the mere mention. The realization that your life-loves are actually depressing begets dire hopelessness.
So, you put that guitar, or violin, piano, canvas, brush, pen, pencil — you get the picture — away, far away. You shut it up in a closet and shut it out of your mind. The same story applies to all that the young man felt somewhat good doing previous to the Darkness. The man almost smiles thinking about his days of drawing and creating stories. There was innocence to all of that.
At the heart of the matter, the young man loved the Blues generally and Blues guitar, especially. The discovery occurred around the age of fifteen, and it changed his outlook on the possibilities of music. Before, I listened to “Top 40” radio and the songs that were manufactured and popular at any given time. He did not know any better. These were the days of stereos, tape cassettes, then CDs, and stores where one went in person and purchased music. The Blues and other kinds of music born from it or related to it, were more authentic, soulful is a good word, than that other stuff.
The artform cut a hole through the barriers of his stale world straight through to something inside, and hidden, rousing in him a feverish ache that reminds of daily living with eyes wide open. The Blues are a primal, dance-around-a-fire kind of music. My second favorite word for Blues is urgent, in that how I feel matters and I am going to howl, scream, or moan it so you really understand. I wish I knew a better word than understand, as it does not do justice to what I mean.
There can be a droning, repeating rhythm that is trancelike and that gave its fire to that pure, early rock and roll beat. Country blues is more sparse with a touch of evil between the lines. My favorite became electric blues such as performed by B.B. King, Albert King, Guitar Slim, Stevie Ray Vaughan, John Lee Hooker, and many more. It is those guitars that cry that better represented the insides of a teenage youth than anything else found.
The fact that the uninitiated do not get, is that the Blues do not give someone the sadness that people also call “the blues.” It is unimaginable to think I would respond in the positive to a music that made me more depressed. No way. If that were so, I would run away and banish the Blues from my ears.
So, now, it is time for my favorite word to describe this musical style: catharsis. In my mind, the word stands for a process of cleansing, like a ritual, that is truthful in an acknowledgement of the bad stuff and then a letting go of it. That is the Blues, to me. Before I put this in words, I felt it as a young person. The Blues indeed has lots of references to hard times and especially a “mean woman” who did somebody wrong. In this regard, the music deals with actual life and not happy jingles — which do genuinely, actually make our hero depressed.
Blues is diverse, so my remarks are intended to be a general summation. With that being said, the Blues admit the low-down nature of life and then urge us to say: “oh well, we might as well have a good time.” Also, the mean women sometimes refer to something else in life, like a work boss. There is lots of coded language.
Well, that last word prompted this: my immersion in the Blues was like learning a new language. I went to work to learn more about the music. My brother was aware of it but did not speak it fluently. So, there was no human source around to further my education, but thankfully the early days of the internet did help.
I recall hours sitting before the computer and listening to samples on one or two websites. Yes, the internet was much smaller and slower, then. They did not teach anything worthwhile musically, in high school. After about three years, at 18 years old, my parents bought me a guitar for Christmas. I do not know what encouraged me to believe that I could play guitar, assuming I was not a real person who could not participate in life. It was a solid guitar for a beginner. From this day forward, I practiced intensely almost every single day.
Those legends of the guitar, it was like they possessed a superhuman talent to translate what the heart feels into those strings, and then the strings vibrated out a searing wail that was otherworldly to Kirk’s ears. This little slice of life might sound suggestive of another place and time in the journey, dear reader. Anyway, those guitar sounds say more about human beings than a thousand shallow words.
Somehow, if he could capture whatever black magic at work in the Blues, he could have that power too. The Blues are deceptive in that the music has a simplicity that is actually extremely difficult to capture. There is nothing to hide behind in this artform, no tricks will cover over insincerity.
I hope you enjoyed this very small sampling of my story. Hopefully, you will soon read the whole thing, enjoy it, and learn a little.
Thanks for reading.