I am not too much of a playlist transcribing person. I made a few mix CDs when I was younger, and even those, which were based on the MP3s on my computer that were mostly ripped from CD, were quite hard to make. Don’t even get me started on the unspoken “one song per artist” rule.

Nowadays, many people my age make playlists obsessively from the seemingly-but-not-so-infinite stretches of cloud server bandwidth. I initially typed that I was not a playlist making person, but I do make them. My brain is the “switchboard with crossed and tangled lines” that Poly Styrene sung about – it is the wall tall bulletin board of the mad man with color coded pins and lines of string connecting the subjects and topics most disparate to the average Joe who chooses to think critically not. Those moments come in fleeting hyper associative bursts, always running away. When I catch them, I get a song or a fragment of an essay. Music and the combination of music with other forms of communication give me inspiration in life. To me, songs hold great meaning, and two songs totally disconnected from and completely, disgustingly unaware of each other can bond as soulmates – sonically, topically, thematically, emotionally. Often, most of these bonds do not even exist to the naked eye. But once you dig beneath the surface, what is abrasive can be as intense and powerful as what is seemingly numbing. The most fleeting detail, the most unimportant nugget can hold the same meaning as a guitar solo ingrained into the brain folds of millions, a stadium sized orgy of bombast.

So, my brain does make “playlists”. They just take time to build up – or they are grains of sand fucking with silent, passionate vigor the ashes of a gone-too-soon girl who died in a car crash whose boyfriend in laying her to rest at her favorite beach, like in some cheesy song sung by white girls with big hair in the sterile sixties, before the hippies took over. Sandcastles crushed by the kung fu moves of puny children.