Today I can’t get enough of The Velvet Underground song Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ today. I feel like it is speaking to my insides, to my soul, to the yet unwritten words that are doing somersaults in my bloodstream. I want to drink it up, devour it, bathe in it, comb it through my hair and inhale it deep in my lungs, this feeling, this song, the way it is making me feel. I feel it in my chest, that nearly about to burst feeling, emotions ready to explode out of me. The sensation is bigger than the prickle goosebumps feeling, it is stronger than that just about to cry burn, it is more like that moment before you tumble off desire’s edge, that split second before a lover’s name escapes from your lips, before the lights go dim, than flash as bright as the sun, and that little death of an orgasm takes control. It feels like first love, or lust, or those terribly wonderful crushes that make you weak in the knees. Oh music, the way you can move me is like nothing else at all.
I wish I could share my headphones with someone else right now. Turn the music up loud and lay back flat on the ground, sharing the music together, grabbing hands when the guitars begin to build, hoping that they feel it, too. Because sometimes I cannot express the way a song makes me feel, the way it unhinges me, disables my everything, and then puts me all back together. Nothing is quite like it, not exactly, not close enough to what music does to me. I long to share that with someone, completely and thoroughly, a musical intimacy is what I crave right now.
The nearest I’ve come to it, the closest I’ve ever come, was the night we lay on your living room floor, the one with all the guitars and that god-damn record collection, and we let the music wash over us, barely touching yet, not saying a single word. That moment, well baby, you could have asked me to go anywhere with you and I would have said yes, a million times yes, yes, yes yes. Later you told me I was more of a musician than he could ever be. I laughed and shook my head. I don’t play anything, and you play almost everything, guitar, drums, piano…
Before I could go on you stopped me, grabbing hold of both of my hands, face close enough that I thought the interruption would be in the form of a kiss.
“It isn’t in any instrument the way music lives in you. You breathe it and bleed it like no musician I could ever be.”
Maybe you didn’t mean it. Who knows, and really, who cares, because in that moment I surely believed it. And when it turned into a kiss I remember thinking I wish I was a musician, that we could hit the road together, like VV and Jack, and make the world come with just our songs. It would be like everything, and nothing, at all.
Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ :: The Velvet Underground
at the starlite diner 