Down and Out of Time

Sometimes examining emotional pain through the lens of other peoples' songs is a pretty healthy experience that doesn't actually cause a lot of personal grief. I've had bouts of remarkably detached emotional catharsis listening to "Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure" by the Weakerthans, for example. (If you don't think a song about a cat can be unbearably sad, I'm afraid you're wrong.)

We like that songs reflect life, or that in the particularity of the songwriter's own pain and hope and sadness and joy, we can locate ourselves -- as Neko Case says, it can be comforting to hear "someone singing my life back to me." But when your life is being sung back to you and it is something you wish was not happening, when you are in the middle of the kind of thing that Leigh Nash wrote this song about, you don't want to hear it. It's like the chorus says -- "you're gonna feel my pain / like it or not."

Well, I don't like it. Yes, of course pain is real - but one person's pain cannot always be another's. I have seen too many times how genuine hurt turns into twisted bitterness, and how that emanates from one person and is absorbed into others. It should not happen, but it does.

The last line of the song is "your mystery is not worth being solved."

I don't want to hear this. I don't want to believe it. But sometimes I do.