I go out of my way not to think of stuff these days. This is in contrast to the past when I would sit around and think of stuff all the time. To top that off, I would listen to sad music; intentionally sad; music whose only purpose was to make me sad and sometimes, if you were around, to make you sad as well. It's unfathomable to me now. Today, I would just as soon listen to intentionally sad music as to stub my toe over and over on the edge of the shower while still wet and reaching for a towel, simultaneously blinded by a sudden pain and panicky with the knowledge that I was dripping water all over the bathroom floor and naked to boot.
In those days, the music was just a tool, a can-opener in a pantry of sad thoughts, which filled the shelves and had no visible expiration dates. I would (we would, occasionally - they astonish me, the things we did) sit on the floor with my musical can-opener and open the cans one by one and suck out the juice as if it were heavy syrup. See, my parents, when I was young, would serve up a large can of peaches for dessert some nights and after all the peaches were gone, my brother and I would take our favorite twisty straws and drink the heavy syrup all the way down to the bottom. The sadness was like a heavy syrup and we'd drink it till we felt heavy and then we'd keep at it till we were nauseus and later sick;
then we'd pretend to be in love so we could fight over something because that's what being in love is like when you're sick from the heavy syrup of sadness (talk about heavy syrup, sheesh, I'm laying it on a little thick) and there's empty cans littering the floor and a stickiness on the roof of your mouth and you would leave or I would leave and whichever of us had left would finally come back days later with more cans and together we'd clean up the kitchen floor, arrange those cans neatly on a shelf and wait for the next time one of us would get the urge to play with the goddamn can-opener, which was really not a can-opener at all, remember?, but intentionally sad music, which is not a toy to be played with, or even a handy tool, come to think of it, but a weapon, a fucked up, pointless weapon that could take out a figurative eye or a literal year of your life iof you're not careful.
And who's careful when you're young and all drunk on sadness? Huh?