By comparison.

The cardigan-clad sons of the t.v. people have gone back to college, and the singing snowmen have been packed up into empty liquor boxes and stuffed in dark attic corners.  Hallelujah!  Holiday cheer is out, and aching backs and sinusitis are in again!  The commercials have, once again, begun to focus on how miserable every one must be, and I, by comparison, feel like a lucky s.o.b.

(Speaking of commercials, wouldn’t diarrhea and profuse sweating make your social anxiety disorder worse?)

After what seemed to be an interminable bout with some sort of cold plague and some other sort of agonizing stomach pain, I am back up and running and feeling better than ever.  

I have stacks of ungraded papers to grade, piles of unfilled-out forms to fill out, lists of unresolved New Year’s resolutions to resolve, and several unstuffed envelopes from collectors of cash to stuff.  Somehow, I find that I am most confident and proficient when I am over-whelmed.  I function like the eye of a storm.  Within the storm, within the spirals of wheeling cows and Cadillacs, there is calm.  Without the storm, calm has no meaning.  I can’t find calm, unless I’m careening through demands.  This, ultimately, is why I can’t stop moving.  

Duke Ellington and biorhythms.

Duke Ellington's style of jazz, full of jungles and swaying hips, is among my favorite musical styles. I can listen to "Mooche" over and over again, and I have been for years. The rhythm of some of songs, like "Mooche," bring to mind scenes played out long ago in Congo Square - hypnotic dancing between tours of duty in the cane fields. They are the sorts of rhythms that swing back and forth between the ponderous, long moments of survival and the rapturous, brief moments of abandon. I hear it in other performers' music, as well. Tom Waits' "Fumblin' with the Blues," in particular, calls to mind that seductively melancholy combination of resignation and determination.

I can't bring myself to embrace the rapid-fire of most modern music - the aggressive shouting of people who still believe that shouting makes people listen. There is a lack of compassion in it. There is a brutal one-ness, a gory personal fable that belongs to teenagers and to middle-aged salesmen who refer to themselves always in the third-person and who pinch waitress bottoms as though waitress bottoms belonged not properly to waitresses but to middle-aged men. There is a lack of soul. I don't hear soul in angry music.

I do hear soul in Duke Ellington.