Top Ten

"What are your top ten albums?"

"What?"

"You heard me, give me ten."

What is this? Some High Fidelity boot camp? Top ten, I don't have a top ten. Yet this this is how people relate. Dog's stiff butts, we share organized lists of our lives.

What's really weird is despite what I do, everything but my job has revolved around music lately. This conversation is only a small chunk of exposed rock. The rest of the mountain involves friends goats and gurus (oh my!)

Ok, maybe not so many goats. Sorry, I didn't mean to get your gruff. Yeah, there I go again…Let's start from scratch. Hi, I'm Rob, I blog. I tell really bad jokes. and I'm a musiholic.

Hi Rob.

I've been listening to music ever since I was a little kid. I remember listening to "Live and Let Die" on the radio, staring into the speaker. I wanted to know where the orchestrated typewriter was hidden. That's what the instrumental part always sounded like. I never saw the Bond action, Bond women, or Bond guns they were alluding to, cuz I'd never seen the movie. I had seen a typwriters and the horns reminded me of a pattern of keys descending to the end of the line, followed by a carriage return to start anew. Yeah, I am that old. I remember manual typewriters. I even owned one.

Not the little Robby in this story though. He was too young. He couldn't spell QWERTY, let alone type it. He did see music though, and to him, "Live and Let Die" was music to type to. I'm not sure Sir Paul would appreciate my secretarial view of his spy theme.

"Red Swingline's are Forever…"

That's the point though, how do we really gauge "top ten." These songs are the pretty songs and they're better than everybody else. Who are we to judge? Jessica Simpson could be a stellar musician in somebody sky. We can only gauge by the patterns we see, and they're strung together by the people, the places and the things we recognize. That's right, Music is a celestial noun. It's the noun. Grease is the word though, in case you were curious.

"So what is it?"

"What?"

"Your top ten? You're stalling.

"Yeah, so?"

Can you blame me? Top ten lists are a stairway to heaven. They're long, overrated and everybody who hears it thinks they can recreate it. Normally they fail miserably. Top ten lists are personal, but everybody wants to show how cool and trendy they are by raising up stuff they've listened to twice because "Critics liked it." Yeah, critics lauded my marriage too, and look where that got us. People's lists are an exercise in futility: they're nothing more than whispers of somebody else's gods, now long dead.

I'd much rather swim the lochs of the living. Surround myself with musical waves that pulse and rise to the beat of a different drummer. I want to feel the caress of fresh currents and old favorites, not wallow in the stagnant pond of decayed vinyl. Music moves, and what moves me today, may not even make a plop ripple tomorrow.

The point is, we like what we like when we like it. If we lock on to ten faves and cling to them like a sunken treasure, how do we know what wonders will stream past?

Yeah, I know this is my divorce blog, and if you're trying to draw the marriage analogy to my music analogy it will never string together. Music isn't marriage. It's a part of it, but it's like judging a Mozart by his piccolo. Marriage requires a blog full of orchestrated love, right now we're just talking about the piccolo. Don't make it more than it is.

"C'mon, I'm sure your list is incredible!"

"It is."

"Well what's on it?"

"I can't tell you. I've blocked it out. MyEx and I--we used to argue about this all the time."

"Oh I'm sorry. I…uhm...Did you catch the Emmy's last night?"

"Yeah…"

See? It's personal. Not like divorce. Divorce is singing your top ten solo's to an empty loge, but sometimes you can use that to your advantage. Relating things to my ex is a song I've sang a hundred times, and yeah, it's on my top ten list.