When Time Stops Flowing

What the music really means

Hello, Creative Companions!

Today, I’m reposting a haiku comic I originally sent out on April 1, 2022. As more people discover this strange project of mine, I occasionally like to bring back comics I sent out before many people were reading them. This comic is old, but the commentary below is fresh.

The music you first heard when you were a teenager starts out as a soundtrack running in the background of your memory movies. Given enough time and attention, these songs become a kind of talisman. When you want to feel the sweet confusion of first love, the idiotic freedom of thinking you’re bulletproof, or the angry isolation of being invisible, you listen to these tunes.

If you’re susceptible to a flavor of dangerous sentimentality, given yet more time, the songs from your teenage years become mythic—a kind of holy writ. Like a child, you return again and again to the melodies and harmonies, you pour over the lyrics to see if you properly understood them at 16 only to find you missed their true meaning completely.

Or perhaps, that’s just me.

As a teenager, I completely missed that Depeche Mode singer and lead songwriter Martin Gore spent so much of his music talking about heroin addiction and recovery.

Likewise, I thought INXS singer Michael Hutchence was singing about time moving too fast in Not Enough Time from the stunning 1992 album, Welcome to Wherever You Are. But, that’s not really what that song is about. Not Enough Time is a deeply sensual song about death and dying.

Death of one kind or another is what kills all our relationships.

Now that my oldest child is legally an adult and I’m closer to 60 than 20, the movement of time only means one thing—death. I only now understand what Michael was trying to tell me. There’s not enough time because for some of us, time itself will stop, never to flow again.

Cheers,

Jason