Anybody who is aware of my history with contemporary folk knows that I've called Leonard Cohen boring in the past. The watermark on sentiments such as these tend to start in 2008 and stop in 2010, and then a hiatus from the man's body of work proved to be the most fruitful task ahead of me. I just... didn't get it. I didn't get that dimension of sadness as a sixteen year old, because my idea of love hurting me was about its stunning absence rather than the complicated folly that attaches itself to the heart once it's come and gone and come again. Last night I was having trouble being me and I passed the nighttime threshold with two shots of rum, a 10mg melatonin nightcap, and "Famous Blue Raincoat" on low and on repeat. I hate rum, I like melatonin, I thought I was ambivalent to Leonard Cohen. "You treated my woman to a flake of your life / And when she came back, she was nobody's wife". I've been cheated on at least three times from zero since I last heard Leonard, but when I think about why that's such a depressing fact, it has nothing to do with the self-pithy. It's no woe that I say it. It's an honest and earnest appreciation for the world, because it's finally unlocked the blockage that was keeping my Cohen chakra from charging its jaundice-laden self. The only opinion that truly remained intact as of last night is how much I hate rum.

And how much the guitar gets sparser with each repetition of Cohen's music. There's a thing that he does where it sounds like his fingers are giving up before his voice does, as he grows wearier and more certain that he is not going to get his point across to his bystanders or his unpersonable love interest. This is the first day in a while that Florida has autumntime weather and I'm glad I woke into it with Songs of Love and Hate. I'm really having trouble in waking these days and I need to know that there is, was, still can be someone that still feels those feelings alongside me. I know that I have a ghost of 1971 keeping me company and that the blood in his veins are not cold enough for his auditory and astral projection into my psyche, but this distance from Leonard's world is just pretty enough to skirt on by without being the sadsack of yore. I wouldn't dream on stepping on toes of that caliber. I'm glad that, through the thick of what I've learned and not learned as someone's boring boyfriend in a sexless relationship, that I'll get to look on this me as someone else. Someone boring. Someone who deserved it. I seem like I'm in a melodrama but I've really just woken up after, as admitting, dreaming to "Famous Blue Raincoat" all night. Cut me some slack when this guy rips new wounds serially.