How To Get Yo'self A Fine Obsession

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There is one particularly useful attribute of the prednisone prescriptions my rheumatologist provides me with occasionally when the pain gets particularly rough that's both a blessing and a curse. It was during this last non-refillable series of steroids that my friend Rainey turned me on to the song written by Jay Ungar entitled Ashokan Farewell. I was really "roided" out the first time I played the video, and my mind was totally impressionable in a way I hadn't recognized yet.

I've written about the high I available with this old stand-by drug a goodly number of times. A lot of it has to do with the relief I get from the pain. If my readers know what to look for they can easily tell through my writing when I'm working through a prescription series. It makes me boldly go where this man has never been before.

The thing about this situation with the drug is that I got obsessed with Ashokan Farewell, and I think it can happen again. What I'm trying to say that if I wanna deliberately get obsessed with a topic I can do it by redundancy and repetition while I'm doing the prednisone.

For example, Rainey sent me a link to a youtube video in why Jay Ungar explains how he came to write the song, and then he plays it through once on his fiddle. I recognized it immediately as the theme song for Ken Burns TV documentary on the Civil War. I get really excited by the fact that I recognized it, and immediately start looking for other videos featuring a great number of musicians playing that song. There must be hundreds of them.

I found one particular video in which the violinist sticks to the original tune in tone and character the composer created, and began trying to play along with it on my digital piano to deeply learn this, by now, absolutely emotionally touching song. This is a link to the video I'm using:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFXbK9aZzXk&playnext_from=TL&videos=PuL_muCirRw

to learn the song.

At first I couldn't remember it long enough to move three feet away to my piano to play it, then over the next few days I remembered more and more so that now I can play the main them of the song without having to play the video to remember it.

I remember writing Rainey an e-mail about my excitement over learning it, and I impulsively used the Subject: box to state that this song was really a farewell to the Old South because I tied it emotionally to the fact that I'd first heard the song as the theme song for Ken Burns Civil War documentary.

Last night I was playing the video and playing my digital piano to imitate it. I really wanna stay loyal to the way the composer wrote it, and not turn it into some emotional hokum that suits my needs more than it does this guy Jay Ungar. After going through the video a couple of times to try to get it right I went to bed.

I dreamed about this song all night long. It was there every time I woke up at the end of a sleep cycle. I woke up this morning hearing this song, and that's when I finally got it. I can use this song as a vehicle to get over the fact that my entire life has been dominated by my trying to adopt to the fact that the Civil Rights movement ended the way I was raised to kowtow to the Jim Crow cultural attitude.

I've been using my participation in the Gospel of Thomas e-mail discussion group as a way of addressing the religion I was raised to in the same manner. I really hated those hypocrites until I grew up and became pretty much the same sort of hypocrite I accused my religious and social mentor of being. Nobody wants that.

I want to be free of that sort of prejudice, and I have the strength and courage to do it, and I have. I have friends who are still stuck there and worship the Limbaugh/Beck crowd. They're welcome to it. Just don't bring it to my house. Go burn your crosses and play your superiority games and leave me to my own delusions. '-)
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