A Whiter Shade of Pale

Got out of work at 11:00 last Friday night.

I don't necessarily like working that late, then again I do. Driving home from work at 11:00 at night feels dark and delicious. 

At one low point in my life I worked second shift on a menial, stupid job. Got out at 12:30. A.M. This is when my hair was still down to my ass. Summer nights, man - summer nights.

It was a short drive home but I'd take the elastic out of my ponytail, roll down my windows and let my hair whip around my head. Radio loud. I was a bit stupider then, so I also always had a beer going or a bit of whiskey.

Felt like freedom. Felt like rebellion.

The current situation is not quite the same - my fucking hair is short and I don't drink on the way home - but the radio is loud, it is late at night and the road is unpopulated. All the drunks are already home or in the drunk tank or still drinkin'. I feel more alive then than I do almost anytime else.

But that's not the point. Procol Harum is the point.

It's after eleven on a Friday night, I'm driving home alone with my thoughts and A Whiter Shade of Pale floats out of my radio.

My emotional reaction was intense. The mood of that song captured - in that moment - everything dark I've been feeling lately.

Everybody's dying.

People who are important to me, people who allowed me to escape the vapidity of my life, people who made me cry, made me feel, breathed life into my soul - people who provided for me a release that kept me alive - these people are dying. It's too finite. Too sad. It is reality in the form of the cruelty of life, slapping me in the face.

All of this was captured in that one song in that one moment.

Gary Brooker was the lead singer of Procol Harum - his is the voice that haunts your soul. He died on February 19 at the age of 76. When I heard of his death I was saddened. When I heard the song, I was shattered.

That song is iconic to anyone from my generation. Assuming you can still feel anything this far down the road.

When regular people die it is sad. Death equals the end of hope. When creative people die it is worse. 

Creative people have lightened the load of the common man, given them beauty to distract them. They leave their beauty behind, but their mortality bothers me.

Creative people should be immortal. In a sense they are, of course. But I'm talking physically immortal. So they can continue to create and soothe the lives of generation after generation. They should be given a pass.

What else do we have?

Every death like Gary Brookers amplifies the fragility of my own mortality. I take it personally. Sixties rock was my true birth, not some fucking hospital on January 1, 1954.

I am not doing much to protect myself lately. Kind of down. But I feel my anger burning. Anger in me is always a good sign, as opposed to depression, which is self-defeating (but hard to defeat).

I am stewing. I am heating up, I am restless, pissed off and aware. I stalk around the house but my brain moves quicker.

I am working backwards to where I was at the end of 2021.

I will be back on track shortly.

My sadness at the death of Gary Brooker is now a dark emotion breathing quietly in my soul. Along with all the others who inspired me, then died.

A Whiter Shade of Pale will crush me every time I hear it from now on.