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If you haven’t checked in with the newsletter in a while, I’ve been using my staff pick space to document / explore / reflect on something that’s been happening in my mind lately. I’m not really sure how to refer to it just yet. A rough patch? A mental health struggle? A nervous breakdown? Every week I wonder if this content would find a more appropriate home in a private journal, but I keep putting it here anyway. I’ve been an avid journaler for a few decades, but for the past few months my journal has deteriorated into basically a document of what media I have consumed (mostly books and movies… I listen to far too much music to catalog it all there) and whatever other content I’ve piped in automatically. The thrill of pure self-exploration has worn off… I need that mild sense of danger that comes from knowing someone might actually read my writing in order to get the words on the page. I could spend some time pondering why that’s the case, but not today.
The gist of today’s update is that things have not been great in Daniel-land. What started as a habit of spending too much time worrying congealed into a uniform sense of dread that blanketed my entire existence, then for the past week or so, that evolved again and started erupting into full-on violent panic attacks. This is not the first time in my life I’ve had panic attacks, but it had been a few years. They are monstrous, evil things. And like the demons in hell, each one is unique, preventing familiarity from blunting their impact. Sometimes I burst out sobbing. Sometimes it feels like all of my muscles clench so hard I become completely paralyzed. Sometimes I get light-headed and feel like I’m going to pass out. Sometimes it’s all in my stomach and I have to fight the urge to vomit. It’s a real smorgasbord of psychological terror. My go-to response when I feel one coming on is to find somewhere quiet, safe, and alone and either do a guided meditation with an app on my phone or just focus on counting my breath. More often than not, when I’m able to close my eyes and focus on my breath, I lose conscious pretty quickly. It’s sort of like sleep I guess, but it’s more like a blackout. My mind is like a computer that flashes the blue screen of death and then I’m just gone. When I emerge, typically half an hour to 45 minutes later, the worst has passed, but I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. One of the strangest things about panic attacks is, at least in my experience, they feel like purely biological occurrences. Typically there is no trigger that I can identify; it’s just something my body decides to do for no apparent reason. Sometimes I can identify a trigger, but often it’s comically benign. I had a really bad one on Sunday when my wife and I were sitting at a coffee shop and someone at the next table mentioned the name of my bank. I started sobbing and had to retreat to the sweltering back seat of the car, passed out and woke up an hour later, soaked in sweat and aching like hell.
My plan had been to ride things out, hoping that after I get through the major stress of buying the store that I could regain some stability and control. However, this week the closing date for the store got delayed (I’m not sure for how long, but at least a few weeks) and between that and the panic attacks ratcheting up in frequency and intensity, I decided it was time to seek treatment. I went back to my therapist for the first time in a couple of years. I put down the book about Swedish death metal I had been reading and started looking for books that might help with an anxiety flare-up. I remember during a major depressive episode a few years ago this book called The Noonday Demon really helped me, so I started reading a book called Beyond Anxiety that seems promising so far. I also made the decision to start taking medication again. I had been on Lexapro for years, but stopped a few months ago. I had been fed up with the side effects for a long time, but what really made me stop was that it felt like the medication was keeping me from processing Red’s death, that I wasn’t feeling everything I needed to feel. I thought things had been going fine, but when I asked a couple of close friends if they thought I should get back on the Lexapro, all of them said yes immediately and with no hesitation. So I guess I’m going to go back to being sleepy all the time, constipated, and having a perpetually sweaty ass crack.
As with my staff pick from last week, this struggles I’ve been experiencing have been the major factor in choosing what music to listen to. Last week I felt so untethered that I needed the sound of my favorite band to ground me and remind me who I am. This week I have been looking for music to soothe me. I’ve been looking primarily for sounds that are spacious, drone-y, and move slowly. I was listening to Agitation Free earlier today and that was getting pretty close to the sweet spot. I went for some Popol Vuh, but I think I chose the wrong album; Letzte Tage - Letzte Nächte was a little too bombastic. Nila Sinephro’s Space 1.8was right on the money. Mind you, I have an entire shelf of Eno records, basically everything he released under either his own name or the Ambient series up to the late 80s, but I haven’t touched them yet. I worry I’ve leaned on those too much during past anxiety flare-ups and have come to associate them with anxiety itself rather than its relief. Maybe I’ll spend a little time with those this week and report back. No promises.
My pick for this week, though, is Alice Coltrane’s 1971 album Universal Consciousness. While Alice Coltrane’s music tends to put me in my happy place, I haven’t actually listened to her too much for the past couple of years. I worry that I’m letting the incessant chatter about her in the “vinyl community” ruin her for me. I have a bad habit of letting other people ruin music for me. My go-to example of this is Infest. I loved Infest when I was young. I bought Slave from a distro box at a show when I was 16 or 17 just because I thought it looked cool and I was blown away. Then I got a bootleg discography CD off Rick Ta Life’s distro at a 25 Ta Life gig and wore it out for a couple of years. But then in the early 2010s, around the time Infest started playing again, things took a turn. I saw them a couple of times and it wasn’t the gigs that ruined them for me (they were pretty sick!), but the cult that grew up around the band. It was very intense in Raleigh. There was a new crop of young hardcore kids in town and they were obsessed with Infest. These kids had a band called Abuse., and they put out a total scorcher of an LP on To Live a Lie in 2013 that you should absolutely check out if you have any interested in Infest-inspired hardcore. However, I could not listen to it. I had heard Infest’s name too many times by that point, and the hate had grown too strong within me. I had gone over to the dark side. The side where you don’t listen to Infest.
I really don’t want that to happy to Alice Coltrane’s music, because I truly love it so much. Though the hatred in my heart is probably the reason I reached for Universal Consciousness over Journey in Satchidananda or Ptah, The El Daoud, arguably her two greatest albums and the ones I’ve spent the most time with. But I’ve seen them posted on Instagram and Reddit too many fucking times. Why does that matter? It shouldn’t! But, as you can tell by all the stuff I wrote about my panic attacks above, as much as I would like it to, rationality does not govern my world.
I’m glad to spend some time with Universal Consciousness, though. While it’s not as blissed out as the two aforementioned classics, I think it’s still a really strong album. Alice switches off between organ and harp for the entire album, which is wild because the two instruments are so different. Alice Coltrane was a virtuosic pianist, but something about the organ’s timbre really makes the less conventional notes she plays stick out. I’m not sure whether her playing is chromatic or modal or what, but the organ’s strange mechanical buzz is a stark contrast to how an acoustic piano sounds so human, how it’s wide dynamic range leaves a lot of space in the sound. But then when she switches over to the harp, it’s an equally strong contrast, but from the opposite direction. The harp lines are these gentle washes of color that sound so airy and ethereal. I actually don’t know much about the harp as an instrument. Are there strings for all the notes in the chromatic scale, or are they in a certain key like a harmonica? You don’t really hear people pluck out tunes on a harp; they just kind of spread these waves of swirling musical color that don’t sound, to me at least, like they have a tonal center.
I’ve spun Universal Consciousness a few times over the past few days, and I’m eager for more. It feels like the album is starting to open up for me in a way it hasn’t previously. I’m thankful I picked up this and all her other records before they were such hot commodities. My shelf worn copy still has a $12 price sticker on it, and I think I remember the weird little store in Greensboro where I bought it. Often it feels absurd to own thousands of records, but it feels perfectly sane and right at moments like this, when you pull an under-appreciated one off the shelf and discover it has way more to teach you.
Thanks for reading, everyone. And if you have any recommendations for soothing, quiet, and/or meditative music, please send them my way.