Chill Chaser
There’s little in this life more grounding, more satisfying than being genuinely surprised. Whether it’s a friend bringing you a cake or one of your favorite dinners on your birthday, or if it’s connecting with someone you always thought of only as an acquaintance, these moments are when we’re brought back down from whatever hang-ups we’ve been dangling from. We stop worrying about how much we should talk to or what we should say to that girl we went out with last week. We don’t think about what’s socially acceptable, awkward or annoying. We just stop. We’re in the moment. We suck it in, feel it in the way that back part of our brain shuts down, and, for a second, stop believing in futures and pasts and how to handle ourselves. In these moments we live, without thinking, without analyzing. We get lost somehow in time.
For me these flashes come the most often in media. In the exciting new way a band you just started listening to clicks somewhere inside of you and you have that first definitive listen–that lightbulb listen–where it all makes some kind of abstract sense. It comes in the smiles hidden inside lush cinematography; the surprising way the most stark and desperate movie scenes come out beautiful; the joy you feel in being so thoroughly manipulated by the screen. I’m a film buff, and even though in the past couple years I’ve been slipping due to school work or life work or whatever else, I still consider myself one in the way I insist on treading through an artist’s work in chronological order, the way I start to feel like I know them through the way they blend beauty and sadness, cacophony and grace, or just simple heart-on-their-sleeve honesty. Music, film, television, I look for these things in all of it, in everything. They’re there, in the scratching of a mellotron and that extra look a director lingers on in that final scene.
These are all surprises, getting so lost in something, being so enamored that you connect with it in more than just an artist-audience dynamic. These artists, musicians, directors, whatever become your friends (no matter how cheesy that sounds). You’re on the same page with them, maybe only for 60 or 90 minutes, as long as an album spins or a projector burns. You’re connected to something. You’re not alone.
That chill you feel when you’re watching a scene that gets everything right, the shiver that trails across your shoulder blades, up your neck and down your arms, the tingling in your fingertips when you realize you’ve lost yourself in sound…there’s really nothing else like it in this world. Those chills are you being so touched by something that your body reacts without you telling it to. They tell of a divine connection to something invisible. A physical manifestation of something completely unearthly and internal. They’re a bridge to some kind of assurance, one we can see but can’t yet cross, a surreal walk down breezy backstreets in perfect weather. They’re feel, the very essence of life itself.
And, Aahh… It’s so good…
My name is Mike, and I’m a chill addict.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 7:59 pm and is filed under creative nonfiction, film, music, television, whatever else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
