Nothing Compares To You

 I don't know if you've heard the Chris Cornel cover of Nothing Compares To You.

But you should.

During my half-hour drive to take my eldest (now 10) son to swim, the song came on.

Tis a powerful rendition laddy. 

And me being the emotional sensitive guy I am, well you know, I had them feels.

The lyrics and the rendition brought back some pretty powerful memories of a break-up in my oh so sensitive twenties. One hard part was the realization of being rejected.

Now here's the thing, this ten year-old reading in the back is oh so sensitive, like his old man. And my job is to help him along in this world.

How does one teach about rejection? Minimize it by giving it context?: everyone will experience it; take the long view. Explain it away? Rationalize it? Embrace it some sort of Leibnizian best of all possible worlds/what doesn't kill us makes us stronger sort of way?

I cannot save him from rejection, even though I know his sensitivity will make it so damn powerful. I know he will look inside and...take it to heart.

I know this.
I feel this.

But dem feels, so powerful; so alive; so sensitive to the rejection but also the love.

Sensitive through and through.

"I can eat my dinner in a fancy restaurant..."

Commute, Cornell

My daily two-hour commute is just a fucking drag.

But let us add some key ingredients to, oh I don’t know, build character. 

        1.  Record heat in New England on Thursday 

By BOB SALSBERG, Associated Press

BOSTON (AP) — Heat records were burning up Thursday in cities in the Northeast as the region gets a summer preview.

The mercury reached 92 degrees in Boston shortly after noon Thursday, breaking the old record of 91 degrees for May 18 set in 1936, according to the National Weather Service.

2.  The AC in my near-200k-mileage car decided to just blow air sans all of that, oh I don’t know, cool, along with it. So I had to sweat like I was in a sauna for two hours yesterday and probably went closer to deaf from driving with the windows down.

Builds character, remember?

But, as I drove through the Bay state this morning up and onto the Braga Bridge where the sound of the pavement roared over the radio that was already up to 11, a beautiful thing happened: the very cool air from the water below filled the car along with the faintest whiff of salt, and for a minute I was one content commuter.

I’ll take a minute.

I don’t know a lot about Chris Cornell and I wasn’t a huge grunge fan from back in the day but I read some stuff about him over the years and knew that he suffered from depression and addiction. I also knew that he had talent, unadulterated, from-the-womb talent. 

So while not a huge fan and while it was hard to hear (please see above for reasons why windows were down), when the Providence rock station played a portion of his isolated vocal track to Black Hole Sun, I cried.

Build character, right?