A Pirate('s Fan) Looks at Fifty

On September 2, 2022, I turned 50-years old.  As with most of my birthdays, but perhaps with some added urgency this year, I find myself wanting to reflect, to take stock, to consider all the blessings, tragedies and triumphs dotting the landscape of my five decades of life.


Over the years, I've started and stopped memoir projects several times.  It's not that I think the stuff of my life would be of particular interest to others.  Rather, it's more of a personal endeavor: a way to take stock of my life, to give some narrative to the grainy snapshots of memory, to process tragedies and celebrate joys.  In short, it's my way of trying to bring order to the chaos of life, to give a more formal structure to the random musings that make up my journal entries, social media posts and other random scribblings in various media.  To the degree I can understand my motivations, my goal is, if not to necessarily make my own life more interesting to myself, at least to make it more comprehensible.  These efforts at memoir often start out strong, but I always falter.  I lose steam.  I can't decide which memories to expand upon, what order to put them in, and which to let go of.  It feels like I am sometimes able to write about certain episodes with the creative zest for which I strive, but I can never seem to string them together into a narrative structure that flows to my satisfaction.  


Ranking high among the deepest joys of my life is music.  One of my favorite bands is U2.  Several years ago, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, Bono wrote an essay for Rolling Stone titled '60 Songs That Saved My Life.'  Evidently, he found the form of a playlist a helpful way to express himself in prose, as he's about to release a full length memoir titled 'Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.'  Inspired, I thought that this might be a helpful approach for another attempt at my own memoir.  I like the idea of hanging episodic reflections upon songs, and not so much worrying about stringing it all together into a seamless narrative.  Uncharitably, I might call this the  meme approach to writing.  Lists are ubiquitous on the Internet.  But, it's not like I'm trying to win any literary prizes here, and I am simultaneously drawn to the promise of discipline through structure, which might actually help me to stay on task, and the creative freedom of choice in picking the songs that most spur me to reflection. 


So, I'm going to give it a shot, with a slight alteration of the form.  Instead of picking 50 songs for 50 years, and writing about them all at once, I'm going to pick five songs from each year of my life, and write about them over the course of the upcoming year.  If I can manage to average one year per week, I will finish by the time I turn 51, on September 2, 2023.  I will look at songs that were either released or charted in each calendar year of my life, pick five, and briefly (or, maybe sometimes, not so briefly) expound upon both the year as a whole and each particular song through a combination of music and cultural criticism, memoir, reflection, poetry, psychological musing and outright nonsense.  Like everyone, my musical tastes change over time.  The songs I select won't necessarily be my favorite songs, either at the time, or now.  They won't always be what I think are the best songs, or the most popular or culturally relevant.  They will simply be the songs that speak to my  memory or inspire reflection at the particular time I'm considering them.  I'm not sure where it will all lead, or even if I will finish.  I'm a lot better at starting projects than I am at completing them.  


Writing helps me to clarify my thoughts.  It helps me to process experience.  It helps me to communicate complex feelings.  But, what I like most about writing, is when it leads to conversation.  I'd love to hear your thoughts.  

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