I wasn’t home much this weekend, but when I was I had music blasting.  Between that and my Ipod and my car stereo, I was immersed in music for nearly three days straight.  Sometimes that kind of exposure to music does nothing to me. Other times, it’s like being struck with a tuning fork.  My perceptions shift and I walk around completely disoriented.

When I was younger, this happened to me constantly.  In high school, a friend of mine started talking to me after I had been listening to a favorite album, and I could barely keep up with the conversation; I felt like I was moving underwater. That’s because music is completely astonishing at that age. It rips you open and pumps you full of colors and textures. You’re too young and stupid to know that these sensations are heightened by your age, because you’re young and stupid.  You think it’ll always affect you that way.  But it’s like building up a tolerance to alcohol.  As you get older, music loses some of its power.  It becomes less visceral and immediate.  You’ve heard it all before.

I interned at a PR agency in college.  I remember a guy in his 30s talking to another guy, saying how addicted he was to music as a kid.  He said, “Now I hardly listen to it.” I always wondered if I’d grow up to become that guy.

Now that I’m his age, I realize that I have and I haven’t.  Because I don’t always react to music; sometimes I even work at home in silence.  When I listen to it, it doesn’t always seem new and fresh.  Sometimes it’s just white noise.  But given the right confluence of time, songs, and mood, I’m thunderstruck all over again.  Yesterday someone asked me if I was sleepy. But I was just reeling from the impact of all the songs I had heard over the past 72 hours.  I was mulling over their internal logic.  I was fixating on their unique calculus.  I was blinking away their afterimage.  I tried to explain all this, but ended up just smiling and saying “Sure,” which was about the best I could manage while moving underwater.