Laying The Ghost

I've been having conversations with a friend (who just happens to be studying neuroscience) about obsessions and OCD thought patterns. She said (and I'm paraphrasing from memory, badly) that OCD loops form when the brain feels like there is unfinished business, a task that has not been completed, so it keeps trying to circle back to the beginning and repeat the cycle until the message gets received that the task has been completed and it can move on.

My thoughts keep circling back to a particular period of 2006-2007, to the bands I loved then, and the crushes I had then. And recently, the problems and concerns that I faced back then have kept circling through my head, over and over, as if they happened last week, and not 6 or 7 years ago. In this terrifying, anxiety-ridden loop, I believe that this was truly the last time in my life that I felt that I had hopes, and dreams, and plans for the future. Which can't possibly be true! My brain is just stuck. Except there is unfinished business, there is something that my brain has never been able to file in its "completed" box.

I became completely obsessed with the unreleased album of another group I loved during the same period, wondering why it was never completed or released. This has suddenly hit me, that it's so obvious it feels like it's been staring me in the face. The missing album I'm obsessed with is not theirs, but mine own.

There are perfectly good reasons it's never come out. Endless line-up changes, personal dramas, at least 3 or 4 different record companies and by this point, several marriages and at least 2 kids. (I was invited to only 1 of those marriages. Of the others, one I found out the normal way these days, through social media; the other I found out about from reading an article on a music magazine website. That hurt, I can't pretend it didn't.) And yet there is this ghost I need to lay to rest, before I can move on and find peace.

I did a blog recently, where I listened to and wrote an entry about every song on every album that a musician of my acquaintance has released. It started as a kind of cheerleading exercise, to distract and encourage a friend who has cancer, while he was in hospital. But it ended with me, as the patient, being psychologically healed, through his music and my memories.

So I'm going to try to attempt to do the same thing with mine own great lost album, to dig up the stories and memories associated with these songs, as a way of exorcising my ghosts. This is not the big, high profile release we expected in 2008; there will be no fanfare. I can't even bring myself to finish the album artwork, though at the time we had an entire comic book for the lyrics planned. I don't even imagine anyone else still cares, possibly not even the other former members of the band. But this is something I have to do, for mine own peace of mind.

I'm going to blog all of the songs from The Universe From First Principles, the great Shimura Curves lost album, and post them for download one at a time. Nah, you won't have to pay, but if you feel the urge to throw some money at someone for the tracks, donate it here.