Music Is Dangerous

I can't listen to music all the time. Maybe because when I really like it, it distracts me out of my normal life and everything goes to hell.

For example. I put on some music and go do some boring housework, because while I think of myself as a writer, most of the time I am someone's unpaid maid and babysitter (AKA wife and mother). So I have all this bullshit to attend to, like buying groceries and ironing and cleaning shit and making sure people eat proper meals and it's not terrible, but it's constant enough to be dull. Also, I'm not very good at it.

With music, I can pretend this tedium is not happening to me. Tune out the checkout line or the gross build-up bathtub ring or how my kid eats fruit like a goddamn locust. 

But then I get all dreamy and stupid. Like the concept of time is gone, and I'm thinking about ideas and memories and voices from nowhere come at me. I'll get some idea of what could happen next in my book. Or a new idea entirely. And I'll go back to my writing and fall into it, like it's a bed and I've been on the road for 24 hours.

Except that doesn't work when you are someone's mother. And when you're supposed to make dinner or drive to swim practice or whatever. You can't be a dreamy, unreasonable slave to your lunatic ideas. 

I never know what'll set it off. Some corny-ass country song and BAM! I'm like the dude in The Manchurian Candidate, all programmed to shuck off my normal life and fall into some other fantastical agenda. Music is dangerous, man. Stick to podcasts for when shit needs to get done.