Pearl Jam 20

15 years ago or so I was victim to some of my first CD thefts, The CDs in question were from the complete and massive Pearl Jam related CDs, and the thief was my younger sister.  This, it turns out, would be the last gift I would bestow upon my sister, as I would soon disappear into the night and upon the world.  It is entirely appropriate that she took from me my most prized musical lessons as I had stolen songs through my older sisters wall at night.  The Police, Pink Floyd, Tori Amos, Phantom of the Opera, I had favorites from each cassette tape.  I took those songs with me as I ventured out into the world, and I hope that Meghan, my younger sister, garnished something from those Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone, Temple of the Dog, and Green River CDs. 

I always felt some connection to Andrew Wood, even though intellectually it's unfair, ridiculous, and delusional to think I could be like anything like some random NWern junkie musician who died before I was truly sentient, but there it was, since the first time I heard his voice, an understanding, a kinsmenship.  After many years of experience, music, life, laughter, sadness, jokes, tragedies, I have learned more about why I felt that connection from such a young age - it bellies on the type of sadness we perceive in the world because it is inside us so prevalently.  It's a quiet anger and sadness that comes with simply being human and living in a world that requires constant drastic change to be faced by the babes that we humans are.  When such emotions are the ones currently bubbling up, often they lead to resolutions of change and compassion.  These things are often corralled and shaped into laughter, experiments, ideas, and exuberant efforts.  These are the things that make our kind of man jesters, and crazed white-hair wizards at different times of the day.  The difference between us, I suppose, couldn't be greater.  We are from different times, we had vastly different lives, I live on and he does not.  We are no where near the same, and yet, still, I feel a connection.  Is this the power of his music?  His gift?  Certainly in part.  I think more likely it's just the kinsmenship we all share, all feel at some point.  It's that moment when your brain syncs up with someone else's soul and you realize what it is to be human, at least to be a human like you.  They say, after studying the human body and all the neural pathways that we likely don't have genetic memory to pass on to the generations after us.  I think technology, one of the oldest being music, has changed that fact.