Oh Death Up Yours !

Last week's AAP posting was already pre-loaded and ready to go when I read the news that Poly Styrene had died. Truth be told, it had been a long time since I listened to some (or even thought much about) X-Ray Spex, but it is still sad to see yet another punk rock icon shuffle off this mortal coil at what I now perceive as such such a young age... adding yet another name to the list of dead Punks.

Now, I don't specifically wish ill-health or death on anyone really, but it does strike me as unfair, on a nearly cosmic level, that Johnny, Joey AND DeeDee are all dead, but every member of the Eagles is still alive and well... Where, I ask you, is the justice in that? The list goes on of course. Anyone who is a reader of AAP probably already knows the roll call so there is no need really to run it all down again here. I think we all remember where we were when we found out that Joe Strummer had died etc.

Of course AAP does have some mail/questions we could answer this week, but I think all I want to do today is think about how impermanent everything is... and if that sounds a bit heavy on the Buddhist, my apologies. As I try to picture my long-gone record collection from those days, I'm trying to think of who might die next -- someone whose music moved my head and soul in new and unexpected directions "way back when" ...even if I haven't heard/played a note of their stuff for a decade or so... and that, of course, makes me think of actual friends, acquaintances and etc who influenced me (in ways both good and bad) over the course of my life who are now also lost to time and space and...did I mention time? As we get older we can't help it - we spend more time 'looking back' than is sometimes healthy for us... In my case it isn't so much a lament for long-lost youth (although, admittedly there is some of that - especially when I find myself searching for my newly mandatory reading glasses) ...I'm mostly wrestling with the "What, if anything, did it all mean?" questions. I'm not coming up with any skull-ringing answers yet.

So that is the column for this week. Now I'm going to dig through my iTunes, play some old music and (more importantly) go through my phonebook and call up some old friends.