I’ve gotten a few emails in the last couple of days from users who state that they can no longer login to listen to the station. It appears Live365 has made some updates lately and this may be causing some issues. Not sure. I wanted to offer you an alternative. If you go to the Evening Melancholy Listen page, you can listen to the station commercial-free thanks to Radio Terra.com. Or go directly to Radio Terra.

Hope this helps!

I’m trying a little experiment here. Based on the stats given below, people love their internet porn. So I want to see how many hits I get on this blog post simply because of its title.

A few things really stood out to me on this. The most interesting stat is the one about Thanksgiving and Sunday. I guess it’s hard to sit in front of your computer monitor and pull your pud when you’ve got the entire family over. And Sunday? Who knows? It’s right before Monday, the most hated day of the week. You get all stressed out about having to go back to work the next day. Maybe you need a little self-love to tame the anxiety.

whenever I need to smile. The baby never disappoints.

In the past week, I have re-watched three films that practically eviscerate the stock image of happily married couples with well-adjusted children (Kramer vs Kramer, Revolutionary Road, and The Squid and the Whale), and I have had my 84 year old grandfather tell me that falling in love is a disease. The sights and sounds of this rampant pessimism compelled me to look at myself in the bathroom mirror and ask, “Why bother?”

There is nothing more discouraging than looking into the eyes of a man who has been worn down by years of prejudice, familial betrayal and physical decline and have him tell you, without a hint of hesitancy, that the one thing that should buoy us above the ugliness of life does nothing but cripple us further. “Falling in love is a disease”. It was like a five knuckle bowel buster right to the solar plexus. Ideally, I wanted to hear something like, “I’d do it all over again if I had the chance.” Or, “A lot of shit has come down the pike during my time and landed right on my lap. It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes it was almost too much to bear. But you know what sustained me? You know what got me through? Love. That’s it, my boy. A little dollop of that stuff and I felt invincible. Nothing could stop me.”

I don’t think of falling in love as a disease like cancer. Instead, it’s more like alcoholism. It’s a disease exacerbated by desire and repetition. You can free yourself from it every now and then. You can toss that monkey aside and feel like you will never look back. But it creeps back into your life without warning. It disguises itself as lust or friendship or temporary affection. Then, once it has latched onto its host, it quickly metastasizes and overtakes you before you have a chance to shake it loose. In short, it’s a real bitch. And like my grandfather told me, even when it’s gone, it’s not gone. In fact, sometimes the remnants of a failed love affair stay with you until your dying day.

And yet, like the alcoholic, I can’t stop myself. I know the overall consequence, but the fix is so good, I can’t walk away. I look back and realize how devastated I’ve been by love in the past, but it doesn’t matter. One more again, I say. One more again.

Perhaps the desire only fades when you find yourself sitting all alone in your room, having outlived all the rest, realizing that the ideal never materialized. My grandfather, like myself, is an admitted romantic. All his life he embraced the fallacy, the flowery sentiment of a love enduring and everlasting. Now, eighty-four years later, he concedes that it was all in vain.

I hear him and perhaps I know that I should heed his every word. But like I said, I too am a romantic. And I would like to believe that if I am fortunate enough to see the age of 84, I will be singing a different, lovelier tune.

Love is funny or it’s sad
Or it’s quiet or it’s mad
It’s a good thing or it’s bad
But beautiful

And I’m thinking if you were mine
I’d never let you go
And that would be
But beautiful, I know

I posted this on the Evening Melancholy Facebook page but wanted to include it here as well. I first heard this song while sitting in a darkened movie theater back in 1988. The movie was Biloxi Blues; the song was the frequently covered “How High the Moon.” I’d heard the song hundreds of times before seeing this movie and thousands of times since. Still, no version crumples me quite like this one. Absolutely stunning in it’s delicate sparseness and emotion.

If you’ve never seen the movie, check it out. It had a profound effect on me, even more so than the Neil Simon play on which it is based. Despite the twenty-plus years that have passed, this song has not lost a bit of its luster.

Ms. Suzuki is still with us. I hope she knows how much she is appreciated.