Dreams and nightmares

In the rainy months of the year where I grew up, the skies would go grey. I grew up outside the city where there were an abundance of farms and washed out riverbeds. I had a babysitter who consistently wore her headphones and trance herself when she came over.

One day she had left her cassette player out after she had left, apparently forgotten. I took the cassette player and went for a ride down by the old washed out riverbed where there was the smell of stagnant water and withering old trees that seemed to scratch at the clouds for sun to be alive again. It was 1980 on a very cloudy day (one of my favorites to be outside in) with the threat of rain. I put on the headphones and pressed play. The music was the soundtrack to the scenes before me; grey, threatening rain and the slow movement of water and wind. Hauntingly the cassette player whirred the sounds of Faith/Carnage Visors.

I walked around as the music seemed to orchestrate my every step. Primary was reminding me that school would be back again in two days time as it was a Friday late afternoon. All Cats are Grey seemed to linger in the sky and The Hanging Garden was the forest of trees around me waiting to die. After Faith, the cassette flipped over to the b side and all went numb. Carnage Visors filled my head with dreams and nightmares while awake. As I walked back to my bike and got on, the world seemed to be at my every whim and I felt I had control to hold back the fighting to fall rain and have the wind push me home. Since then I had found myself buying every single album on the release date in every format, every book, every photograph kept in a trunk over the years to commemorate my journey. Kept every ticket stub from every concert I have seen live. Photo albums of my journey through the cure in a handmade pine chest that I continue to fill.

The Cure's music has been the soundtrack to my life, the score to the landscapes I have seen and the essence of how my heart beats. The Cure's lyrics have always been poignant and exhilarating to my brain and the things that I have experienced. Not as a drug but as the blood of who I have become as a person. This journey I have been on for the last 28 years of my life with this band has no regrets and never will - save one - I have never been able to meet Robert Smith in person if even just to shake his hand and simply say THANK YOU. They remain my favorite band for all occasions, moods, weather and things that happen in my life and will continue to do so. The Cure to me is magic, it is love and it is life. Today is April 21st 2008 and another Happy Birthday to Robert Smith - may it be the best one you have had yet.

(From: Brian Whitmore - whereabouts: unknown)