A week after I made my own post-funereal memorial mix, I was already in possession of two new tunes that just cried out to be included. But them's the breaks; the CD was already burned. I'll go back some other time for an update. You can't spend all your time preparing for the inevitable. It only does some limited good, and oddly, it's boring after a while.

Primitive - Annie Lennox
Walk Home - Thomas Newman
Beacon Street - Nanci Griffith
I Don't Want To Know - Muki
Heaven Or Las Vegas - Cocteau Twins
Distant Sun - Crowded House
Zimbabwe - Toni Childs
Little Fluffy Clouds - The Orb
Missing - Everything But The Girl
Harry's Game - Clannad
She Sells Sanctuary - The Cult
F.E.A.R - Ian Brown
Wortspur - Laub
Gli Impermeabili - Paolo Conte
Breathe - Télépopmusik
Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennae - Godspeed You Black Emperor!
Requiem excerpt - Gabriel Faure
Makin' Happy - Crystal Waters

My preferences tended toward music that evoked various periods in my life thus far, some of them tunes I played quite a bit and would be familiar to people around me. A few have some coded messages, like "breathe" which might as well be a coaching session in overcoming grief, set to a techno beat. I'm not going to type out the words 'cause when I started to do that they looked really stupid. Techno has a way of making stupidity likably danceable. For the most part, they're fairly depressing, or at least moody, but that seemed fitting.

What really, really bugged me was that after I made my selections, I heard a car commercial in which "breathe" plays in the background. That makes two of my own picks that have also been used to hawk automobiles ("Little Fluffy Clouds" -- which I first adored ten years ago while living in Senegal -- was later bought up by Volkswagen for the early New Beetle campaign). I don't really have a huge beef with advertisers buying up huge tracts of music for the spurious cultural associations they typically use to sell their products... well, actually, I do have a problem with that. It just seems lazy. It is in this spirit that I intend to compose all the works on my next death mix myself. Anything less would be like admitting that I'm not better than a major automobile manufacturer.

On Friday we went with neighbors John and Sara over to Barbara & Jim's house for a pre-Christmas feast. Barbara had proposed that everyone should bring something creative and holiday-seasonal to share in coffeehouse style. Susan cooked up a huge pot of Tunisian couscous but declined the offer to be otherwise creative -- she's healthily obstinate that way. On the other hand, I felt mildly inspired, and spent a few hours preparing a story of a young woman who reflects on her life as a deprogrammed former cult member as the stresses of the holidays drive her closer to rejoining her cruel onetime guru on his isolated farm compound. I really liked the tale; it had the kind of circumscribed, practical kind of hope that is readily available in everyday life. Nothing grandiose, just the possibility that everyone will find a place where they fit in, even if it's in sad, destructive circumstances.

It wasn't until we all lolled out on the couches after dinner and everyone started sharing their creative endeavors that I began to feel I may have miscalculated the mood. People kept making reference to "peace, hope, and light" -- words which were apparently in the emailed invitation but which I'd somehow overlooked. They were in a genuinely inspirational mood with none of the qualifiers that I typically apply to positivity. I mean, I wasn't being recklessly ironic or anything, but the emotional tone of my contribution was starkly divergent from what others had prepared. I felt like I'd gut-punched a holiday caroler after mistaking him for a burglar.

I really do have a measure of appropriate spirit to apply to the season. For example, Susan and I broke out our shiny aluminum tree with it's Color Changing Light Wheel™ last night, which always puts me in a nice mood. This year we topped it with The God Without Followers, a gold, four-armed, antler-headed figure I made last year. Originally he was created to star in a photo-book, but technical limitations restricted the movement of his limbs, and he became more of a household God. I'd been meaning to make a little alter/shadow box for him, but I hadn't gotten around to it, so topping the tree seemed like a positive step in his career. We put a CD behind him to form a reflective aura, and I'd wager he could kick the ass of most treetop angels.