At least once upon each December, I mentally exclaim, "wait, _____ put out Christmas music?!" This year, _____included Esquivel, Taken By Trees, and Marvin Gaye. This song was reworked into Pretty Little Baby, Gaye’s second Top-40 hit, and not released with its original snowy lyrics until 1992. I love the shimmery, low-fidelity piano here, but I have no idea what he's on about:
Drifting on air, without a care (Purple snowflakes) Cover the ground, without a sound (Love the snowflakes)
It’s probably drugs, though, right?
I’ve experimented a lot with (doctor-recommended) drugs this year. This February was the first time I got a prescription for anything other than birth control. After a good long while standing in front of the CVS counter, unsure of the protocol, I obtained a paper bag full of those orange pill bottles I’d seen in so many of my friends’ bedrooms and handbags.
That week, I wrote the following in an e-mail to my mum:
I’ve been a lot of different people over the past few seasons, much of that driven by medication. I’m feeling much more emergent flavour of today’s neurochemical soup than ghost in the machine. Through the window, snowflakes are shimmering in and out of a streetlight halo. I wonder if I perceive them more precisely than I would have last winter, having now seen more of ways that my perceptive machinery can be chemically reconfigured.