Dishwasher Blues

Mysterious high-pitched sound emanating from the dishwasher tonight. Always that worry. Built-in obsolescence. Has its time come? Is this the sound of the unrepairable? Is this the sound of incessant expenditure? Built-in obsolescence is what keeps the capitalist train going. It’s the coal we keep shoveling into the firebox to keep the locomotive chugging down the rails. Hopefully, the sound was an anomaly and will not appear next time. Not all sounds indicate looming disaster. Some sounds are pungent and a bit jumpy. And some sounds form patterns. These are the sounds we call music. Which is different. Always different. There’s that music that builds to something, that pulses, that throbs, that engorges with its own suspense, aims toward the summit of a mountain whose dimensions exist in the abstract, a theoretical Himalayas. And then does. Erupts. Releases its tension in a burst of fire. Ascends the heaven in the body of a creature holding a lightning bolt in its claws. And becomes luscious. And then there’s the music that glows inside its own questions, that tickles the stars, that rubs its belly on the bar and laughs at its image in the mirror, and goes home drunk in a taxi. Music that grows increasingly pliant and bends around corners looking for Xanadu. Music that forms spectrums of melody in a solid glass eye. All kinds of music. Sounds that are blessed by the melt of objective. And so by the grace of everything sublime become the best music of all, which is the silence between the stars.