An overload of pain

I don't know why I put myself through such emotional circumstances, but I do.  I'm not even Catholic.  It probably has a lot (everything, really) with the fact that I'm drunk.  It's a vicious circle I throw myself into.  Drinking to forget what I do for a living, thinking about my Dad and  Brother, songs that remind me of them...  Throw in some memories of "Her" for good measure and I end up with a serious case of the blues.  So far there are only two songs that are guaranteed to make me cry like a baby.  Vince Gill's "Go Rest High On That Mountain" and Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run."  The former hit me a couple of years after my Dad died.  I was listening to it while standing in the upper parking lot of the daycare center I worked at.  The sun was on the western horizon, it was a warm day and I cried my guts out.  It was the beginning of dealing with the pain I had bottled up after my Father died.  I deal with pain of that order as if it were a time release capsule.  My first concern is taking care of others so I package everything I'm feeling and put it on a shelf to deal with it "later."  I'll then break open that package, break off a piece and deal with it.  I can only do it in that way otherwise I would go insane.   The thing is, I'm not breaking off big enough chunks.  Which is why I'm still dealing with that pain so long after.  As I've written about  previously, my level of grief got to the point where I had an alcohol fueled breakdown.  My mind was not capable of processing enough through the "time release" process and decided "Well, we have to save ourselves so, it's all coming out NOW."  I'm embarrassed of the things I admitted to my Mother but I'm glad those demons were expelled.  I had simply bottled up more grief than my mind was capable of handling and it all spilled out in one shot.  A more humiliating, yet liberating, feeling I will never experience. 

It just goes to show how important music is to us.  A song some dude wrote as  tribute to his late brother can make hundreds of thousands of other people feel the same way.  Songs that were recorded by a miraculous voice over 40 years ago, in mono two track no less (take that Britney!), can still make us cry just by hearing the intro... Music is important to us whether we realize it or not.