I played a few songs religiously on the way to work, early in the morning, forming poems in my freed-up brain, about fat-capped moons, and crows in traffic, or about women reaching for the milk with uber-elegant limbs, living lives so leisurely and grand in comparison to my two job, overflowing one, a thin band of permanent headache across my forehead.  I'm not a morning person, but I appreciate all the poet's thoughts that come with morning.  Reg Saner says something about the early moon meaning something.  I spent all my drive to work to drag this out of my memory but it stayed recessed.

            Those songs sustained me over and over during my short commute to the administrative assistant job where I double and triple tasked all day long from Xcel, to explaining policies, note taking at meetings (notes which I'd have to decipher between personal poems in the margins and the hurried minutes I scrawled in bad handwriting), then back to different kinds of policy explanations.  This was the dream job I fought thousands to get.  Even dream jobs can take the brain through an obstacle course where the ending chore is to jump into a vat of mashed potatos.  Humans simply aren't supposed to triple and quadruple task.  The brain fatigue by the end of the day rendered me a slobbering zombie, who knew how to cook polenta and could down a bottle of wine in a haze of fatigue. 

            The first morning song that sustained my commute was Tie Up My Hands by Starsailor where the main line is sung by an Emo, 80s waver voice, "So I turn to you and I say, Thank Goodness for the good souls that make life better, If it wasn't for the good souls, life would not matter."  Swimming up-stream, I was lucky there were plenty of these good souls.  This song reminded me to treasure and cling to good natures,  to hang onto niceties, because I had previous jobs that were devoid of such people.  In fact, I would say that some past jobs I was lucky to survive with both my eye balls intact. At a cubicle job in finance, I came in smiling, saying things like "Good morning," or "How are you?"  The looks I got were either of contempt or murderous, where I traced back my steps to make sure I hadn't just said, "F*** you," or "This is your last day on earth." 

            The good souls at work were the faces that I knew to have equally overcrowded brains.  All of my job environs had been over-burdening up to my administrative assistant job, but many also had that nice layer of caustic lava that erodes.  I was lucky for the good souls.  

            Many jobs in my late twenties, early thirties at least gave me an appreciation for the next, better one.  Babysitter, night-busser-turned-waitress, Crabtree & Evelyn key-holder-then-Manager, CP Shades natural clothing pusher, student, bookseller, Literary Events coordinator-while student (another miraculous job where I responded to an ad asking for a "poet"), babysitter-while-student,  administrative assistant while student then while teacher. I babysat both children, and teens, and moved to New Jersey, Berlin, then back to Colorado, living with different examples of where things belonged in which closet, whether we were eating cold-cuts and rye bread for dinner or grilled lamb burgers.  I had the rare view of lives that I could model mine after, other examples away from my parents.  Some ways I combined, some I discarded.  My kids, if I have them, will have to work for every shred of allowance they receive.  They'll also learn the skills of sleeping alone. 

             The other song I couldn't live without hearing on the way to work, on those heavy Linden filled, misty, Spring Colorado mornings, was the ultimate "I'm okay, and I love life," song: Positivity by Suede, "And the morning is for you, and the air is free, and the birds sing for you and your positivity."  The over-the-top, eighties tinged grandness of Suede, mixed with the incoming wildflowers edging my neighbors' lawns, lended my car a capsule of cool, some transition station between dreaminess, a creative slug brain and the triple tasked, drained one.  Off the record, I called myself an information specialist.  It took my brain to a level I didn't know I had.  I ordered meals for meetings, keeping details in my brain like who takes cream, who drinks both coffee and tea.  Who doesn't eat nuts. I should have used lists more often. 

            I hear music is being used as therapy.  On this particular morning where I remember these songs, I know I was self medicating.  After this long life of "Go-go-go-go-go-go-go!" I have to remember the songs that carved out chunks of brain space.  During the song, I knew myself and words flowed from all kinds of creative synapsis.  I crafted  poems about Pergolesi, or salad packets I'd purchased in Berlin and had been hoarding; the uselessness that hoarding renders things. These songs saw me through the last two jobs which allowed me to acquire my Masters in Creative Writing (very late in life.)  

            This  life after brain fugue is a combination of lightness where I am doing something that comes naturally to me (teaching and writing) and the strange feeling that I should be doing four other actions all at once.  In this new life, where I have the degree, the teaching job and the writing job, I order a coffee around the corner and realize while the gal swirls the top of my latte, oh yeah.  This is my coffee.  I am grateful for the good souls who have brought me to this place.  Here's a shout out to them now. 

          I hope for them the same predicament, where they feel this lightness, and the strange feeling where they should be engaged in too many activities, then the dissipation of that compulsion to enjoy the swirl on a cup of coffee.  Where they apply their expertise and feel themselves slow down and shed that triple tasking brain.  I invite them now to my dining room table and ask if they take cream.