When I'm feeling low, sick, frightened, or a combination of the three as I am right now, I reach to the familiar and comfortable.  Right now, it's in the form of a movie/soundtrack that has been with me so long that it's like family.

#1- Harry Nilsson's "The Point" - The album itself is sublime and life-asserting but the animated movie is even more so.  How did Nilsson find inspiration for this simple but meaningful tale?  

"I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's a point to it.'" -- Harry Nilsson 

The tale features Oblio, who in a land of pointed head creatures, is pointless and wears a cap to conceal his pointless condition.  As a sidekick, he has a dog named Arrow who has a pointed head (remember the me and my Arrow song?  did you think it was just a car commercial?).  When Oblio defeats the Duke's son in a game called Triangle Toss wherein the players catch triangles on the points of their heads (but Oblio plays by having Arrow leap upon his head to catch the triangle with his point), the spoiled royal son complains to his father  and Oblio and Arrow are banished from this kingdom.  

The parable is a simple one but one the world's people as well as its leaders and would-be leaders can benefit from absorbing its message: Conformity is a hollow mistress and everything and everyone has a point and needs to be considered if not valued. We empathize with the little boy who finds points where he's told there are none, and concludes, "If everything has a point, well then I must have one, too."  One of my favorite lines in the score is from the Rock Man who, when questioned by Oblio over what he sees and the meaning of it all, declares "You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear."  I don't know if a greater truism has ever been spoken, particularly about politics and a populace swayed by pretty but ruthless wolf hunters and frightened of a powerful and smart black man.

Think About Your Troubles (for Lydieth)
- Harry Nilsson

Sit beside the breakfast table
Think about your troubles
Pour yourself a cup of tea
And think about the bubbles

You can take your teardrops
And drop them in a teacup
Take them down to the riverside
And throw them over the side
To be swept up by a current
And taken to the ocean
To be eaten by some
Who were eaten by some fishes
And swallowed by a whale
Who grew so old
He decomposed

He died and left his body
To the bottom of the ocean
Now everybody knows
That when a body decomposes
The basic elements
Are given back to the ocean

And the sea does what it oughta
And soon there's salty water
(That's not too good for drinking)
'Cause it tastes just like a teardrop
(So they run it through a filter)
And it comes out from a faucet
(And is poured into a teapot)
Which is just about to bubble

Now think about your troubles