The happiest place of all

ever had anyone tell you to go to your happy place?

the first time i heard that, i was lying on the floor of a psychiatrist's office. it was 1996 and i had just had my first panic attack. i, naturally, thought i was dying or going to die or was for sure insane and might stay that way forever. the shrink told me, "think of your happy place. a place that makes you happier than any other place."

i thought of my grandparents house and immediately started bawling. they weren't even dead yet, but i loved them SO MUCH that the thought of them, and their house where i have always been my happiest, was too much to bear. like how some people describe their love for their children.

since then i've come up with a better happy place. i've found that my happiest place ever...is inside music. music takes me to a place that is perfect. it's in the middle of everything, nothing touches the ground there, and yet i don't float up and up indeterminately either. the wall of sound creates the ultimate womb. all beauty and floaty and lovely and free and smooth all the time. completely separate from everything that sucks in every way.

so then i was thinking, if music is my happy place, and our personal ideas of heaven or hell could very well be where we end up in the afterlife, then after i die, i will go live inside a song.

it will probably be a sonic youth song. or the beginning of devo's "come back jonny."