For a long time, I've been terrified of death.

Ever since I was a kid, actually; I distinctly remember laying in bed one night (I was probably around 8 or 9) and trying to imagine what it would feel like to be dead. It was pitch black in the room, and I just lay there, slowly trying to feel less and less until, for a split second or two, I felt nothing. Past numb, past anything. Just nothing. That feeling terrified me for months, years really.

It's still minorly crippling at times; there are moments (and they rarely last longer than a few seconds) when I make Woody Allen seem like Jim Breuer in Half Baked. I call it temporary neurosis, and it's kind of fun, in that "I wish I could curl up in a ball and cry" kind of way. It's strange, because I logically realize how ridiculous it is, and my reasoning is thus: if there is an afterlife, then there's not really anything to worry about; if there isn't, if there's just oblivion (which is more my belief), then it makes even less sense to fear or worry about it, as it's just a waste of the very little time we have here. But logic has this way of not interfering with the dark recesses of the mind, and so I get small moments of this vertigo of depression, though I rarely end up depressed at the end of them. Weird, huh?

So how am I going to tie this into music? Simple: I think this has a lot to do with why I am involved in music. Not why I play it; I play for those moments all musicians know, the ones where everything clicks and all is suddenly right in the world. But why I record music, why I started the label, this zine: maybe it's an attempt to leave something behind, some mark that I've been here. I mean, I know I'm not going to cure cancer or end world hunger or war or anything like that. But I can do this, and though it may not be much, it is something, and something I'm pretty happy to be a part of.

I guess the point is this: whatever you believe, you only have a set amount of time in this world. Make sure you do with it the most you can.

-todd

Postscript: I would be remiss if I didn't in some way remember or eulogize Johnny Cash. I don't have the words to sum up how I felt about the Man in Black; besides, you've heard it a million times in the last couple of weeks. All I'll say is I feel, like many of you, that we've lost beauty.