Killing Time Can Be Therapeutic

I have a new love in my life. And it’s a killer! (Actu­ally, it’s the band “The Killers.”)

I love their music. I just recently pur­chased their CDs “Hot Fuss” and “Sam’s Town.” And I think I’ve played them, oh, about 20–30 times now. These two CDs are rock­ing! Great music, great lyrics, and yes, great drum­ming, too.

(Ron­nie Van­nucci, Jr. is a pretty solid drum­mer in my books. I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by drum­mers who can whip up a storm on such small kits. Buddy Rich is one of them. Ron­nie is def­i­nitely another.)

Since I was a U2 and The Smiths fan when I was a teenager (I still am!), you can be cer­tain that it was easy for me to fall in love with the Killers, whose musi­cal influ­ences include Mor­ris­sey and U2, among others.

I don’t really lis­ten to music when I write copy, but I do when I’m work­ing on my com­puter doing other stuff. For exam­ple, when I browse the web, answer emails, con­duct research, etc, I like to have music play­ing in the background.

I don’t have any music when I write copy because some­times the music is so engross­ing, it takes my focus away from my writ­ing. (I pre­fer peace and quiet when I write. Or I sim­ply lis­ten to clas­si­cal music — prefer­ably Baroque.)

Any­way, songs from The Killers I love are Mr. Bright­side, Some­body Told Me, Smile Like You Mean It (from “Hot Fuss”), and When You Were Young, Bones, and Read My Mind (from “Sam’s Town”). Bril­liant pieces of music. I tend to hum or sing along when they play, too.

The Killers are com­ing to Toronto and Mon­treal next month, but most of the seats are sold out, unfor­tu­nately. Too bad. I was going to bring the entire fam­ily, since our teenage kids are Killers’ fans, too.

Speak­ing of shows, last night Sylvie and I went to see John Pinette’s show, “I Say Nay Nay!” in Ottawa at the National Arts Cen­tre. We were in stitches all evening! (My jaw is still hurt­ing from laugh­ing so darn much.)

His show was fan­tas­tic. It was joke after joke. Non-​​stop com­edy, from begin­ning to end. (Hence, the hurt­ing jaw­bones and chest pains from pulled mus­cles caused by uncon­trol­lable bouts of laughter.)

The man is incred­i­bly funny. If you ever get a chance to see John, even if it’s on DVD, do it. What we loved the most about John is that you can sense his com­edy was borne out of per­sonal experience.

Sylvie and I imme­di­ately detected (and it’s only a guess) that John doesn’t vocal­ize his per­sonal frus­tra­tions and griev­ances much, so com­edy is an out­let for him to make fun at the very things he’s deeply annoyed with.

From deal­ing with pushy and con­trol­ling peo­ple (mostly his fam­ily), to his many embarass­ing moments (which is where “nay nay” comes from), we inti­mately knew what he was talk­ing about!

(Lis­ten­ing to music, and par­tic­u­larly play­ing the drums, are my out­lets for let­ting my frus­tra­tions out. Some peo­ple work out at the gym or hit a punch­ing bag. I hit “the skins” and chan­nel some of the neg­a­tive energy with music and through play­ing drums.)

But John is a bril­liant come­dian. After arriv­ing in Canada to do a series of shows across the coun­try, he cre­ated a good part of his mate­r­ial, almost on the spot, based on new (and less than enjoy­able) experiences.

Any­way, all this to say that, if you ever feel stressed out, burned out, frus­trated, angry, annoyed, or dejected, don’t dis­count the power of going to see a show — whether it’s shows, com­edy, con­certs, danc­ing, or live music, includ­ing karaoke (yup, I do this from time to time, too).

It’s hard to describe just how ther­a­peu­tic this can be.

About the Author

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