About

I’ve spent so much of my life in “musical” cities. Detroit, Los Angeles, Boston, Memphis, Seattle, and New Orleans seem like the big, obvious ones at first glance. But it’s the ones in between where the seeds are planted. Musical cities are grow lamps for the soul.

What’s my story? Everybody has one, right?

Like Sri Ramakrishna quipped (or maybe “quipped” isn’t quite the right word), we’re all just salt dolls sent out to measure the depth of the ocean. And you don’t need to drink more than a spoonful to figure out the whole thing is salty. Good thing, too, since our little buckets don’t hold all that much water. No matter where we kneel on the shore and dip our bucket, no matter what we call it out there and then when it’s in our bucket, no matter what the shrines we build there look like and who we think is right enough to get in, we’re all drinking the same Kool-Aid, ultimately. When we drink from the source, that is. Anything else is like decaffeinated coffee – brown disappointment water. But what we do on the shore doesn’t really matter in the long run. Because once we get out into the sea, and I don’t mean just a pinky-toe at the edge of the surf, or a brief jump off the boat for a cooling swim, but when you’re out up to your chest and can just feel the sand under your toes. That’s when it happens. You start to melt. Your salt and the salt in the ocean aren’t separate salinities trapped in different decorative shakers. Together, you and the sea are the record player capable of playing a record that contains the frequencies to disintegrate the record player. You never get more than one chance to make a first (or last) impression. You’re traveling at the speed of now. Nothing to prove and all night long to do it in.

© 2010 – 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.