Anhedonia

I don't listen to music the way I used to.

Who does?

I mean, nobody has the same relationship with music as an adult that they did has a teenager. I'm not saying that I don't appreciate music in middle age. I do! I listen to music all the time. The celestial jukebox is never far away and the cloud shoots old favorites and new releases through the ether to a bluetooth speaker at the press of a button. I have tunes playing most of the time, but I never actually listen to the songs the same way I did when I was 13, when the rhythm and the melody would charge up my body like a goddamn solar battery. I would pore through liner notes and memorize lyrics, staring at the words until they no longer made sense (which meant, of course, that they made perfect sense).

Now, it's all background noise. enjoyable, but not particularly noticeable.

I don't turn to music when I need to feel things. And most days, that is just fine. I'm a grown ass man, with no time to sit in the dark with my headphones on, rocking out with no one else around.