I love the Nine Inch Nails song Right Where It Belongs from With Teeth, and I especially enjoy all of the remixes on the NIN website.  I don’t know if you like their music, but it’s a great place to check out some NIN for free. And to download remixes – some done by Trent Himself. You only need to register to download the remixes and put them into your iTunes. I have well over 100 downloaded remixes.

Maybe we can get Metallica to do the same thing now that Kirk’s got a PS3 and downloaded Death Magnetic off the internet.

I like the lyric image of caged animals and confusion over who’s in and who’s out of the cage. Don’t throw me in the Briar Patch! There’s something beautiful in the music that is almost post-coital in the bliss and sense of completeness and a lack of desire for motion or change. Comfortably Numb. I get that same feeling from Kashmir, and Listening to You from Tommy, and Annie Lenox’s The Gift. Some epiphany has been experienced and consciousness has been blasted, sanded, and smoothed. Broken, blown, burned. Even if the epiphany is that I am completely confused and everything I thought I knew was wrong.

For someone who takes such pride in knowledge, why is this feeling so appealing to me?

I don’t have a non-flattering answer to that. And I’m dubious of the flattering ones. But I grapple with meaning and purpose in life. I don’t believe in a creator, so any purpose in life is one that we make. And any systematic knowledge we gain is fraught with uncertainty – capable of being rendered incorrect by a new fact. I am Ozymandias.

I deal with my failure to gain all of the knowledge and understanding I desire by embracing the opposite. Hello Shadow. I deal with my failure to communicate the knowledge I have by letting the Poet of Ecclesiastes possess me. “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.”

Then I sleep, have some coffee, crank some Hendrix or Zeppelin and see if I can’t get it right after all.

And sometimes you just have to say “frack you” to the void. Ride that bitch til she bleeds.

NIN, is there anything they can’t cure?