Does this need me?
On jazz and broken jaws
Lately I’ve been thinking of this room that I have never been in, the church on East 30th Street in Manhattan. The altar and pews were long gone and microphones and speakers had taken their place. The pulpit was made into a control booth and miles of cable stretched across the floor like snakes. The sixty foot ceiling was lost in space. When you stepped on the wood floor it would groan and creak. When you would speak in a normal voice to someone sitting near the wall, the dryness of the plaster would take the sound away until it was returned to you, warmer. It all smelled like old wood and warm vacuum tubes and of the slightly sweet, chemical taste of tape on tape heads. Maybe. I have never been to Manhattan.
On March 2, 1959, Miles Davis arrived with a set of scales and forms and handed each of the six jazz musicians a sheet of paper with basic instructions for playing the music. There was no rehearsal and he paid each of the six sidemen $64.67.
Pianist Bill Evans described the session as a Japanese ink painting, with one brush stroke on rice paper, no errors. He also noted that the music was all new, the band had not played these tunes before. Drummer Jimmy Cobb recalled it as “It just another recording date. I didn’t know if it was Kind of Blue or Kind of Green.”
Music filled the air, but music don’t care, it just needed them to play, and every article you’ve ever read about overthinking, ends the same way.
The advice is literally more thinking to solve more thinking
Schedule your worry time
Label the thought
Ground yourself in 5 things you can see
Set a decision deadline
Just start
Just do it
Their advice is literally more thinking to solve more thinking.
You’ve probably given them all a go. Setting worry windows, thought labels, grounding exercises... which one managed a week without being ditched?
73% of people in the 25-35 age group call themselves overthinkers and by the time we reach 65 that number increases to 20%. It’s a puny season! Not your spine. But a long enough season can become your spine — one of many spines upon which billion dollar industries are actively building cathedrals of “info-products” and “educational courses” to sell to the inundated to make sure they stay that way. I’ve seen this first hand because I ghostwrite for a living and I’ve been in the marketing streets for the last 6 years and FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) is the hottest marketing strategy in Kali Yuga. The industry definitely knows the art of gaslighting you but definitely not the science of how beliefs change.
The rehearsal never stops
I’ve tried all the jazz. All the courses. Still do. I love courses. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest and my curiosity has an unquenchable devotion for knowledge.
But when that curiosity, that devotion is not directed, the rehearsal part of my mind is running three conversations I’ll never have. My jaw is tight from gripping words I’m not saying. The lockbox part of my brain is touching an old bruise, not to try and heal it, but just to confirm I still have it. The bookshelf part has a full length essay, the most gangster essay I’ve ever written that’s not written down anywhere, and counts it as progress. And the judge — oh, the judge — who has been scrolling at 1:58 am on a blue screen burning away in a dark room, thinking about someone else, probably who created another dope workflow with AI and made a bazillion dollars, reading an article from a founder who is overthinking from “AI stress.” And I’m here prompting, re-prompting, burning tokens and API credits while watching the output of the model degrade with each iteration of the noise I’m feeding it — the same noise I feed myself. The words I don’t say harden into the bruise. The bruise composes the essay I won’t write. The unwritten essay becomes the comparison. The comparison rehearses itself into my jaw, and the jaw tightens around the next words I won’t say. Each pass lays a wire. Each wire pulls tighter. Each pull I feel it less.
My jaw is tight. I don’t remember when it started.
My house was wired for conflict and anger. I grew up watching my family fight and shout at each other all the time. I imbibed all of it and did the same with my mother when she came back from work at night as my uncle did with my grandparents during the day when I came back from school. This went on for a long time. My only coping mechanism at the time was to lock myself in my room and blast heavy metal through my earphones on my Philips MP3 player/pen drive — essentially, replace unpleasant loud noises with pleasant loud noises — even in silence I would hear the arguments and criticisms, my mind was always roaring and rehearsing like when Professor X used the Cerebro for the first time so the guys over at Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold, Nirvana and Lamb of God really came in clutch.
Before I devotedly performed deprogramming rituals on myself and became a magician, fear, uncertainty and doubt were wired in me from a young age and I spent my days in blood boil and mental diarrhea.
The only way to tame a noisy mind is to liberate it
4 years ago, I cracked my lower jaw in 3 beautiful ways while playing basketball in college.
Right outside the restricted area, my lower mandible kissed the concrete and there was no need to think or decide – I just knew, my chin knew, instantly. However, to the people around me, I was simply bleeding from a source unknown and the medical professionals went on to wipe the blood off my hands for the next 40 minutes until my friend, god bless him, finally got a pen and a tissue. Somehow, of all the faces staring at the scene in the medical room, he was the only one who could decode my repeated handwriting gestures. With blood dripping on this holy tissue, I wrote “My jaw is broken” and that’s how the plan to get me to a hospital finally started to logisticate.
Next thing is I’m sleeping my way into surgery and waking up to metal hooks laced through the upper and lower rows of my teeth.
Those metal hooks, laced through my teeth, shredding the insides of my lips into eternity, smoothies strained through the wire for breakfast, soup slipped through the wire for dinner. In a way, the three beautiful cracks tamed the noisy mind, rather helped me see that the only way to “tame” the noisy mind was to liberate it.
Not through meditation, willpower, discipline or 432Hz meditation tracks. Through the wire, I saw that no matter what life situation you’re in, you have the choice to either react compulsively, or respond consciously to it. All it takes is one conscious response that reframes all your compulsive reactions of wounds you acquired, into a willingness one has the divine ability to exercise limitlessly. Then people wonder whether you’re a wizard or just weird, but this is something every child learned before they turned 13 and it’s encoded in every cell of your body because some of those children are your sexy ancestors.
The world is changing at an alarming rate, often in ways that are both profoundly dramatic and profoundly subtle. The first crunchy bite of an apple doesn’t crunch the way it used to.
The noise had kept me safe once. I was young and scared and didn’t know where to turn. Now the anxiety is my background noise of not burning enough tokens and exhausting session limits on Claude. This anxiety is the message, the body telling you something about your experience. But it’s so easy to confuse yourself with an emotion that generated from within when you are programmed to communicate emotion as “I am anxious, I am sad, I am ...” It’s so easy to confuse yourself with emotion because emotion moves slower compared to the speedy thought. One’s mind becomes one-pointed when a thought or feeling is emotionalized. “I am anxious” on repeat for a decade is a record you play over and over like it’s a Eminem and Akon record or a Taylor Swift record — depending upon your willingness to woundedness ratio. And a record played long enough stops sounding like a warning. It starts sounding like you. I remember listening to “Through the Wire” through the wire, being so emotionalized for what a record could show me.
Maybe you’ve had a version of this. Not a messed up jaw like Kanye. More like a moment when you heard the record of your life while inhaling and noticed the compulsion, the pattern, the context rot when you dumped everything about yourself in your AI agent with an exhale.
Noticing this pattern, marked the start of a new, and death of an old pattern. New information on the mechanisms of these patterns and compulsions started materializing into my life. Opportunities revealed themselves. Randomness turned into laws I haven’t yet discovered. My fake friends disappeared and reappeared after my bounce back from the injury. The simple act of looking magically unlocks pattern recognition, and it’s what tech bros call “taste” because the one thing AI can’t do is look and feel and life around like a life.
Davis chose the constraint. I had it forced upon me. Davis’ was a matter of conscious choice. Mine was a matter of accident which was a result of a compulsive choice of contesting a layup.
The writing demanded more of me than my doubt did
I still practice. Catch myself rehearsing. A conversation from last week. A paragraph I haven’t written. My jaw gets stiff and clicky.
I guess I’m supposed to tie this all up neatly. But I just caught myself packaging this essay into a redemptive arc that resolves neatly and provides a sense of closure, I suppose, and somehow it became performance therapy for all the overthinking that occurred while attempting to write it.
In the end, what really matters is if you could see the invisible wire and rebuild neural pathways in your sexy brain.
Six months after my jaw healed, I posted my first essay as a part of a stupid college assignment. My jaw tightened around the word publish. It’s a reflex at this point. Nobody read it. I wrote the second and the third and fourth and fifth. But then I convinced myself they’re terrible and deleted them 2 weeks later. But I just kept coming back to writing, because the writing demanded more of me than my doubt did ever since the moment I wrote “My jaw is broken.”
Evans called it a once-in-a-lifetime convergence. Cobb called it just another Tuesday. Whatever it was that came to life in that church on that squeaking hardwood floor — recorded by musicians who were improvising history — has outlasted every doubt because thought can never outclass life experience. We have thought so long and so deeply about the possibilities of the music we make that we have lost sight of the reality of the music that came before. We have lost sight of the fact that the music existed before we played it. We have lost the sight of the fact that the music was magic before Pythagoras understood how to tune instruments in the mathematical ratios in tuning and found that you had a string, a wire and when you changed the length of the string, it changed the note and he worked out all the proportions and created the very first guide for musical tuning.