Finding Joy through Joy Division

A dark room, a blanket, and Joy Division's album "Unknown Pleasures" playing just loud enough to become the only ambient noise.

Straight up distraction rarely works for me, because distraction is usually my problem to begin with. When my brain "veers off track" it usually picks up speed rather than slowing down and I can't just jump back on track until I've gotten a handle on the train. The truth is, the immediate problem that sent my mind off the rails is only the proximate cause. The dark stuff my head shovels into the furnace keeps the train flying down the wrong track: insecurities, anxieties, fears, the ghosts of failures past. I need to recognize those fuels and feel their role in my fraught mindset, which I can do by leaning a little into the gloomy bits of my unconscious. Hence, Joy Division. The blanket and the dark room just cozy and quiet me. It's the album that does the trick.

It's hard to separate Ian Curtis's voice from what happened to him. It's an ethereal, haunting baritone that intones just as often as it sings, and it shades every track. "Disorder" is his inimitable epileptic dancing among the confusion and chaos ("I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling - feeling - feeling - feeling -feeling...") "Day of the Lords" begins the brooding, strong, slow and heavy that starts to get me centered and calmer. He keeps asking, "When will it end?" with frustration, yes, but it's been a slow and weary burn that I can attune with. Uneven and dissonant bass combine with his odd voice on the next track, moving toward trance, and thereafter the brooding is on. Listening in the dark beneath the blanket and typically behind on sleep, I'm usually slipping in and out of consciousness somewhere between "New Dawn Fades," "She's Lost Control," and "Shadowplay."

Forty-five minutes does the full album; 25 minutes is enough on a casually chaotic day. Problems are not gone when I finish listening, but they're mine, and I can own them and my mood and mind and be whole again.