K folks, I've really hit rock bottom today and I know I'll feel better if I drag you all down with me. Ready? Here goes ...

After a lifetime of hearing, playing, studying, practicing, teaching and enjoying all manner of music, I see now that I've been most diabolically misguided. I have, in effect, fallen in love with and devoted my entire most miserable life to the immortally and monstrously evil time-waster called music. The evidence is simply overwhelming. Just ponder these points, for starters --

* Countless innocent birds and animals died absolutely horrible, vicious deaths to provide early humans with bones and skins for making the first musical instruments. Obviously, all the negative karma accumulated by our ancient ancestors in their bloodlust for music-making still infects music and musicians today. Hence, the appearance of such genres as "death metal", "atonal", "traditional folk".

* Music has been used throughout history to march the soldiers off to slaughter;

* Even the most pathetic specimens of humanity have been crowned as monarchs to the evilly sweet and majestically deceptive sounds of music;

* The most notorious and ignoble of human infants in history have been lulled off to sleep with music. For instance, I bet even Dracula's mother sang him lullabyes and soothing little nursery rhymes to ease all that teeeeeeething!

* Music is so awful an influence on humans it wastes them, quite literally. Those who become hopelessly obsessed with it pay for it with their lives. Just look at the evidence -- every musician in history has ended up dead!   No kidding! And the end is never, never easy. Oh no! Look what happened to Beethoven's ears! Or Schumann's pinkie on his right hand, or Chopin's lungs, Janis Joplin's larnyx, Michael Jackson's sex appeal, Elton John's waistline ...

* Just yesterday, one of my students had an awful experience on the way to his music lesson. The windshield on his mom's van suddenly smashed to smithereens, for no apparent reason. I kid you not. No doubt it was the work of a host of vicious unseen entities gathered around him as he prepared for his piano lesson. Music attracts all manner of entities, after all -- and imperfect music, such as what is typically produced by students like him, draws the most vicious and evil of them all.

Oh, the pain and horror of s miserable life wasted teaching this most ignoble of arts is almost too much to bear! But my musical habits are so entrenched by now I really need your help giving it up. So please, post any evidence and/or flaming attacks against music and musicians right here. Don't concern yourself about whether your arguments are flawed or even completely fallacious-- in the spirit of a similarly-titled Mudcat thread of surprising longevity, just go right ahead and vent.

daylia