I grew up in Nashville around country session musicians. The first music that had a big impact on me consisted of inordinately fast tunes. Like, tunes that ran at 160-200 beats per minute, featuring fiddle and pedal steel and electric guitar and keyboard solos so fast as to warrant contemplating the meaning of things like gravity and neurotransmission.  Some people think such music is superfluous, even pointless. Maybe even soulless. But I was pretty fascinated by it when I was young. Every time I heard it, I asked the same question:  What the f***?  For a while, my captivation with blazing country instrumentals led to a severe narrowing of my musical interests. Nothing else on the radio or in my parents’ album collection was nearly as exciting to me. At age 9, I realized I had an illness. I consulted numerous physicians and natural healers about my CIFD (Country Instrumental Fascination Disorder), but their only suggested cure was to go play tag in the backyard or something.  Finally, at around age 11, I determined that my “What the f***?” sensor was simply hyper-activated. I needed to stop listening to the same music, get some fresh air, and restart my process of musical discovery.  Nowadays, there are plenty of things in musical styles ranging from classical minimalism to K-pop that activate my WTF sensor. Thank goodness. I believe I’m normal again.  But perhaps one of the lingering effects of a musical disorder like CIFD is that, today, listening to music for me is a real task that saps real energy. And you know how guys can’t multi-task? It follows that I can’t really listen to music and do other things at the same time. I can’t listen when I read. I can’t listen when I try to sleep. I can’t even listen when I sit upright, because I risk falling over. ​ I know, you’re about to ask the obvious question: Why don’t I just have my WTF sensor surgically removed? I’ve thought about it. It would be great, for instance, to be able to walk into a Muzak-blasting elevator without surging into a fit of analysis. ​ The reason is that my WTF sensor, like everyone’s WTF sensors, is a key to life. Really, the contour of life is just a tracing of its “What the f***?” moments, both immediate and prolonged, that change the way people think and feel, among other, similarly minor things.  What is life without WTF moments? Not to say they need to be positive; indeed, they’re all over the map. Like the time I whacked my head on a tree and lost color vision in my right eye for two days. Or the time I copied a Seurat painting in a high school art class (I might as well have attempted to eat a beach, sand grain by sand grain). Or the time my dad and I were held for questioning by law enforcement officers in the basement of the Mormon Tabernacle because they thought I had been kidnapped. By my dad.  Listening to a virtuosic country instrumental solo at 190 bpm, whacking my head on a tree -- they’re basically one and the same. As long as they both make me ask that universal question, they’re intensifying the busyness of my life contour, which is a signal that life is keeping me on my toes, right?  Combine that with the fact that music has offered me more WTF moments than every other type of experience combined, and it becomes clear why I’m writing all this nonsense. Maybe.  So, enough about WTF moments and sensors. I hope to see you sometime down the road!