My Trouble

When I read the first few lines of this story, I sighed and thought that it was going to be perhaps the most depressing text yet. It also took a while for me to get used to its rhetoric and flow -- it seemed very choppy and disjolting, but after a little while I found that it read fairly quickly.  It was very sad, but in a different way, I suppose.  I felt like I wanted to give every character in this story a hug.  Each of them seemed vulnerable and hurt.  But hurt seems like too nice of a word.  Rather, each of them had gaping, bleeding wounds. 
  "My trouble made his real."  Sometimes when we suffer we are able to more effectively relate to others, if we allow ourselves, of course.  We are better able to look through the masks of everyone around us and see them in their vulnerability.  This story mentions faces quite a bit, I noticed.  The face of the bartender which seemed to turn into the smile of a little girl, the faces of the people on the street watching the musicians, Sonny's face tinted with worry, "the way shadows play on a face which is starting into the fire."  Someone I knew once said, "I wear so many masks in one day, that in the evening when I'm in my room all by myself, I can't remember which one is really me."
   I especially liked the scene in the nightclub:
 "Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues.  He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air.  Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about.  They were not about anything very new.  He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen.  For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard.  There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."
But oh, there is another tale!  I think that's why I wanted to hug them all.  One of my classmates laughingly said about a literary character, "She needs Jesus."  My classmate was right.  (I think the author did a great job depicting a group performance.  Chamber music is also this way -- asking, answering, and discussing through instruments.) 
But I can't hug these people, because they don't exist.  I suppose I'll have to find someone who's real, and I daresay I won't have to look very far.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN0_L-byqnc