Gram Parsons, who has nothing to do with the vigilance vs. paying attention debate

(If, with my sketchy memory, I posted Gram Parsons' Return of the Grievous Angel (with Emmylou Harris) a few years ago and don't remember, consider this an encore.  Now I try to have labels for each post.  Who has the patience to look through so many when there are songs to be played?)


A separate topic:

Introduced by Jayne in her comment on the recent "Worry" post, we will look at vigilance, which I have come to believe is not the same as paying attention.  Not the same at all.

Vigilance, or hyper-vigilance, depending on how deep one's wariness runs, is usually a vital coping mechanism, resulting from too many real monsters in too many closets over too many years.  It is an exhausting, unproductive, full-time volunteer job that one can never do well enough to keep the cockroachs from crawling all over the chocolate cream pie.  Paying attention is just what it claims to be: an alert noticing of the world within and without and responding appropriately to its cues.

Jayne mentioned calling her lawyer, severing all ties with vigilance in a legally-binding way.  I like the vision of marshals serving papers on a shirtless, barefoot vigilance at 3:30 some morning.  As my son would say, "ooooh, snap."

This is a first installment of this exploration.  Having devoted what I might once have described as my good years to hyper-vigilance, I know its investigation is not an off-the-top-of-my-head activity.  I wanted to open the door for my own thoughts to wander through and invite others who, like Jayne, have grown weary of watching the horizon for ghost ships.