would the music be loud enough?

first: happy 18th birthday mary.
second: there is no possible way i can write about my life right now without using a lot of swear words. so here's more annie dillard.


"I was gaining momentum. It was only a matter of months. Downstairs in the basement, I played "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" on the piano. Why not take up the trumpet, why not marry this wonderful boy, write an epic, become a medical missionary to the Amazon as I always intended? What happened to science? My boyfriend never seemed to sleep. "I can sleep when I'm dead," he said. Was this not grand?

I was approaching escape velocity. What would you do if you had fifteen minutes to live before the bomb went off? Quick: what would you read? I drove up and down the boulevards, up and down the highways, around Frick Park fast, over the flung bridges and up into springtime hills. My boyfriend and I played lightening chess, ten games an hour. We drove up the Allegheny River into New York and back, and up the Monongahela River into West Virginia and back. In my room I shuffled cards. I wrote poems about the sea. I wrote poems imitating the psalms. I held my pen on the red paper label of the modern jazz record on the turntable, played that side past midnight, over and over, and let the pen draw a circle hours thick. In New Orleans - if you could get to New Orleans - would the music be loud enough?"