Anoxic Environs

I wrote a song.  It is not great, but it has a moment in it that I would love to develop.  The song moves in and out a middling cheery folky sort of acoustic riff, and then it turns into…I don’t know. A dirge.  That would be the best way to describe it.  It’s cold and dark and isolated.  No, I will not sing it.  I do not sing, really.

Anyway, the song deals with the virtual anoxic state of the surroundings of a person in any sort of personal cataclysm.  The overall theme would be one of asphyxiation, though only a perceived one.  Anyone whose had good friends die on you, or to a much lesser extent, love fail on you, knows the condition.  Not like drowning, that’s too easy.  With drowning, you can just give up, with asphyxiation, you slowly succumb and can’t help but fight.  But there is nothing to be done.  I read that before the Nazis switched over to the more efficient Zyclon B, they experimented with simply displacing a warehouse full of breathable atmosphere with CO₂ generated by massive marine diesels.  The effects were so absolutely inhumane that they were worried it would rob all motivation from the soldiers assigned the extermination duties.  People are singularly wicked organisms.

That feeling of the air displaced, or even that of a vessel in space venting atmosphere, was what I was going for.  I didn’t get close, but I formed a turn of phrase I like.  Choking on the blues. 

It works well inside an electric cacophonous dirge.  That makes me happy.  It is a grinding pain of a thing.  I wish I had the talent to do more with it, and I like the term well enough that should I ever write about something terrible and visceral enough, you will see that the subject is choking on the blues.

Maybe even sucking in the tragedy.  Gasping and they lose. Losing all they have to breathe. Choking on the blues.

That’s catchy.