Panacea, "Sync-in City"

Once, before a high school field trip to Washington D.C., my AP US Government teacher warned our class about headphones.

“I just can’t believe anybody would just walk around a major city with headphones in,” he moaned. “It’s so dangerous.”

He recommended that we not wear them while visiting monuments, or embassies, or the Congress. Shocked, and having spent a majority of my senior year wearing headphones in the hallways, I stifled a laugh. Of course I’d wear headphones in D.C. I’d wear them anywhere.

I spent the week drenched in sweat, baffled by subways and cardinal directions and my own naivety; as I recall, I never used my headphones except as lullaby, as reassurance. Now, with a few years of city living behind me, I feel this was for the better. For a city’s pleasures and grotesqueries can never be fully experienced with them plugged in; I doubt any could become a “Sync-in City” this way.

Difficult to fuse your “soul” to a place when you’re only partially there. Hard to comprehend even half the “facts of where you’re at” - on a roadmap either literal or metaphorical - while distracted. Headphones can be illusory, quelling some critical, uncomfortable truths. You’re “scared.” You’ve been here - or gone - too long; everything seems “smaller.” Sometime, and often without warning, it becomes time to “break the cold.”

It is harsh to learn it with or without headphones: Sometimes, it takes catastrophic luck to “fucking make a dent” on the place you are. The world, your city, may never “hear you vent.” So, go - or stay? K Murdock offers wholesome shoves and a beat worth walking to, painting a fresh dawn on the seductive unknown. Still, despite the demand to “face the facts,” I think it pointless to impose a strict thesis. Often, Panacea imparts to me the simplest truths of all. “Poor” or “rich,” we’re all headed down the same “road.” So open your ears and appreciate the idiosyncrasies, whichever surround you, while you can.