“Not Dead Yet,” the caption above a black cat on a sticker I saw recently proclaims. Lately that has taken on greater and greater meaning.

The end of the secular 2012 began an era in my life where I grieved loss, stopped wanting to exist, and just may have embarked on some of my worst life choices in order to repair a past that had already broken me. I’ve spent more and more of that time grieving people I’ve cared about, over the years.

October 7th hit me in a different way. I wasn’t in Israel and anyone I’d know who was is someone I hadn’t talked to for years. That said, I know I have cousins and some of my aunt’s former in-laws, as well as people I have met in person years ago or known online at some point. None of that was the connection, nor was my recently rekindled connection with Israeli politics due to the judicial reform and ToI’s coverage of it, it was the music.

And maybe very specifically it was Avi Nissim and Lior Perlmutter, a DJ duo known as Astral Projection, even though I didn’t realize it yet. While my festival-attending former friends had been getting turned on to dubstep in the late 2000s, I’d introvertedly continued my lifelong journey with electronica by getting more into trance music, especially psytrance and related subgenres that all tend to connect Europe, Goa, and Israel in some way. Often Greece ends up in the musical mix.

It is unlikely that I knew anyone at Psyduck or Supernova, the two music festivals I know of in Israel that were attacked on October 7th. I believe fewer people know about Psyduck because of that yet it was not safe from the terrorist attack on nearby Kibbutz Nirim, which was a much smaller and more intimate festival. After October 7th, listening to and supporting Israeli trance musicians (and those who still viewed Israeli trance musicians as family) became a personal focus to me and maybe a way to cope with the guilt I felt.

I will write more about trance music another day, over the years since the advent of AI music has made music a fraught topic for me as has the unraveling of my own life after being utterly horrified by October 7th opened the door on years of personal trauma for me. And part of that was the guilt.

Not guilt for what I’d done, but guilt for being alive and physically safe while people who loved the same music as I did were hunted by terrorists while I was still sleeping. Unlike the Prime Minister, I was asleep due to the difference in time zones so by the time I woke up and found myself reading about Psyduck first by chance, my 6am news reading routine was late to a horror that had started hours earlier yet was still continuing.

Lately I’ve been thinking back to 9/11/2001 as so many people have. September 11th, a day that most Americans felt the way I felt the morning of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)