Music is a mind-altering substance. When I first got into recovery, there were certain songs I couldn't listen to - too many associations, too many triggers to rip and run, or doorways to grief. And all these years later, particular music can catch me off guard.

Like the other day, driving home on a beautiful summer evening, a Fleetwood Mac song came up on my mix-tape and I was in tears. I wasn't even a Fleetwood Mac fan - R&B was my jam. But there was that one summer when my lover played the Rumors album all through the long nights that we didn't sleep, a good seven years after release, but new to me. New to me, and hitting home with its "if you don't love me now, you will never love me again" refrain.

I've heard that particular song hundreds of times and usually sing along at the top of my lungs. But sometimes, when the wind is in the trees, and the sunlight is of a particular quality, I'm transported to that summer that was the bittersweet beginning of the end of my addiction. I sometimes think of it as the summer of lost love. But no, it was the summer of love squandered, of love stomped on and disregarded while I chased the shiny object of my infatuation and the deadly elixir that he cooked up in my basement while I sat in my lovely house, looking out at my lovely garden, listening to Fleetwood Mac while pretending that the man I loved wouldn't notice that I was shacked up with a meth cook.

Other songs take me to other places - that's what music does, this soundtrack of our lives. Stoned Soul Picnic is the old Bonneville Hot Springs with the pool that smelled like rotten eggs and the frigid river where my cousins and I would sneak a smoke before our moms woke up, and where we learned that Pam R drowned in the Columbia River, forever fifteen, forever gone.

80's pop takes me to early recovery. Fresh out of the disco era, my new friends and I considered dancing to be one of the Steps of recovery. Just like my folks did when I was a kid, we'd crank up the stereo and dance in the living room, or at the ratty PASS Club, or the URS, or that church hall in Vancouver. It was gloriously good fun.

My dad was a Dixieland and Big Band aficionado. He'd show me the goosebumps on his arms when he heard a particular passage on Pete Fountain's or Benny Goodman's clarinet. Oddly enough, it was the opening guitar chords of  a song I'd barely noticed when it came out, that had me on an August day weeping for my dad, feeling his presence in the car a good ten years after he died. I would love to feel him again like I did that day, almost like he was sitting in the backseat, but I don't. Music is a mind altering substance, but just like other substances, inconsistent in the when and the how it alters me.

I love that way that music can transport me to another time and place. What songs make you laugh, or cry? How do you merge old memories with new associations? What would be on the mix-tape of your recovery?