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Nothing is more pathetic than a grown man holding forth on music that mostly young people enjoy.

What. Ever.

I've become fascinated lately with doom metal - specifically, funeral doom and ambient doom, genres known for their incredibly slow pace, full, deep basses and solemn, often lugubrious, if not hellish, lyrics.

Is this a personal problem, or a sign of our dreadful times? Probably the former, but it's amply reinforced by the latter.

"Fascinated" is too imprecise a word. Doom metal has stricken me with an intuitive jolt of recognition - a wordless revelation of cognitive consonance, in which the music outwardly confirms a deeply rooted inner truth. I'm compelled to keep searching, until I hear what resonates exactly with that soundless, internal tuning fork.

Crazy? I don't think so. It's a normal way for people to relate to nonverbal art forms.

An example: I remember walking along Bleecker Street in New York's Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s and being dumbstruck by an electric guitar riff. It beckoned from the darkness of a club I was too young to enter. The notes were slow, simple, minimal, expressive. The fact that meaningful gaps of silence fell between notes fascinated a youth long used to pop radio's all-noise-all-the-time approach.

Turned out it was the blues. I had to keep exploring and make it my own. Eventually, I ended up playing it. Similar deal later, when I was stunned by the gorgeous, heart-piercing, slow-moving ballads of loss, longing and mystery, sung by Irish and Swedish maidens into the darkness of night.

And what of doom? I came to it late, driving home one night this past winter. Part of a track emerged from KUNM Radio's "Tombstone Rock" show - not a usual haunt for me. It, too, was fascinating. Dark. Cold. Quiet. A relentlessly powerful but infinitely patient beat. What one might hear creeping down a dimly lit, deep-underground utility corridor smelling of damp concrete.

I had to understand. I sorted through a Charon's raft of groups - many from the twilight of Scandinavia. The "Stormcrowfleet" CD by Skepticism came close. So did Sunn O)))'s "White1." Shape of Despair's "Angels of Distress" hit the mark in places.

How does doom measure up? I like the pace and the gravity - the slower, deeper, more repetitive, more like the engine of the universe, the better. Give me the Taos hum over the fast and the frantic.

I'm not too impressed by the lyrics, which tend to dwell on abject hopelessness, or any growling delivery, which can sound like Cookie Monster struggling to sing.

Doom is no match in emotional richness, or even slow pace, to, say, Scottish folk songs such as "Willie o Winsbury" or "Flooers o the Forest" by Dick Gaughan, or Irish performer Maighread N! Dhomnaill's poignant rendition of "Johnny Seoighe." Those songs pierce directly to the eternal pathos of the universe. They also embrace the pathos and, ultimately, affirm rightness and justice. Doom fans, oddly, might like it.

Doom, however, has some potential to match the inner tuning fork, I believe. Maybe I'll work on it.