But no matter where the days have left you

You know what the street cafe is. Well, I do, anyway, and that's what matters. 

 

And what have you done?

Don't get carried away

Well, I haven't seen this video in a minute. Now that I'm three times as old as the first times I saw it (!), I can see that it's pretty densely packed: a post-apocalyptic Western, and/or a Mad Maxian pilgrimage tale with a state-of-the-art, probably Magnavox, plot device (that happens to have working batteries).Well, a lot of analog devices, amps and whatnot, stuff that gearheads would salivate over now. Tom and the HBs, though, seem bemused, at least until Mike finds that guitar just in time for the solo. And the climax must be when Tom pushes over the Astro Invaders video game since, after all, it's 1982. But why doesn't he shoot it?



It doesn't matter. I just like to hear this song. The creepy synths, the kind of ponderous pace, the lonesome guitar chords...they sound like dark October weekday afternoons that seemed safe and cozy but when it felt like something better -- spring, sunshine, the wisdom of age-- might be around the corner.

p.s. Heard the lyrics for years, yes, but when reading them--yowch. Kind of a terrible dude there, Tom, dude.

Well it's all right, everything'll work out fine

Today In I Needed To Hear This.

Well it's all right, riding around in the breeze
Well it's all right, if you live the life you please
Well it's all right, even if the sun don't shine
Well it's all right, we're going to the end of the line

Folks get 'round in the sunshine

Everybody does, even when it only goes up as high as your eyes like it does here in November.

Then as it was, then again it will be

Is anyone else surprised when they (re)learn that Zeppelin released an album in 1975? Aren't they indelibly of 1969-72? Or, my god, in 1979? I mean, I like those songs to be sure, but they are kind of the shadow of the former selves.

This one still has the hip-hugger pants magic, in a way, and the Green World/cheeseball lyrics ("We are eagles of one nest / The nest is in our soul"). 

Today, I think it just sounds like autumn time. And looking back at paths not taken. 

Time, beckoning me

This is what you listen to when you have writer's block. Or don't know what to write, or both.

It could kind of be a hymn, like Dust in the Wind. It was in the hymnal (or, rather, binder with mimeographed pages of songs), but we never, ever got to sing it. I don't know if it was somehow officially sanctioned, or if it was sneaked in there by a fan of Kansas.

Time followed up the first single, "Games People Play," which was decidedly more prog and prone to be played in a bar while you're playing pool in the early 2000s, but never to be played during Mass (maybe confession, though).

This, though, is sweet and sad, and not so slick that it doesn't take you someplace, whether it's up in the clouds or a daydream you had in the backseat of the car in the summer of '81.

Waiting out the winter was a little too much for him

Brrr. What is this?

Well, we will just have to deal with winter in November. And dream of sunlight in May.

Strange ways coming today

Summer’s snaking backward in memory and the air is clear and feels anxious. It’s all starting to die around you, so hang on to excitement now. Once the pall comes, you can get to work.

Just follow your eyes.

I can't stop listening to



Maybe because it's fall now, and trees are front and center, dying gorgeously. Though this sounds like the stark ones of November, blotting a pale sky, their former glorious dressing rotting and crunching underfoot.

This was the peak of the epic show I saw in lush, pre-solstic summer.

Just give me some truth

...now

All else are castles built in the air

I've been listening to this playlist because 1984 is, of course, the Best Year. These spins ease into 1985, too, but I don't mind that. After all, the early months of year was a continuation of '84 musically--Purple Rain, Born in the USA, and Wham! are represented--and in that we were still wearing natural fabrics and Madonna-inspired flounce and flash (and rubber bracelets), with the neon, knit, and cut-outs of the latter months not having taken hold.

Where was I?

This song.



I like this song because of its similarity in tempo and atmosphere to her bigger, and, of course, Best Year hit . It doesn't quite fit the movie, but it fits Tina's ca 1984-85 zeitgeist.

And, duh, the same dudes wrote it.

Someday I'll figure out why those 18-24 months hit so hard, then and now.

I need some sentimental hygiene

Warren of 32 years ago, when he was 40, gets me now.

And do my job, whatever.



Every day I get up in the morning and go to work
And do my job whatever
I need some
Sentimental hygiene

Everybody's at war these days
Let's have a mini-surrender
I need some
Sentimental hygiene

Everybody's had to hurt about it
No one wants to go without it
It's so hard to find it
Sentimental hygiene

Every night I come home exhausted
From trying to get along
I need some
Sentimental hygiene

Everybody's joining up to fight
For the right to be wrong
I need some
Sentimental hygiene

Some nights I drive my car
Up and down the boulevard
It's so hard to find it
Sentimental hygiene

It comes and it goes

The soft rock radio hit by Clapton that gets me the most isn't "Tears in Heaven" (though it's a eye-weller when you think about it) but this movie theme song.

And not because I loved the movie (or the song) that much, but because I think it was a first or second date.

Once again, music x time = that moment again.

As the sun has its place up in the sky, I love you so dearly

This is a repeat. But I don't care.

Straight from too-bright backyards in summer 1983, the sound of big fluffy clouds momentarily darkening the grass or the pool. The *scronch* of an inner tube as you shift on it, the trees swaying. How could I have ever known I would caress all those little snippets and bits, but I must have known, somehow, that the song would be the bridge between then and now, rethreading it onto older skies, newer clouds, decades of generations of leaves and branches.

But the sun is still in the sky and shining above you

Nope, didn't learn about this from Three Billboards, but rather from my Grandad's copy of Voulez-Vous that he gave to me probably not long after it came out. Maybe he didn't care for it, maybe he expected it to line up more with the less disco-y Arrival. What I do know for sure is that I was, even at 10 or 11, pretty floored that he even bought himself an ABBA album.

Strength and solidarity. Or a message you can send to/hear from yourself.

Making the life that I had seem suddenly shiny and new

We all want someone or something to appear in life and make every path forward and back clear to us.

Living in the gap between past and future

Well, if it's so deep you don't think that you can speak about it
Just remember to reach out and touch the past and the future
Well, if it's so deep you don't think you can speak about it
Don't ever think that you can't change the past and the future

You might not, not think so now
But just you wait and see, someone will come to help you

 

I drift back in time and I find my feet down on mainstreet

I know this is a creepy song about a dude obsessed or worse with an exotic dancer, but I was listening to it while reading and seeing a few photos about the old days and it's really just about nostalgia when you transpose the relationships in the scenario. In my case, it's me and the neighborhood. It's where I belonged, even if it was hard. All things were still possible.

I play to win.

Applicable every day, to everything.

Still, every day, I play to win.

Well, everybody better move over, that's all

I got my back to the wall.

Or at least some semi-permanent bitch face.

I miss the mountains...except those were crowded, too.

Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows

As a child, this song moved me.

Now, in the winters, I think of the seeds and bulbs sleeping.

Maybe it's because of this song.

Don't know what a slide rule is for

I am more interested in why the little birds are dipping into that trash can outside of the university student center than deep research and outcomes. And hard work.

Maybe this is hard work.

Just slide behind the wheel, How does it feel?

We may not want to right now, but we do. So, let's just think of this place as a place that can give us the grief and turmoil of today, and James Brown. Hand to hand, across the nay-chun.

There are better, bigger, deeper cuts to choose today, but going back to the mid-80s, when everything from who your enemies were to your shoes was clear.

It could only make you stronger

Mmm-nnnh. Mmmm-nnnh.

Expect the best of/from your collaborators. Give the best of yourself. Model what you want to see. Be them before they show up. Your tribe is out there, even if you hack away at it all alone for a long time.

I don't know or want to know where the drive crossed into being fueled by pain and chemicals more than just the drive, but he chased it and left the lab as much as he needed to.

Get your shit done at home and then get out there.

Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying

The sky is unbroken and opaque today, humidity knitting up around us. It feels far away from the world's obiter dicta.

I'm going to try to stay right here for the time being.

In dreams the world keeps going 'round and 'round

The 21st-century, vacuous, vacuuming, echo chamber isn't good for someone who is living in their mind a lot. There's too much information, sure, but it's what's unsaid that's worse, the impulses behind any pronouncement. The contextless void.

What we need is old-fashioned back-porch jawing and justifications, sipping on cheap wine coolers from around the corner. Those times are missed. People looking at people.

Whom can I run to?

Notre Dame de Paris is burning. It has survived more than 800 years of humankind's travails and mistakes and joys. But a basic element, fire, can pull its soaring spires to the ground after all of this time. Wood disappearing into fire, which happened long before the cathedral existed, and which reminds us that we are no match for natural elements of this earth.

Even our longest-lasting, carved-into-stone aspirations aren't.