Roses never fade

You can have your “Don’t Stop,” I’ll take this sadder-than-sad I did stop believin’ tune any day of the week. Only made it to Number 23, okay with me. 

Does the guitar at the end arc like crying? I think so. I didn’t in the fall of ‘83, when this was out there and unwinding from my radio and the car and the speakers at Champs during couples-skate (“Couples only”). It just sounded—and still does—like fallen leaves dusting around the ground in the wind, leaden skies overhead.

It’s been matte white or gray overhead here practically daily for the last two weeks. A plane decelerating in that opacity above is there, but you can’t see it. Sometimes its lights cut through the bank. 

I’ve had a few dreams about a few people from my past recently—every other day, almost. I guess even if you have left all of the physical spaces and your heart has pragmatically been emptied of a person, something is still there, in the stratus nebulosus of your mind.

And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden

All week I've been thinking, "we are stardust." All of us, even if we don't want to be, or wish others weren't. We are, as Joni says, "billion-year-old carbon."

Considering this perspective, time means nothing. A day, a few hours, are meaningless when it comes to galactic evolution and the point in the formations and mergers and deaths that we were spit out of the elements.

And I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes

Riding shotgun in the sky

Turning into butterflies

Above our nation

You’ve got to learn to live with what you can't rise above

No one told me about Bruce. It sounds dumb, but I didn’t understand fully how deep he is, how troubled, how truly bardic. See, he was the loquacious songs on the radio, the chronicler of “real” America guy of Born in the USA and “Born to Run,” and, between ‘83 and ‘84, the perpetrator of a long-ass video I had to sit through time and again waiting for “Rio” or “Union of the Snake” to show up on MTV. I’m on limited time, JJ and Alan, and, now that I think about it, what the hell were they doing playing this song from 1973 and video of a 1978 concert? At over 7 minutes, my guess is filling dead air. 

Speaking of MTV, this one’s straight from his prime time there, though I experienced it mainly through the radio, having become occupied with things other than sneaking as much MTV as I could in drips and drops and when babysitting. 

I finished his autobiography today. Now that I’m not, I can say I was inside the man’s mind for a good portion, if not all, of that book, to the point that reading it at bedtime resulted in insomnia. 

Too much to digest, and too much to discuss (yet). 

He just a-let it all hang loose

I have a no Carole King rule. I lunge to switch the radio to another station or skip the track, whether in a car, boat, plane, or my own home. But I’m letting myself listen to this one because the internet radio is showing the Tapestry album cover—and this track doesn’t whine and depress like some of the others do. This one is upbeat, but the subject is still a huge bummer. 

No, it’s still the cover that draws me. I used to linger over it when I would review all of the albums in the cabinet or that were spinning on the turntable around ages 7, 8, 9 or 10–whenever I could handle the stereo and its components undisturbed. I must have been shown how to put the records on without damaging them, as I’d done to basically all of my Disney records on my own plastic in-its-own-carrying-case turntable. Slide it down the spindle, gently lift the arm, apply some—not a lot!—pressure to grasp the handle on the head shell, and whatever you do, DON’T DROP IT ON THE RECORD.

I remember studying album covers more than those tutorials. And Tapestry’s struck me A woman, alone, and...barefoot? I couldn’t understand it. Women on the other record covers in the cabinet, like Marilyn McCoo on a 5th Dimension record, wore fancy outfits, coordinated with the background or others, and were posed carefully. Here was a woman in her house, sitting in the window with a cat, and who can’t be bothered to put on shoes. 

What kind of crystal ball was this record that I wholly do not like?

Are we gonna let the elevator bring us down?

This one comes from somewhere between convention and instinct. Marking the start of a new time, though if you ask the birds and the trees being smothered by snow outside right now, they don’t care, don’t know, don’t need it. They just need to stay warm and alive, and they have been preparing for this fallow time a while ago, driven by the almighty instinct.

Me, too? I guess I have been applying that guide inside (forgive the PSA and/or morning drive radio speak), preparing for winter’s starkness and solemnity. Somewhere behind it are outrageous colors, ease in the air...and the purple banana?