Five-minute write: Can't find a way back home any more

This is my hand clawing onto dock, I'm desperate to pull myself out of the water and up on to the hard surface that's real, feels real, is real underneath my bent body. But this unibody aluminum clamshell has got its one or two teeth in me, pulling me to do one or two more things in/on it. Just one more! It's only...oh, crap, sorry, now it's 9:00 and you're still working and you don't need to hide from highly perturbed and uncertain world out there, and phone notifications, and random thoughts (am I dying? what is the age difference between Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas, anyway?) any more.

I can do this. I can get up here, if only because I can hear this coming out of a radio somewhere. Not out of this computer (okay, yes, really, but I need to keep this scenario going).

If anything can pull me out of this, it's this pair of "California v888na sailors".  The wise man has the power, after all.

Well, I don't remember all I know

This debuted on the Hot 100 exactly 41 years ago. How is that even possi It's a fact. Let's leave it at that.

Having never put the line break in the right place in the lyrics, I always thought Martha was singing "Well, I don't remember all I know...but it makes me feel good now." 

It's a fact. You're the boat against the current of your memory, borne back ceaselessly (this can't be the first instance that I've quoted TGG; I don't care). Or, your memory is the boat, you're the current, and-- Muh, this metaphor.

The fact is that you've got to be a bit trapped between the walls of something to push out and make something. Even when the walls are familar and limn your comfort and safetey that you don't need any more.

The first poke of your nose outside of them can even be a rehash. Hell, Russell Mulcahy even recycled a table flip from this track's video in "Hungry Like the Wolf."

The days of DD: living lonely out on the limb

Before I go there--and by there I mean a Discogs dive to begin a completist mission for all the DD vinyl I can find--can I ask if we can go back in time and create an extended mix of this? 

I need for the gentle contours of this song to be expanded, so I can hold my wistful gazes out of windows at the rococo-pink sunset clouds just a little longer. 

It's ridiculously romantic, even without the gauzy video, even without anything in particular to be romantic about. That bassline bridge. Come on.

Can't pretend that growing older never hurts

Straight to the top of my heart with a bullet today.

...but I say I gotta try

Today in Soft Rock Saved Me: 

Change is the only thing, though it hasn't been in quite some time. The contours of daily life got crushed like spaghetti going into a boiling pot, softened, and became a meal you had to eat every night for a year-plus. 

Now I'm given a plate of lasagne every few days, and I'm not sure whether it's going to hold up or slide all over my plate. 

I can't set the structure and choose my pasta, but, boy, I gotta try to find a way to enjoy it. 

 

Maybe it's true what they say about it

Maybe we can't make the ends meet
Maybe we'll all have to do without it
Maybe this world's just incomplete

Still we all look for the truth in our lives
Searching from different sides
So hard living in a desperate world
But we all do the best that we can

Some people see a change
Some will remain the same
But all of them live their lives under the gun
Some see the road as clear
Some say the end is here
They say it's a hopeless fight, well I say I gotta try

Maybe there's too much to think about it
Maybe there ain't nothin' left to say
But if our time's really runnin' out
Then this is no time to run away

'Cause we're destined to look for the truth in this life
Blinded by tearful eyes
If it's no use tryin' in a desperate world
Then tell me why was I born

Some people see a change
Some will remain the same
But all of them live their lives under the gun
Some see the road as clear
Some say the end is here
They say it's a hopeless fight, but I say I gotta try

Lonely-living too lonely
Is it too late
To turn it all around

Some people see a change
Some will remain the same
But all of them live their lives under the gun
Some see the road as clear
Some say the end is here
They say it's a hopeless fight, but I say I gotta try

Someone's tryin'
Someone's cryin' out
While we live under the gun
Someone's livin'
Someone's givin' up

It's poetry in motion

God, I used to love to dance to this song when it came on at the Mad Planet on Friday nights. In fact, I just typed "dance with this song," which is, indeed, what was going on. I'd fling whatever I was drinking (Leinie, and for a time Cape Codders, gah) down and, shoving aside whoever I needed to, make my way to the black square with the one-step-up stage to get busy.

Was it the 12-inch they played? I somehow think not, because I remember having to, you know, really get out there to absorb as much of the three-minutes-something I could, and I think the "sci-ii-ii-ence!" mixing would have become a drag.

No, this is better as a tight three, not with its angles and "tubes and wires" exposed and broken down and out and hiccuping (along with the vocal hiccuping) over you on that floor.

Plus, it's how Dolby imagined it: he conceived the video before he wrote the song. "Dolby saw music videos with story lines as 'short silent films with a soundtrack'." Oh, come to mama! Exactly!

Back at the Mad Planet, though: I asked then, and still do now, how could something so...mechanical be so funky? 

If change is what you require

Imagine you suddenly have to look at yourself all day (or a good chunk of it) while you work. 

Blimey.

For richer memories of the song, try this. I've got to Zoom away from this screen.

'Cause when all the curtains are pulled back we’ll turn and see the circles we've traced

Losing your freedom to move may result in acute nostalgia. Ask your doctor (self). Symptoms may include shopping for t-shirts that you can cut the neck out of, air drumming bongos, requesting that your friends play songs for you on the radio, and wanting to feel like you felt before when you felt/heard/saw things that you didn’t fully understand but knew were unconventional enough to make you, maybe, unconventional, too. 

Causes may be Side B deep cuts that never became singles that you can repeatedly listen to that begin with the sound of a cigarette lighter (probably Silk Cut because that just sounds like what they would smoke) and include vibraphone and make you feel like palm trees are rustling overhead and you’re wearing something gauzy that looks like this.

Funny, it’s just like a scene out of Voltaire.

Where does it go from here?

Oh, how many times did I play this on the Y-Not II jukebox? When I discovered it? I wish I could remember that first time I saw it spin past, and what number it was? The juke at the Y-Not looked like...? Was it the rounded dome or the broad table style box? There were stick-up buttons, the kind that satisfy when pushed because they're going in about half an inch. 

What was I even doing there? Because it's what I did, what you did when you were 24, 25 years old and still exploring the contours of freedom since you were a teenager only less than a decade before? A lot of young adults accomplish a lot in those years. I remember aching with the understanding that I wasn't doing that--that accomplishing (something). Not raising hell, either. In the middle, having fun. 

If what exists from that time is not a credit to my name but a memory of a feeling stitched across time by music, I'm okay with that. You were doing something all along. Pushing buttons that still satisfy.

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. 

 

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.

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.

Unearthed from the 80s: You know you'll always thrill me

Perfect for the day that fall sends silvery, slender, cold drabs of water down into your sun-drenched eyes from a leaden sky. Autumnal stabbing into your heat-baked, flowery heart.

Who broke my heart? Autumn? No. It has to arrive.

It was summer. For leaving. Leaving all of a sudden.

And now you find yourself in '82

There's not a specific memory tied to this. Like the too-many notes in the song, there's a tumble of images, sounds, smells. The dank lockers, the rusty corners, the glub-lb-lub-lb sounds when underwater, the smack of a back flopping off the board, the screams, just general screams of delight edged with terror from the deep end, and the specific shouts MARCO POLO POLO POLO AAAAAIIIIEEEE, my eyes burning as the shadows deepened, the dense grass squeaking under my bare feet while crossing to the snack bar, the feel of wringing out a sopping towel, the tautness of sun-dried skin, wrinkled finger/toe pads re-wetted, a whistle on a lanyard whipped one way, then the other, around the lifeguard's finger, all of my own freckles, the worry someone noticed you farted in the water, the sun boring into my skin, shoulders, neck and scalp, the parts most often out of the water, then my hair and suit dried by the air across my aunt's red MG, because the top was down, always down, but my eyes didn't dry because they were behind glasses and trying to keep seeing what I saw all summer at the pool.

Don't you want to stay til there's no one else around?

This one was at the beach. The pool is the Atlantic. I don't remember the house, it might have been the weird triple-story one that had seen better days. I was stung by a jellyfish, not a blob but a badass one that had tentacles that left heavy red welts across both of my legs at the knee, welts that lasted well after vacation ended, because I was showing them off to friends back home. I was clinging to my canvas raft, going woop-woooo over the waves, facing the horizon, imagining we could head out there. Occasionally we'd turn around and try to ride a crest to the shoreline, and when you caught it at the right time, bounced and hurled forward on its foam, it was the best, happiest, and most slightly-dangerous thrill. Maybe it was one of those times, turning from east to west that the jelly brushed past me, I felt it passing, and then fire. Pain, fire, that I can't remember now how it felt but I remember that it hurt, more than anything, more than scraping both knees in a single tumble at summer camp, from which I still have scars. The jellyfish welts have disappeared.

I was rescued by my dad and ministered by relatives and a lifeguard who poured ammonia from a jug he had at his chair just for this reason.

I didn't go back in the water the rest of the week, but I still wanted to stay, stay oceanside forever. Til there's no one else around.

I heat up, I can't cool down

Summer at the pool. This crinkles out of the lifeguard's AM/FM Panasonic over the 3' - 5' area of the pool, the long part of its L shape. The sky and the water are the same color blue and when the breeze shifts, fryer smell wafts over the water, which you stay in from one whistle blow to the next. Enforced breaks, goose pimpled and sun-scalded skin, fryer smell now in your hands via a tray of perfect golden spears, maybe a Sprite. The towel is hot, the deck chair is hot, the concrete surface is hotter.

There is no better time, nor place.

Random Play: Just let me close my eyes, memorize the way things are this minute

I miss:

• Videos with parrots that are like little films in exotic locales, aren't in HD, and that don't have tongue displays
• Diagonal stripes
• Focusing on one thing at a time--like watching a three-minute music video--without constant distraction deflection
• 1982

 

I wish I could sing it to you

It's a long way from "Hard To Say I'm Sorry," and I'm okay with that. The 80s did things to people, me included.

So let's stretch back over that entire decade (and the one after) and go to the beginning, because beginnings are good.

The bass is super bad on this track, and, oh  man, check out the one-minute percussion breakdown at the end.