Wonder why you haven't before

I used to loathe this song. Not so much the song itself, but what it stood for, of course. The end of opaque R.E.M., cool (whatever that meant to you) R.E.M., blah blah. Now I know it was self-admittedly "stupid" and that it passes the float test for me right now: "Singer Michael Stipe has said of the song's meaning, 'It's about making decisions and actually living your life rather than letting it happen.'" 

And you don't come from this town

After five days under the big sky a mile high, fuzzy-headed and languid, this is the perfect fit, just as it was in the humid Kentucky summer in '89, when I was finally fully driving, working full-time at TJ Maxx and figuring out how to continue to live in the liberation I had during that first year of college while staying in my old room back at home. How odd to return to childhood in your last teenage year when you'd gone where you wanted when you wanted, and if you didn't go where you needed when you should have, you and you alone paid the consequences. 

At least I had the freedom of a car. Did they finally have two cars then? Must have, because I was able to take the matte-blue Toyota out at night, to work, to where I needed (and sometimes wanted) to go. I have a distinct memory of sitting at the light on Waller Avenue at Broadway, an intersection where both streets turn into other-named streets, Waller becoming Mason-Headley Road and Broadway becoming Harrodsburg Road. This must have evolved from the junction being the legal boundary of town at some point, where city streets became country roads named either after people or their farms, or the destination/terminus, where a managed thoroughfare, a part of a whole, abruptly ended and became a country highway. 

Anyway: I'm at this light, and this song is on the radio. And I'm sitting there, late in the night, waiting at a red light where the green-lit street is empty, no traffic, where, decades before, what was controlled became free. And I'm noticing that key change in guitar in the song's "doo-doodoo, doo-doo" outro, and I feel...my age. Grown. Living on the highway, not the street.

I'll write you a letter tomorrow

Maybe it's because we haven't advanced in life in proximity, only with the scattershot familiarity of the virtual tubes and wires we couldn't have imagined at 19 and 20 and so on, that I'm able to re-realize the significance of our knowing each other, and how and why it set me on a trajectory to further meet who I would meet and be who I would become. 

This waiting 'round's killing me

I'm standing backstage at whatever that space was called in the hulking white warehouse at the foot of I-794 and edge of the Third Ward. Waiting for my cue, which I believe was the first of the longer guitar chords, the ones that go dun duuuun, dah duuun. (I really should figure out what those are) in this one. 

And every time I hear it, I'm there again. What I was wearing, my character's name, god, even the name of the play, I'm not sure any more without thinking harder. 

But I do remember the feeling of waiting to begin something, to cross from the dimly-lit real backstage into the hot and harsh and exciting unreal. 

I'm waiting to get there again, but, damn, it's a long wait, and it's filled with doing a lot of other shit that is grayscale, unending, requires brain parts that are already exhausted, too full of nitpicky details. 

I'm not even sure I want to go back there, but I do know I can't stay here. As the wise man said, You don't have to go home but...

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

 

Come along and share the good times while we can

I'm not a fugitive on the run

This PE track played on the 'pod as I ran three blocks in a minute to make it to join a phone meeting at work.

The irony was palpable with each step. At least it was ironic to me as I struggled to reach the cell that's not of my choosing to be on time for a meeting (a meeting! Already it's hopeless.) that I didn't want to attend nor that I truly care about.

It's not really a raw deal, but, man, what are we doing when we're not running toward something we chose without restriction or requirement?

Public Enemy - Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos (1988) from Golden Era Videos on Vimeo.

Ain't lost yet so I gotta be a winner

I'm letting the Universe decide if I am going to get to do this next month. If I can get a ride back from the depths of western Wisconsin (the Minneapple, basically), then...and then...

Looking good's a state of mind

This is a perennial favorite, and one that I hadn't thought of for some time until today, the roots of which spread deeply and unexpectedly.

See, a Swedish singer-songwriter-rapper turned Londoner (with a visual cameo in a Big Audio Dynamite video) scores a worldwide hit, gets robbed (literally) of a Grammy, records, performs and collaborates around the globe, and lands in indie-darling heaven (hell), file under Reinvention (but not).

I just think this is a great song. I scored a used copy of the CD and hung onto it for quite some time but eventually ditched it in some move or other. Nonetheless, I'm going to check out the recent outing, The Cherry Thing, toute suite.



And the performance in the clip is rad if only because she's strutting and fronting seven months pregnant on TOTP.

May I crawl behind your eyes?

If I could go back someplace I never was, but was in proximity to, within a facsimile of, this would be on the list.

(Because, you know, there'd have to be a list.)