…if you want it.

Really, it is so, if you want. 

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...

This could be the biggest sky

(How do I write this without any working jargon? No "aligns" or "frameworks" or "meet?")

In the absence of feelings about the time this song emerged, or about its content (this is SUCH A WORK EMAIL RIGHT NOW), I am going to pull myself out of dutiful, scheduled, timebound thinking by wondering about the genesis of it.

Here it is, a snapshot about him, and his reminder to me that you can be both deliberate and spontaneous in your creating.  

That structure will set you free. 

That I admire the freedom of improvising, and understand viscerally how that freedom happens because improvising, though improvising, still has a...framework. 

I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside

Last week, I heard this in Jewel--the nice, big one on Western, where you'd expect more of an elevated, er, moment, as they say now. I finally get it, this song. 

I overlooked it, the first song on The Joshua Tree, all this time, fast-forwarding my tape purchased at Rose Records on Michigan Avenue Rock Records/Rolling Stones Records on Washington [edit: I think I've misremembered where and what the records store was. I was sure it was across from a Bennigans on the east side of Michigan Ave, but who can reconstruct chronology and geography from 33 years ago?] in the fall of 1987 to deeper cuts and deeper meanings. "Bullet the Blue Sky" fit my unending teen rage, "With or Without You" to whine and feel longing, and, later, "Red Hill Mining Town" and "One Tree Hill" squeezed my heart tight.

Sure, it sounds like winding through the curves of Jackson County, Kentucky, or coasting down the foothills of Virginia to sea level. This was a road-trip album. 

But now, now, this song feels like freedom to me. And I don't mean the freedom to move about afforded by the bigger-footprinted, latest version of Jewel, retooled for the 2020s for the yups or whatever you'd call them now of Roscoe Village. Bigger aisles, more shelves to scan, less dust, less grumpiness.

No, it's the freedom I am going to feel so soon I don't want to even let myself think about it. Keep head down, keep in the game of working and preparing meals, keep making headway through tv episodes.

But I don't have to, any more, much longer.

Why won't Jimmy pledge allegiance?

Freedom
Love
Joy
Peace

Let's get some.