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.

I guess I'll know when I get there

I've sort of kept this one to myself during all these years (semi-years, okay) of this thing here, and that's on purpose. It's a talisman, and I know I've said there are others, and there are, but this is a real one.

It's not to play on a computer, in close quarters.

I waited until I was outside and could see the sky to hear this yesterday. It was the first thing I heard today, on the radio in the kitchen, tuned to music in the morning because there's not really another way to start out these days.

It doesn't have a lot of words, but every word matters. And the space between the words, I have to believe, is deliberate.

Well I started out [   ] down a dirty road
Started out [   ] all alone

And here I am again, trying to summon emotion to grasp the un-graspable, when someone leaves when it's just utterly not the time (in fact, here this is just a week ago), and trying to fill the space with...something.

Maybe the space has to just be    space.

How can I escape this irresistible grasp?

1. I know. 80s-era Pink Floyd. I know.
2. But there is an absolutely incredible mullet in this video (around the 2:14 mark)
3. And this song reminds me of boring afternoons working at Randalls grocery store when I was in high school.
4. I was pretty lucky to be able to listen to the radio while I was working at my job during high school.
5. That is why I knew who Robbie Robertson was when I was 17. But didn't truly discover The Band until I was 37.
6. Victoria Beckham's autobiography (from 2001?!) and a video album by Hilary Duff are both titled "Learning to Fly."
7. This is my favorite "Learning to Fly." Not really this one (though the video is rather funny). Too much of an earworm.
8. PF's LTF sits in the middle, straddling meaning and memory. Well, the weight is mostly on memory's side (see number 3).
9. Of all Pink Floyd songs, this one makes me feel something. Even when I heard it bleeding from Wrigley this June into the rehearsal I was in, up the street on Wilton Avenue.
10. I seem to gravitate toward making lists about Pink Floyd.