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This is where I am right now. I profoundly need no words, a time with no pecking, typing, seeking a word to express what I am doing and especially to define what I am thinking. I'm talking about (though I don't want to talk) some chill out music. These guys are especially good at it.

Just these sounds, natural warmth, peaceful ease. And an island where I can even "go to get pancakes and a milk shake and just relax with a book."

That's where the hell this beautiful above-tropical beach is and these people mingling--oh, so mingling!--are. I didn't know Germany had relaxing-escape islands on the North Sea coast. 

These dudes have the right idea. Bring everyone together someplace so untroubled and sacramental, no words are needed.

I missed the peak sensation

 Over. And over. And over with this one. 

Is it the cadence, the creepy guitar? More likely, the video, this huge, angular man haunting a comfortable house, the comic tableaux of the band playing on the couch, in the dining room, the kitchen, the anthropomorphic appliances and shoes--oh, yeah, the shoes! I would have dug those white booties with the ruffle and big buttons, and the hint-of-the-70s dressy platform sandals. 

I probably did. This one's pretty burned into the back of my eyeballs, so far back there that all I can do is just play over. And over. And over.

I've invested too much time to give you up that easy

I wish it was February 1985 instead of February 2021, because then we'd all be looking at MTV and Space Shuttle launches and returns, and wondering "Where's the beef?" instead of preening and pissing on the internet constantly. Which is what I am doing right now, but that's not important right now. 

I'm sure I'd feel much lighter and connected--to physical things, like papers, pens, desks carved by dozens of bored teenage hands, mildewy girls' restroom corners, cig smoke undulating out of the Faculty Lounge (and sometimes the girls' restroom corners), mimeographed exams, formaldehyde in the bio classroom, Giorgio Beverly Hills and Drakkar Noir drifting down the halls. Or like cold, glassy tv screens, permanently leaden November-March Kentucky skies, the pops of color in everyone's clothes, pops of their collars, the nubby acrylic of my sweaters from McAlpins or Jean Nicole or Deb (did I shop there?), a needle on a record, pencil lead dust on the edge of a ruler after making one third of an isosceles triangle. Baked potatoes and Pop Tarts.  The wondrous web of hair spray in another girl's curls.

My heart lurching under my Oxford-cloth button down and sweater when I saw him down the hall.  

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?

Please take hold of my hand

Reviving this, since this ungovernable and infinite archive we are "on" right now shows me that I skipped last year.

 None of this "need it more than ever" stuff--that's marketing lingo by now. 

Let George say it:

In his autobiography, Harrison wrote that the song “is a prayer and personal statement between me, the Lord, and whoever likes it.”*

 

*quote thanks to this piece, which I will have to dig into (or steal the idea)

I'm sick of sitting 'round here trying to write this book

If no one can understand why I need to listen to this song over and over and over and over, they are living in the middle of the ocean.