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.

I'm actually thinking about yesterday.

Another loss. My age, my experiences, some of them, anyway.

I always dug this track more than their name-maker. This second single is just as lush, but tinged with loss.

I think Mike taped this one for me. On side two was something dissimilar, like Big Audio Dynamite. Or maybe that's not so different. It sounds like summer to me, the end of that first free summer of mine in 1991. It sounds like the distant blue line of lake and sky I'd stare at day after day, as much as I could.

But you're not really here

The way that Karen sings "long ago, and so very far away" pierces my soul, somehow, transcending time and sending me back to the long carpet, record burbling on the stereo. Maybe it's the first song I could grasp as "song." But it's also that the voice, the voice is supernatural, it is the aural explication of yearning. It expresses and explains longing at all the same time.

Those three words immediately push out tears from I-don't-know-where.



I should add that this is what I assume to be one of the rare times Karen is seen playing drums, which was something she loved to do.