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Sometimes fate just won’t let your mind rest.

My friend Josh joined me for a game of Scrabble. Seemed like a good idea, and something that would take my mind off other things. It was not meant to be. With one tile left in the bag, I had REGALES at my disposal, but nowhere to play it. I settled for attaching REGAL to an E already on the board. That left me an S and an E. I drew the one remaining tile. You guessed it.

At least there aren’t two Z tiles in the bag.

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Restlessly I searched for her thousands, hundreds of ways.
Suddenly I turned, and there she was in the receding light.

There was a time in my life at which I gave up on love. Up until that point I had engaged in what I felt to be a normal love life– I had dated lots of girls, crushed on lots more, and had a handful of full-fledged girlfriends, but I had never fallen in love with anyone. Now, I do not mean to say that I ever made a conscious decision to “give up;” I did not leap to my feet one day and declare, “I give up on love!” or do anything dramatic of the sort. It was more as if I gradually resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never capture that elusive feeling called love. Without making an active decision to do so, and without even really realizing it at the time, I didn’t date anyone for nearly a year. I turned my focus instead to my own needs, friendships, and business concerns, and had a pretty successful, if celibate, time of things. Then I stepped into an elevator and met the girl with whom I would fall in love.

Somehow, more than six years have passed since I met Sue. Our relationship has been something of a storybook one, but we are about to face our first big challenge. For the next year, she is going to be living in Los Angeles. For my geographically-challenged readers, that is about 400 miles from where we currently live, and where I will remain. I have never been a part of a long-distance relationship before, and I don’t know what to expect. Our plan is to take things as they come, whatever that means.

In the meantime, here at last is a picture of the happy couple. For whatever reason, I have not shared many pictures of myself in this blog (and, before today, none of Sue) but this seems like the right time to finally acquiesce to the requests of more than a few readers.

PICTURE DELETED

That was taken on Christmas Eve of last year. Regular readers will recall that as the date of a most exciting knife fight, chronicled here.

Also– no I do not wear a zoot suit on a daily basis. It is pure coincidence that in one of the only other pictures I have ever shared of myself here I am wearing the same ridiculous outfit. I swear.

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And if the snow buries my,
My neighborhood.
And if my parents are crying
Then I’ll dig a tunnel
From my window to yours,
Yeah, a tunnel from my window to yours.
You climb out the chimney
And meet me in the middle,
The middle of the town

I’ve been playing this song over and over and over for more than a week. I can’t get enough of it, and I cannot wait for the supposedly soon-to-come album.

Currently Playing: Arcade Fire – Tunnels

I am not using hyperbole when I say that this song may be finest combination of deeply profound, poetic lyrics and a beautiful tune I have ever heard. I am fully prepared to crown this song as just that. There may well be songs with a prettier tune, and songs with even more poignant lyrics, but none that I know have both to the degree that this one does. There are more levels to this song than I can yet comprehend, and with every listen I feel I have grasped some new element of its meaning.

I’m going to try to break down some of what I take away from the song, so bear with me as I suddenly get all abstract and emotional.

But sometimes, we remember our bedrooms,
And our parent’s bedrooms,
And the bedrooms of our friends

They have hit upon something so powerful there– the bedrooms of our parents and our friends. I think I speak for nearly everyone when I say that as a child, though willing and able to run rampant through the rest of the house, I treated my parents’ bedroom with a sense of awe and respect. It wasn’t quite off-limits, but it was certainly semi-hallowed ground, and now that I’m grown-up I remember it as somehow mysterious and larger than life. Now, that alone would have been enough of an allusion to elevate this song to the “super hella profound and deep” category, but then they immediately take it one step further– the bedrooms of our friends.

If there was trepidation in the bedroom of my parents, there was a magic in the bedrooms of my friends. At that age, your bedroom is the only place where you have any autonomy; beyond how you dress, the posters with which you adorn your bedroom walls are nearly your sole expression of self. Seeing what someone else did with their tiny corner of the world always made me question how my own little kingdom looked. Today, years later, I remember those rooms with a hallowed sense of nostalgia. The hours spent listening to music or just wondering about life were all framed by the environment of some friend’s bedroom. I hadn’t thought about it before, but that one little line in this song floods my mind with memories every time I hear it.

If I had to offer an overarching meaning, I’d say this is a song about growing up unprepared for the world that we must face as adults. Either because of death, absence, or plain negligence, so many of our parents just aren’t there to guide us, and we’re on our own. We’re a generation of children in adult’s bodies, going through the motions of adulthood without ever having earned it. That is just my take on the lyrics, and I’m sure there are many other ways to interpret this song. In truth, there are certainly numerous meanings intertwined with one another. The only certainty is that it is a song charged with powerful symbolism and poetic wordplay, perhaps none so more than when the chorus comes in for the final time: it arrives with one extra line, and it’s a line that ups the ante exponentially:

You change all the lead
Sleeping in my head to gold,
As the day grows dim,
I hear you sing a golden hymn,
The song I’ve been trying to sing

The song I’ve been trying to sing. That feeling or emotion that is forever in the back of your mind, and one you know, if you could just bring it forward, would make all the difference in the world; but one you can’t put it into concrete form. It remains hovering just behind your consciousness. To hear someone singing it– would that be to experience a moment where someone is able to make sense of everything in your life that has heretofore been a confused jumble? Or would it only add to the confusion, when a moment later the song is gone and you can’t remember exactly how it went, and it too ends up buried in the recesses of your mind, a haunting melody that you need to hear again but know you never will.

I’m normally a very literal, to-the-point writer, and when I try to put my emotional response to a song like this onto paper (computer screen?) I fear I am lacking. Much like the golden hymn in the song, I’m afraid that I am only skirting around what I feel because there really aren’t words that convey what I am feeling; or, if such words do exist, I do not know them.

Purify the colors, purify my mind
And spread the ashes of the colors
Over this heart of mine!

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Lucubration often fosters the most random, yet poignant, thoughts. Combine the deep thoughts of a late hour with a melancholy song, and you have all the ingredients for… something. I sort of lost steam there. What I believe I mean to say is, although I have a very happy life, and a positive demeanor in general, it is sometimes nice to listen to a particularly well-written sad song, and step for a moment into the persona of the singer. It’s almost enough to make me wish I were melancholy, at least for a night, just so I could better relate to the powerful sentiment the singer is expressing.

If only I’d thought of the right words
I could have held on to your heart
If only I’d thought of the right words
I wouldn’t be breaking apart
All my pictures of you

Actually, I take that back. I want to be sad so I could write a song like this, not just relate to it.

Currently Playing: The Cure – Pictures of You

You can click the artist or title to hear the song, but for those who have their speakers turned off, here are some more lyrics:

Looking so long at these pictures of you
But I never hold on to your heart
Looking so long for the words to be true
But always just breaking apart
My pictures of you

If you know me at all, you know I am a massive fan of The Smiths; which means, I am supposed to dislike Robert Smith and The Cure. I’m not that sort of music fan. There are plenty of songs by The Cure that I adore, and this one is probably my favorite of the bunch. If pressed, I’ll say I think their overall body of work is uneven, but that is a blog for a different day.

There was nothing in the world
That I ever wanted more
Than to feel you deep in my heart
There was nothing in the world
That I ever wanted more
Than to never feel the breaking apart
All my pictures of you

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As several commenters have so skillfully pointed out, I have not posted for some time. Initially this was due to the busy December party season, but a little more than a week ago my mom fell ill, and I have been with her ever since. I have three siblings, but none live in California, so until they arrived a couple days ago I’d been the only one around to help. They timed their arrivals well, however, and not just because of the pending holiday– today I’ve been feeling sick, and I’m not supposed to visit mom until I feel better. However, this means I am alone on Christmas for the first time in my life, as Sue is in Los Angeles with her family, and what little family I have is at the hospital.

I will try to post again soon, but I can’t say when that will be. In case I’m not back for a few days (or more) here is a question to ponder and/ or answer.

Today’s Question: What do you hope Santa will leave in your stocking?

Neither of my Christmas wishes will be under a tree or in a stocking come the morning.

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I discovered Nick Drake quite by accident. I’m a huge fan of The Smiths, and I when I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off I recognized one of my favorite of their songs, “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want,” being covered in spectacular fashion during the scene in the Art Institute Museum. I found out the band covering the song was The Dream Academy, and I looked for their music the next time I was in a record store. The Dream Academy had recorded a hit single, “Life in a Northern Town,” which I quickly grew to adore. At some point, I noticed the song was dedicated to someone named Nick Drake, and set about finding some of his music.

It wasn’t easy to find his albums. He only recorded three, and none sold very well. They were out of print for a while, then reissued, but not in vast quantities. Eventually, I tracked down a copy of Pink Moon and fell in love with it upon my first listen.

Currently Playing: Nick Drake – Pink Moon

Nick Drake’s story is a tragic one, and I won’t delve too deeply into it. He was a near recluse who seldom performed, was interviewed in print but once, and was never captured on film other than in childhood home movies. Pink Moon, his final, and in my opinion best, album clocks in at less than 30 minutes long. When asked why it was so short, he is said to have replied, “that’s all I had to say.” Sadly, his words were too true– he never recorded another album, and within less than three years, Drake was dead from an overdose of antidepressants. His death was ruled a suicide, though his family disputes that finding.

I saw it written and I saw it say
Pink moon is on its way
And none of you stand so tall
Pink moon gonna’ get you all

So simple, and yet if you hear it sung, and the accompanying music, you can’t help but feel your soul overwhelmed by anguish mixed with beauty. More so than any other singer I know, Drake’s music encompasses heartache and sorrow in a way vague enough to allow you to apply it to your own life, and yet in a manner that appears deeply personal at the same time. Many bands accomplish the first half of that equation; Radiohead comes to mind. Myriad others capture the latter half; Morrissey anyone? Who but Nick Drake successfully juggled both elements at once?

In the opening paragraph I traced my meandering journey to discovering Drake’s music, because in many ways it mirrors the equally rambling path his music took from unknown to popular. For nearly 30 years after his death, Drake and his music languished in obscurity, only surfacing occasionally, as in the dedication that helped me discover him. In another blip on the radar, Robert Smith once stated that his band The Cure was named after a Nick Drake lyric, taken from “Time Has Told Me,” another one of my favorite Drake songs.

Time has told me
You’re a rare rare find
A troubled cure
For a troubled mind.

Then, nearly overnight, Nick Drake became a posthumous celebrity. “Pink Moon” was used as the backing track for a car commercial, and within a few days, the improbable had happened– Nick Drake knocked N*Sync out of the Top 5. When I read the headline I was dumbfounded. I hadn’t seen the commercial, and my mind could not comprehend what I was reading. “Obscure English Folk Singer Nick Drake Nudges Pop Superstars N*Sync from Chart” made as much sense to me as would have “Jimmy Hoffa Found Living on Venus.” Once I read the article and learned about the commercial, of course it all became clear, but that may have been the only moment in my life where I was awake and honestly wondered if I were dreaming.

I’ll close with an excerpt from “Life in a Northern Town,” the tribute to Nick Drake that led me to discover his beautiful, yet pained, songs.

The evening had turned to rain
Watch the water roll down the drain,
As we followed him down
To the station
And though he never would wave goodbye,
You could see it written in his eyes
As the train rolled out of sight
Bye-bye.