Category: general

Hi Thursday.  Work today might suck, so I wrote this in preparation.

I like writing about music, so I thought I’d write today about songs that “move” me.  A lot of songs move me in positive ways, making me happy or pumped-up or reminiscent, but the sad songs seem to get the short shrift.  So today I want to focus on just a few songs which make me feel… sadness.  Some, in fact, move me to the point of tears; not because of some associated memory or anything, but just because the songcraft or words or whole package is done juuuust right.  Here then, are some songs that make me sad.

Save the Life of My Child – Simon & Garfunkel (from the album Bookends, 1967) [listen]

How can a song about teen suicide not be sad?

Poor kid.  Who knows what’s driven him to this.  To climb out onto the ledge of a building and contemplate ending it all.  Paul Simon narrates from a 3rd-party perspective, showing us the crowd and the cops and the poor child’s mom, begging someone to rescue her child, to not let him die.

Where does it wrench the gut?  Oh, people, if you’ve heard it all the way through and you don’t know… they you ain’t got blood in your veins.  After all that time up there, all alone with his thoughts, the crowd that’s gathered below is growing hungry with bloodlust.  As night falls and the the police train their spotlight on our protagonist, Simon almost laments, “He flew away.”  The song changes drastically, and is a cue for us to recognize that we’ve now entered the mind of our young jumper.  We hear his thoughts as he falls, “Oh my grace, I’ve got no hiding place.”  Over and over again.  The lack of resolution makes the resolution clear.

As soon as I hear that, “He flew away” bit… I get chills and can almost feel the weight of that fictional kid’s choice.  What an awesome song.

The Ballad of Humankindness – The Dears (from the album, Gang of Losers, 2006) [listen]

Who said sad songs can’t be powerful?  Because, let me tell you, if a dude did say it that dude was dead wrong.

By now you’ve maybe queued up the song from the Grooveshark link and it’s starting.  You might be wondering, “Dave… this sounds cheesey.”  Stick with me!  Please, I beg.  Just make it through the trumpet solo (and don’t let the fact that there’s a trumpet solo turn you off).  Right around the end of that solo, you’ll hear a stray tambourine… it’s your warning bell, your omen, your hint of the amazing denouement to come.  Musically, this track is like a lovely jack-in-the-box, winding and winding and winding and finally exploding into an orgasm of arpeggio guitars, steady tambourine, sing-song chorus, and that final strum-hold/strum-hold/strum-through rhythm.  Musically, it’s bright and powerful and… maybe you’d say… happy-sounding.

But lyrically… lyrically I want to re-cast it for you.  Listen to Lightburn’s words.  Listen.  Bemoaning the plight of the homeless, Lightburn asks himself what he’s been doing about it.  Indicts himself for simply “living with” such a terrible situation.  The part that cuts me to the bone is the impassioned, “I’m gonna change, I’m gonna change, I’m gonna change, I’m gonna change!” verse.  It’s a song about being disgusted with yourself for not heeding your WWJD bracelet.  Maybe the words are a bit over-the-top, but I love the sentiment.  The guilt, the shame, all of it comes across really well for me – and qualifies as a song that makes me sad.

Little Dancing Girl – Harry Connick Jr. (from the album Lofty’s Roach Souffle, 1990) [listen]

There are no words to this song.  In fact there are no words on this entire album.

But people, this is one sad song.  I don’t pretend to know what it’s about, other than maybe a little dancing girl, but I like to imagine a story in my head of a father who, for whatever reason, has lost his daughter.  Years ago, maybe it was an accident, or a divorce, or even just bad blood and a broken relationship.  This song is him remembering when things were better.  When she was maybe five and he was her idol and her rock and everything she looked up to in the world.  He can think back to that day, maybe she was just dancing around silly in the house, maybe it was her ballet recital, but it’s a perfect memory and he holds onto it.

The song really gets bad, sad-wise, when everything else drops away and all you get is the upright bass, somewhere around the 3:40 mark you get that little bass solo.  So deep and round are the notes on that big bass that you have to turn the stereo waaay up to hear it.  But this bass breakdown represents, to me, my fictional dad’s breakdown.  He knows his memory isn’t reality and this is the part where it all falls apart.  Dang.  Tearjerker (in my own mind).

She Sends Kisses – The Wrens (from the album The Meadowlands, 2003) [listen]

I wrote about this song already, back in 2004.  I loved it then and I love it now.  The lyrics are so perfect, 100% unrequited love.  The girl is gone.  She’s been gone.  He spent a lot of time missing her, still misses her, maybe not rawly or every day anymore, but he still loves her.  He’s got all these memories of the time they spent together, how much he worked for her, how badly he wanted her.  “Hopes pinned to poses honed in men’s room mirrors,” and “I put your face on her all year,” are simply amazing bits of lyric.

And then, around the crescendo things go dim.  My eyes go damp, my chest goes tight.  This poor, sad, pining sucker.  This dude is head over heels and this specter from the past just sent him a note signed with Xs and Os.  Those are stupid-letter-code for kisses!  Kisses?! That bitch!  After all this time she’s going to do this to me?!  He reads the note and sees those Xs and Os, knows what they mean and all of the sudden, “Back doors blow open.”  Every memory cued at half speed, it all comes flooding back.  Xs and Os.

Oh you poor man.  Down the rabbit hole again.

Thorn Tree In the Garden – Derek & the Dominos (from the album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, 1971) [listen]

A gorgeous song by Dominos member Bobby Whitlock.  An unbelievable stereo mix, the guitar and sparse knocking percussion clear and present and balanced.  The harmonics repeated in the background almost like bells.  I imagine I can hear Whitlock’s held-back tears.  At the end, when he goes falsetto to wonder, “And maybe some day soon, some way…” you want to just put your arms around they guy and tell him it’s going to be OK, it’s all going to be alright.

I wonder how many people have listened to this song whilst bawling over their very own lost love.  I wonder what they’d think if they learned Whitlock was actually singing about a dog.  Yeah.  A dog.  A roommate of his took his dog and killed it. Bobby hated him for it and wrote this song to “out” him to the world as the guy who did such and awful thing to the pet he loved.  Don’t worry though, those of you who may have misappropriated the track, Whitlock himself clarifies, “It’s all about love anyway. There is no love of this and not that. There’s no measure of it. Whether it’s a dog, your mother, dad, brother, sister, your companion, your horse or your neighbor, it is that one thing. It doesn’t have a distinction. There’s no barrier, it’s just one thing that encompasses everything if you stop and think about it.”

OK, that’s enough for sad songs.  Here, have a tissue.

How about you?  Got any songs that start the waterworks every time?  What did I forget?  “Tears in Heaven?”  Cash’s “Hurt” cover?  Yeah, saaaad.

Goodnight.

Saturday in California the weather went downright Springy.

70° and a few high wisps of cloud.  Sharaun had all-day (and most-of-the-night) plans with girlfriends so I was playing daycare (it’s actually kind of dumb to say that, like it’s not half my job anyway… but I find men do make jokes about it so I guess I’m part of the herd).  Around 2:30pm I decided it was too night to say inside, even if to listen to some fine music and read The Hobbit with Keaton.  Since the trees, both ornamental and fruit, needed pruning I decided it would be a good hour of sunshine and fresh air.

Put the new Dead Road Trips (’88 April Fools Day show) on the outdoor speakers and pulled out the ladder and went to work. I chopped and trimmed and shaped and formed, not really knowing if I’m doing ill or good, not really caring (OK, kinda caring if I’m forever ruining the fruit trees, but I did do some internet research – three minutes looking at “good pruning” vs. “bad pruning” pictures – beforehand) if I was doing it totally right or not.  In the end I think I did OK, although standing back and looking at the Japanese maple I think I could’ve been even more heavy-handed, guess we’ll see when the canopy begins coming in for true-Spring.  Afterward I gathered up my cut branches and put them into a pile (the green waste thing is full of winter clippings).

Know what though?  I didn’t want to write about pruning or the weather or how great it was being outside doing something.  Nope.

I wanted to write about the small blister on my right ringfinger.

It was maybe an hour.  Maybe.

How soft have I become?  Apparently that soft.  So soft that an hour, if even that, of what would be classed somewhere below “light” work leads to a blister.  Egad!  The humanity!  This life of computers and cubicles and elevators instead of stairs and supermarkets and horseless carriages and insoles has torn me down.

On YouTube this weekend I saw a video of a native dude in some dense jungle scaling a tree that must’ve been a hundred feet tall with nothing but a vine and rough-made axe.  Once at the top he walked bravely out on a spindly limb, high above the ground, not tethered to anything, and proceeded to chop a hole in the limb to reveal a massive hive of jungle-bees.  He then blew smoke from a smoldering bundle of leaves – which he’d hauled behind him tied to his waist – into the hole, getting stung the entire time.  As the angry bees swarmed, he reached bare-handed (and bare-feeted, for that matter) into the hive to break off and steal honeycomb. After hepping that honeycomb down to the jungle floor he and his family feasted on the raw comb, hungrily plunging comb and bees and all into their grateful mouths.

This is from whence we all came.

The guy who got a blister from pruning his Japanese maple… blood and mettle so thinned by time and trade.

I run from a bee.  A bee.

Goodnight.

No re-read; streaming direct; how bad is it?

My family and I were living in a condo by the beach, maybe the sixth or seventh story, high enough that we were afforded a view.  On the south side of the living room there was a large two-panel sliding glass door through which, to the north, you could see the beach, the waves themselves.  Directly outside and below was that kind of pre-beach landscape, dunes and clumps of tall windblown grasses and those kind of ivy-looking bushes that stay low to the sand.

One afternoon we all sat together, watching something on television.  Sitting nearest the glass doors, I noticed a small Jeep making its way through the dunes and grasses and ivy-looking bushes that stay low to the sand, bound for the surf.  I thought it strange, but not too strange.  In the back of the truck I could see what appeared to be several lengths of large-diameter PVC pipe.  I hmmmph’d and turned back to the TV, but only until I saw the smoke.

Now parked on the beach, I could see two figures outside the Jeep.  What I thought was pieces of PVC were now lined up in a row on the sand, the men moving from one to the next.  Suddenly, one of the pieces of PVC belched fire and smoke at the sand-end, and shot upward into the sky at high speed.  That’s when I realized: the things were some kind of rockets.  At first I was amused, thinking maybe these two guys were launching some high-grade fireworks on the sly, hiding out below the dunes to lay low from the law.  But once I saw one zoom higher and got a look at it from eye-level before it disappeared in a point far above my head, I realized they weren’t toys.  That’s when I got scared.

I turned to tell my folks, who were by now also looking outside with interest, when one of the rockets already in-flight seemed to lose power a few hundred feet above our level.  I watched as the metallic nosecone dipped towards the earth and the thing began to fall.  Before it could turn completely nose-down, however, the thruster re-engaged and began propelling the thing nearly horizontally.  I tried to say it out loud, “It’s coming right at us!,” but the thing was just too fast.  It was simply too quick to react, it was smashing through the window.

Directly across from me, I assumed my dad would be a direct hit.  Instead the thing, which I could see now was about a foot round by five feet long and had separated from the conical silvery top, lay smoking and faintly buzzing just to his left alongside the couch.  For what seemed like one terrifying, and shameful, minute – I simply cowered in a catcher’s position with my hands clamped over my ears, expecting to be consumed in a fiery explosion.  I don’t know why my reaction was inaction, I only thought it strange it after I woke from the dream.

After realizing we were all alive and that the thing which had crashed through our window still lay in two pieces on the other side of the room, I came out of my duck-and-cover position and tried to think fast.  Still very much afraid for my life and wondering if we’d all be blown up, with an edge of desperation in my voice I asked my stunned family, “What should we do?!  Should we call the cops?  Should I throw it out the door?!”  No one answered.  I began to panic.

I grabbed the body of the thing, tossed it out the shattered doors.  I watched as it fell, hit the ground, and bounced unrealistically high, near on-level again with our condo on the sixth or seventh floor.  Rockets shouldn’t bounce, I thought.  The thing dropped again, bounced again, lower this time.  Again and again until it settled in the tall grass and sand and those kind of ivy-looking bushes that stay low to the sand, seemingly now malignant and much less threatening out of the room.  Tearing myself away from watching it, I similarly tossed the metal nosecone.  Same thing; bounce-a bounce-a bounce-a and an anticlimactic ending in the dunes.

I love it when I remember dreams this well.  Goodnight.

Two of my friends at work had gasoline siphoned out of their cars while they were in the parking lot; during work.

I wonder what puts one in this circumstance?  Is this person on foot?  With a length of rubber hose coiled and hidden under his sweatshirt and a couple milk jugs tied through his beltloops, maybe?  Or are they driving?  Burning gas to steal gas, likely not even breaking even due to standard fuel economies and the volumetric constraints of such thievery?  It seems such a strange position to find yourself in.  You really need gas that bad?  Wouldn’t it be easier, and less risky, to panhandle on the train for a couple hours?  Hell, if you’re on the train, you don’t need gas anyway – you just got free money!  You’re a green thief.

Do you guys know how to steal gas?  It’s not hard.  Open the fuel door, remove the cap, drop in about three feet of rubber hose, make a loop that touches the ground, and suck hard on the loose end until the gas get to the bottom of your loop.  Holding your loop, drop the free end low to the ground to “pour” out your pilfered gas!  Congratulations, you are now a petty thief.  And, if I may add, I think you’ve chosen a poor field of thieving to focus on.  What’d you get there, maybe five gallons?  I mean, if you got much more you’d have a hard time carting it around, all sloshy and heavy.  So you saved $15 and now you have to carry a five gallon container back to your lair.

Doesn’t seem worth it.  Like those dudes who break into traffic light control boxes to rip out 300 wires for the copper  I bet the copper is a better take.  It’s also a pretty jerk crime.  One of my employees who got siphoned ended up with $600 worth of damage, everyone else just leaves work to find their car on empty.  I guess all crimes are kinda jerk crimes, except maybe jaywalking… that seems pretty innocent.  Illegal u-turns when it’s safe, that sort of thing.  But anyway…

Stealing gas seems to be admitting your stretched pretty thin, nothing better to do, maybe bored or something.  Maybe it’s kids.

I don’t know where I’m going with this.  Goodnight.

Man, Sharaun made some yum dinner.

I can still taste the garlic and onions in my mouth.  No, I might not make the best conversation partner but they are certain pungent flavors which linger in the mouth that I absolutely dig, regardless of unappealing they may make my breath.  A good tobacco is one; pipe, cigar (certainly not the wet-ashes aftertaste that is American cigarettes; making the “why” of my sometimes-vice all the murkier).  Garlic is another, as is onion, and somewhat pungent meats, like lamb. A strong cup of coffee; a properly malty beer (be easy with those hops!, meister); chocolate.  I know there are more, but Sharaun looked at me all crazy when I asked her to name some.

But anyway, it was a fancy dinner to be sure – and I even downed a nice glass of red wine alongside it (yet another pleasant mouth-memory, this lingering malaise can be damned).

The salad had red bell pepper and little bits of red onion, the meatloaf was her “Greek turkey” thing… made with spinach, feta cheese and pine nuts and topped with a homemade tzatziki sauce.  As I enjoyed each bite I kept thinking, “Man, this is some fancy junk!  I mean… like restaurant-fancy and whatnot!  No really… who else has got a wife making him this kind of fare?!”  I think the gourmet spread actually helped me make dents in this cold or sickness or whatever.  Such a well-met meal was able to sneak into those chinks and and cracks and pockets, filling them with delicious and displacing fever and weariness.  And, with the help the pine nuts and the feta and the red onion I’m sure tonight will be my eve of conquer – the night I kick this sick.

It’s good, too.  I need to get back to work something awful, and need to shave my head and face (everything from the neck-up, I suppose you could say) even more.  And… if, by some extra God-given grace, I wake feeling 100% – I’d like to spend an hour at the gym before the sawmill.  One can want, right?

Goodnight internet.

I spent all weekend cooking in my own skin.

Last night I woke so cold (that deceptive, you know it’s not real, cold of a fever) that I stumbled into the living room in the dark to grab another blanket to cover with.  As I shivered my way back to sleep I stuck the digital thermometer in my ear for a few seconds.  It beeped and I hit a button on my cellphone to get enough light to read by (why, digital thermometer people, would you not backlight the temperature readout?): 102.1°, it said.

Reluctantly, I arose again to pop another couple Tylenol.  At the same time I swallowed a Sudafed, already knowing it wouldn’t, like the others I’d popped before it hadn’t, do a dang thing to diminish the tight ball of pressure in my head – the stuffy pain that I could will to one side of my face or the other by putting that side into the pillow.  I don’t know why that muck is so hard to get out, when it seems to be beating against my cheekbones and eyes all day to do just that.

I thought maybe be tonight I’d be on the mend.  But no, I’m still fevered.  Not running as high as the previous days, but I’m still dosing with a steady regimen to keep the numbers in check.  It goes in cycles, and every few hours I’ll break out in a warm sweat and feel so much better for about sixty minutes.  Much past that, though, and the heat returns to my skin and I get a bone-tiredness that takes me back to the couch or the bed to wait out another cycle.

I know how I got sick; it was that weirdo lady on the plane.  So strange with her two kids, one of them named Sophia who was two-and-something years old yet wouldn’t stop fondling for her mom’s breast and crying.  “As you can see, I’ve not quite weaned her yet,” she said.  Hey, nothing a whit strange by world standards… I suppose – but that wasn’t what made you so odd.  Anyway, you told me as we were parting ways in the terminal: “I’d shake your hand but I’ve got a nasty cold.”  And then there you and your family were, in 29A, 29B, and 29C.  And us, occupying 28D, 28E, and 28F, we must have been well within the zone of communicability.  Oh I know it was you, weird red-headed lady… but I don’t blame you… you got it from someone too.

Luckily, most of the others in the house seem to have recovered.  It’s just me sticking it out.  I’ve all but decided to call in sick tomorrow, but am stubbornly “playing it by ear” until the alarm bell rings.

Until then, goodnight.