Thunder Struck a Chord Up in the Sky

A brief, fleeting glimpse...

It flashes before you. An instant.

In which everything seems to freeze and the cascading mirror images of eternity all line up.

Your stomach does flips as you remember everything you've seen. Everywhere you've been. Everyone you've known.

Time slides to a stop.

Everything collapses in on itself.

A singularity. A moment -- perfectly wonderful and perfectly horrible.

As the universe pauses, you cock your head to the side. This is what eternity feels like.

This is everything. Everything that's ever been and everything that ever will be.

This is the perfect coalition of everything it means to be alive.

But we're not built for eternity. So the shadows creep in from your peripheral vision. And the building blocks of atomic nuclei collapse in on each other.

The flip side of everything rears its ugly head. And you see nothing. Nowhere.

This is what it means to be dead. The imperfect absence of everything you treasure, everything that hurt you, everything you thought you'd forgotten.

And desperately want to remember.

And then the moment passes. Time speeds up.

And you look around at the world, with no explanation but a knowledge that everything's changed.

It's the End, the End of the 70s

It's the End, the End of the Century

"You can't take yourself so seriously," she said.

And I stared at her, thought of her rituals. The way she tapped the end of the cigarette. The way she flipped open the Zippo. The way the smoke curled around her like a wispy castanet.

I wanted to say something about the musical lines of her neck and the perfect tonic chord of her breasts. But instead I started ranting about media consolidation. And how radio had died but we didn't want to realize it, so it kept marching like a zombie, desperate for brains and unwilling to recognize it was no longer among the living.

And she smiled, took a long drag on the cigarette, then turned and exhaled it out the window. Where it floated upwards, past other tiny apartments like the one we were in.

"I don't remember radio," she said.

And I realized my memories of radio were third-hand. Not the Alan Freeds, not the Wolfmen Jack, but the ones influenced by them. The ones who'd slowly sell off their vinyl collection and get jobs in finance while the radio stations they once called home were swallowed up by conglomerates, programmed by consultants who'd never set foot in the market, and prerecorded to eliminate the need for even the most underpaid of disk jockeys.

I thought of listing the fourteen songs I knew with her name in the title. Or the 10 bands I'd seen that came from her home state. Or the 8 singer/songwriters her toes reminded me of (leaving out the fact that big toes never remind me of anyone).

But instead, I told her this: "I had a dream that John Lennon wasn't killed. And he wrote a song for the Ramones after they bonded about all having been held at gunpoint by Phil Spector. Lennon's song finally gave the Ramones the hit single they'd been dreaming of for all their lives. A real smash pop song."

And she stubbed out the cigarette, unzipped the knee-hi brown leather boots she'd been wearing and said "You think too much. Even in your dreams you think too much."

Every Generation Throws a Hero Up the Pop Charts

There are stories for both of these...

I'll tell them someday.



But not just yet.

For What It's Worth

Sha La La La La. Embedding on this one's disabled, but click here.

Dogs and Everything

Portions originally posted a year ago.

The Iditarod starts today. Or Tomorrow. Depending on how you look at it.

The race has a ceremonial start in Anchorage today. Mushers and "Iditariders" go 11 miles through downtown Anchorage and out into the woods on ski and bike trails.

About 15,000 people come out to watch the mushers live. It's packed shoulder to shoulder downtown, but if you move 10 blocks away the crowds are much more spread out. And if you go into the woods where the bike trails are and the locals hand out cookies, hot dogs, and pastries, you can go a few hundred yards in between clumps of fans.

There's a lot you might not be to know watching the event on TV. The first thing is the total will and concentration of the dogs -- their controlled bursts of energy and the quiet intensity of their breathing.

The second is the complete and total joy of the mushers. (As much as this comes through on TV, it's a million times more intense to see it live.)

The third thing is how happy the crowds are. Yes, this is a weird event with its own customs and rituals, but it's also an event that fans can feel is theirs. Mushers mingle with fans freely in a way that's unimaginable for the top competitors in any of the larger professional sports.

Today is just for fun.

No one keeps track of today's times because they don't really count.

The real race begins tomorrow in Willow (about 70 miles away) and the winner will likely arrive in Nome 9 or 10 days later.

It's hard and it's cold and it's long. And the people and dogs who run this race are amazing and disciplined and tough.

And inspiring.

Which reminds me of this.

Left and Leaving

Wish I had a socket set to dismantle this morning

In a lot of the best songs by the Weakerthans, melancholy and hopefulness engage in a battle of wills.

The longing drips from the songs, enhanced by clever wordplay and a point of view that combines the best of world-weariness and childlike creativity.

Who among us hasn't sometime wanted to go to construction sites and tape notes to heavy machinery saying "We hope you get to be happy some time."

Or:

We've got a lot of time
Or maybe we don't
But I'd like to think so
So let me pretend

So this morning, as the fog lingers on the mountains surrounding Anchorage, and the sunlight reflects white and blue off the cold peaks, I heard this song, melted into the music of the saw... and had to share it.

Denny Laine, the Barber Shaves Another Customer

In Glorious Black and White

Steve Simels over at the great PowerPop blog posted this lovely piece by the "pre-cosmic" Moody Blues.

Hard to argue with that. As a bonus, it's as much fun to watch as it is to listen to.

(Note to self: don't use up all your cleverness on the post title; save some for the post itself...)