Your First Least Favorite Songs

Hating stuff is boring. It’s easy, and unproductive. And yet we sometimes strangely seem to enjoy the act of disliking the music we dislike most; just check all the random internet lists and YouTube videos of “Songs You Love To Hate”. 

We may have fun with these things, but in this age of musical plenty, not to mention abundant access, isn’t it so much easier, and healthier, to focus on the stuff we like? Sometimes I suspect we focus on stuff we dislike out of some kind of insecurity within ourselves that we don’t yet understand. But that’s a whole other rabbit hole. And let’s not even get started on “guilty pleasures.” 

That said, of all the things to expend energy on hating, songs are relatively harmless. And maybe investigating why we dislike specific songs can help us shape or understand our own personal taste. 

“Love Will Keep Us Together” is an innocent song, it doesn’t deserve hatred. Yet since the days I first endured its omnipresence on pop radio I’ve hated Captain and Tenille’s huge 1975 hit with a passion most reasonable people reserve for street mimes or political lobbyists. 

It isn’t any one specific aspect of the song that inspires my loathing, it’s sunk by a whole collective gathering of musical traits - any one or two of which might be inoffensive on their own in some other song. The bounciness, the sugar-sweet melody, the perky delivery, the overwhelming cuteness of it all - it’s a perfect storm of horrific American mildness.

I’ve listened to the song recently, just to try to come to grips with it somehow, and I can recognize why so many people loved it. It’s a catchy, tight, perfectly Pop production. Light as air, well-meaning, fun. I even kind of like the way she says ‘whatever’ with the same kind of shrug that came so naturally to any number of grunge alterna-kids twenty years later.  

So maybe I just don’t want to like it. But, you know, taste is yours to do with as you please. It doesn’t bow to logic, and it doesn’t cave to pressure easily. We can nudge it in specific directions via willpower or intellect, but it mostly works from intuition and gut feeling. And my guts hate this song. Quite literally, actually. One night during the song’s reign of relentlessly bubbly terror I ate way too much Frankenberry and got sick, and in the moments of peak nausea I happened to be watching Captain and Tenille performing the song on television. So yeah, after that the song became an instant trigger for revulsion. Which explains why it endures in my world as a least-favorite song, a kind of anti-“Jumping Jack Flash”. 

“Love Will Keep Us Together” is innocuous enough, at least. It’s meant to be purely frivolous. At the other end of this spectrum is another monstrosity that hit big right around the same time, Barry Manilow’s impossibly portentous "I Write The Songs". It was written by Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, who was perhaps inspired by Brian Wilson’s frequent musings on the power of music. Brian Wilson, however, surely never came up with anything as sodden and overwrought as “I Write the Songs”. The lugubrious, desperately dramatic piano and orchestral arrangement set the tone, and the words do the rest. Manilow sings from the point of view of the original inspirational spirit, the embodiment of music itself, no less than the author of the very first song. “I AM MUSIC / and I write the songs”. Oh brother. 

Even as a small child I thought the whole thing was an overblown embarrassment, though I definitely wouldn’t have been able to articulate it that way or explain why. More likely I’d just squirm and grimace and wonder why the song made me feel the opposite way that “Pinball Wizard” did. The line that makes me shake my head even now is “I write the songs of love / and special things”. Seriously, what a terrible line. Special things? What a vague, weak, borderline nonsensical term. Argh. Again, though, this is just one irritating moment. History is filled with great songs with terrible, mediocre or meaningless lyrics. It’s the bad lyric combined with the dreary pomposity of the music that makes it lethal. Damn, I feel dreary and pompous even talking about it - see what I mean about hating stuff being unproductive?  

Millions of people loved these songs, and that has to count for plenty. And the artists in question surely meant no ill will. John Denver was by all accounts a thoroughly decent guy - kind, thoughtful, funny, dedicated to philanthropic causes like environmental conservation and animal welfare. Disliking his music feels like a betrayal of common decency. 

Yet there it is, a song that stirs up an almost indescribable malaise right at the core of my soul:  “Sunshine On My Shoulders”. Denver’s 1974 number one hit should stand in stark contrast to both the bounciness of “Love Will Keep Us Together” and the pomp of “I Write The Songs” in that it is a relatively modest tune - a gentle ode to the wonders of nature. However, it earns its spot in my own personal pantheon of Songs Barely Preferable to Water Torture via the same unwieldy sappiness that permeates both of those other Billboard hits. It even has the same soporific tone and sloppy emotionalism as the Manilow song. 

“Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy.” Somehow this first line, and everything that followed, was more than just an irritant when I was younger. Maybe this goes back to what I said earlier about disliking a certain song because it hits a nerve that exposes some kind of deep-seated insecurity. But I like sunshine and happiness as much as the next guy, I swear! 

In any case, the song filled me with a kind of existential restlessness, a bland, hopeless feeling that I couldn’t begin to understand or explain, and can’t really now. Could a lousy but ultimately benign song really provoke that kind of feeling? What happens in our brains that music can sometimes inspire such an extreme reaction?  

I dunno, maybe I’m exaggerating the effect. Doesn’t feel like it though. This is a thing that music is also good for - it allows us to feel and process genuine feelings in a way that is more or less harmless to the world at large. More or less, I said. I mean, songs have provided some degree of inspiration or motivation for any number of people to do any number of things, but those actions are ultimately that person’s choice. Just as a famous for-instance, those Beatles songs that Manson and his followers unfortunately tapped as inspirations were innocent in and of themselves. 

“Sunshine On My Shoulders” eventually earned a measure of redemption in my world when in early adulthood I worked as a DJ at my hometown’s Country/AC radio station. We had the song on our playlist in its longer album version, one that stretched past the five minute mark. This meant when it was on I had time to run down to the bathroom or grab a soda, or talk mindlessly on the phone to my friends for a few extra minutes. So despite the weird unease it still inspired when I listened closely, it eventually served a function.   

The point is that taste is wildly, ridiculously, amazingly subjective. And subject to various shifty associations. Each of our own inner pantheons of favorite music is filled with artists and songs that other people loathe. In this day and age it’s so easy to find music to love and to avoid the music you don’t care for. Why not take joy where you find it, and ignore everything else?

PS, Carl Wilson (the critic, not the Beach Boy) wrote a whole book about the nature of taste for Bloomsbury’s 33 and 1/3rd series, using Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love as a jumping-off point. It’s way more than worth the time and it’ll tell you more about the vagaries of taste and subjectivity than I ever could.

And It's Always 1975

What are the songs in your life that immediately trigger memories of joy, excitement, wonder? Aren’t the feelings these songs arouse so palpable as to be felt in a near-physical way? Music works like a damn time machine. My friend Mike G likes to tell the story of being at the community swimming pool as a kid in the mid seventies and hearing Wings’ “Listen to What the Man Said” on the radio, and how the blue waves and bright sun and wet concrete all combined with that song’s light, skipping tempo and warm-breeze chorus to create a whole new feeling beyond mere, momentary joy. It’s a feeling that might be indescribable except to say it’s the feeling that happened at the pool as a kid listening to “Listen What the Man Said”. It’s a feeling that still exists, accessible to him anytime because the song still exists. 

This effect doesn’t necessarily happen in an obvious, overwhelming way. The endless parade of radio hits that filtered into my consciousness beginning in the mid-seventies often cast small spells via small means. A single turn of phrase delivered with a certain style could do it, like, say, Linda Ronstadt in the measured, slow-burning intensity she brings to the build-up to the chorus of “You’re No Good”. Or maybe it could happen with an evocative mood or atmosphere, like the mysterious hint of backwoods voodoo rippling through the first half of The Doobie Brothers’ “Black Water”. These songs aren’t particularly personal favorites, though I like them well enough. Doesn’t matter, they implanted themselves in my brain and soul at a very impressionable age, and these moments within the songs still produce at the very least some tiny measure of simple pleasure or joy, and you take that kind of stuff where you find it.  

You might find it in small and large ways within the same song. Any or all of the musical hooks studded throughout David Bowie’s “Fame” - the chicken-scratch rhythm, the title repeated in a half-dozen different ways, that fuzz guitar lick that punctuates each line of the verse - may conspire to summon flashbacks of the environment I existed in at four years old, in that tiny four-bedroom house with the dark red carpet and day-glo curtains, and the accompanying strange sensation of everyday newness, in which a simple trip to Grandma’s or the grocery store may as well have been a voyage to the other side of the world. Through the years that song has roused these sensations. Except when it hasn’t. Sometimes I just enjoy the song for what it is, outside of any of the associations I’ve assigned to it. Either way, as when I was four, I still find myself waiting for that weird high-pitched voice near the end that repeats the title over and over as it floats from one speaker to the other, descending in pitch on the way down to a low, robotic moan. Again, “Fame” isn’t necessarily a favorite, even (or especially) in Bowie’s catalog, but it is dependably evocative. Weirdly elastic, both earthly and alien, it can withstand repetition.

Repetition can warp perceptions. How many times have you heard “Born to Run”? Bruce Springsteen’s signature song now seems so much a ‘signature song’ - a treatise, a summation, a big statement - that its original impact may have been blunted. We risk not hearing what’s actually there in the music because our minds are too busy responding to the associations we’ve accumulated over time. However we feel about Springsteen and his music, the temptation might be to boil it all down to a cartoon caricature. Here, for instance, he’s the shaggy street poet, the rebellious everyman singing an anthem of unbridled romanticism. Love it or hate it, we risk missing the substance of the song altogether. I remember hearing it in 1975, though, when none of these things made any difference and I was too young to understand what the difference might be anyway. Riding around in the back seat of the car - my father driving, one of his buddies in the passenger seat, conversation some kind of secret language I felt I probably ought to be learning, heavy cigarette smoke not a nuisance but an accepted given - so when the song burst out of the radio as background to all this it seemed vaguely scary, maybe a little sad, what with all that stuff about broken heroes and last chances and that whole widescreen, windswept quality that implied that everything might just explode or disappear any minute now. The song seemed very adult. In many ways, it is. If you wanna hear it that way. 

When I heard Jefferson Starship’s “Miracles” I had to hear it in whatever way I wanted, not being old enough to grasp the overtly erotic subject matter. Like Springsteen’s song it seemed very ‘adult’ as well, though I wasn’t sure in what way. All I could really grasp was that amazingly gorgeous chorus melody that rises and falls and sways and shifts, stretching the word “by” into roughly six syllables. Background vocals encouraging the lead, chattering like distractible ghosts. The whole languid atmosphere carried along by a sleazy, spaced-out keyboard sound, a dominant feature of so many early/mid-seventies songs. The melodic sensibility at work in Marty Balin’s vocal is the central magnetic pull, though, and it cast such a strong spell that it’s little wonder it took me so many years to notice the lyric that explicitly references cunnilingus.  

Misapprehension might be the defining factor in 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love”. The song is almost all atmosphere - languorous, hazy, floating, threatening to disappear altogether. The lyrical approach plays with an old songwriting trope - saying one thing and meaning another. The singer repeats the title phrase like he’s trying to convince himself, while it’s obvious to the listener that he protests too much. Meanwhile we’re swept up by the mood, all the gauzy production touches that slip the song into an ethereal realm. The weirdest and most compelling touch when I was four was the disembodied voice that appears in the song’s interlude, whispering “big boys don’t cry” again and again like a mantra. I didn’t understand what that meant, the whole segment seemed out of place in the song somehow. Plus I misheard the phrase anyway - I thought he was saying the very nonsensical “keep poison quiet”. I wanted so badly to know what that meant. I thought it might be some kind of occult thing, an incantation or something, not that I would have been able to articulate it that way. That one misheard phrase affected the way I would hear the song altogether, so the whole thing seemed like something witchy. I still hear it that way. Stage whispers still freak me out.

All these songs just happened to be there, they were in the air when me and Mike G and maybe you just happened to be there, doing whatever we were doing. Maybe we would have liked the songs in any circumstance or maybe we wouldn’t have, either way they appeared and they mixed with our lives and created associations that linger way beyond the initial hearing. 

1975 happened, but it’s still happening, and we can make it happen again.

Elton Is Everywhere, Elton Is Everything

One day in 1975, when I was four years old, both of my teenage sisters came rushing breathlessly into the house, each clutching a poster of the rock star who was dominating pretty much the entire cultural landscape at the time; Elton John. They were so excited I was afraid they might spontaneously combust. The sheer bubbling-over exuberance of my sisters’ enthusiasm was a thing that both took me by surprise and thrilled me. It was contagious. What was it about this guy with the glittery outfits and oversized glasses that made them feel that way? Whatever it might be, I wanted in. I mean, at four you don’t necessarily need a good reason to jump up and down in place while squealing, but if you can get one, all the better. 

I’d seen him on television singing “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds”, a giant radio hit earlier in the year. The song itself was easy enough for a child to latch onto; a visionary, dreamlike thing, redolent of Wizard of Oz, so full of colors and strange sensations, the verses a flowing, languid travelogue that bursts suddenly upward like fireworks into a shouted, stratospheric chorus. Someone helpfully explained to me that the song had originally been written and performed by The Beatles, the same group who had come up with “Octopus’s Garden”, which I had loved so long ago, when I was three. That’s pretty interesting, I must’ve thought, if I thought about it at all.

During Elton’s tv performance he wore one of those signature silvery outfits, occupying the center of the screen, glasses glittering, while in a bit of special effects trickery a group of tiny colorful Elton heads danced around him in a circular pattern. This was a typically seventies touch, fitting for a track that contained, as Rob Sheffield memorably described it in his book Dreaming The Beatles, “the world’s cokiest xylophone solo”. Those floating heads, in conjunction with the day-glo dreaminess of the song, became the stuff my dreams were made of. 

Next came a family trip to see the movie adaptation of the Who’s Tommy, in which Elton had a brief but dizzyingly colorful turn as the Pinball Wizard. His rendition of the song was exciting enough, all power chords and flashy piano trills, but it was the visuals that really clinched the deal. The requisite giant glasses and glitter were as ever in place, but he also wore a multicolored knit hat with a giant pinball on top, along with white pants trailing tightly down to a set of ridiculous giant brown boots, yellow laces tied in orderly rows. The boots were so large Elton had to wear stilts in order to fit into them. Oh, and the pinball machine he was playing doubled as a piano.

The whole scene is an overdose of seventies spectacle, garish and excessive. And it blew my tiny four-year-old mind.

Elton John, one-man excitement generator, had pushed impressionable young me into a new realm of sensory overload, where anything less than some combination of color, lights, catchy refrains, and an overarching sense of absurd wonder seemed insufficient. It was an infection of mind and body, almost ghostly. 

I wanted to wear the boots, and I wanted to be in the crowd cheering Elton on, and I wanted to be in the pinball machine, being bounced around by the flashing lights and crazy colors. I wanted to be inside the song, vibrating, stretching to fit inside the power chords and piano flourishes. 

I wanted to be the flashpoint, the aftershock, the signal and the noise. 

Wouldn’t you? 

Look at those boots!

More Songs About Dirt Roads And Rain

I was an indoor kid. I liked comic books and television and whatever sounds happened to be emanating from the radio. This doesn’t mean I didn’t like being outdoors at all - far from it. Our backyard was ripe ground for exploration. Me being a very small person at the time, that yard seemed to go on forever, green all around, like a couple of damn football fields. Of course it was actually only a patch of grass, maybe a couple dozen square feet. Whatever. The imagination distorts things, and I say let it. At least when it comes to things as relatively inconsequential as backyards. I mean, don’t push it.

My family used to go fishing sometimes. That’s an odd memory to consider now, given that several decades later I am still very much an indoor kid, with an aversion to anything that bites, anything that is slimy, and any situation in which I might have to walk around in wet clothes for any length of time. But when I was a kid, I loved these fishing trips. It meant dirt roads and strange vegetation, weird rocks and insects and animals. Those hordes of cattails popping up out of the ground seemed so exotic to my young imagination. Compared to the household plants my mom kept around they seemed like some kind of hallucinatory vision.

These fishing trips would have happened roughly in 1975, right around the time that Willie Nelson had an enormous hit with his cover of the classic Fred Rose country tune “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain”. It’s an unassuming song, so short and spare it almost floats away. But if you put together a playlist of songs to go fishing to, it would surely be in strong consideration. Something in the lilting, lonesome sound practically begs to have a bonfire built. 

Country music wasn’t as ubiquitous in my world as one might have guessed given that I grew up within a few miles of Nashville. We listened almost exclusively to pop radio. Willie’s song crossed over to the pop charts that year, so it was all over the airwaves. Even if that hadn’t been the case I would have heard it anyway, because my father was a big Willie Nelson fan.

More broadly, my father was a fan of a particular style of folk music; one that incorporated blues and country in a way that melded them together so that the music seemed elemental, made up of dirt and dampness, humidity and grit.

One of his favorites was the self-titled debut of the folksinger Bob Frank, released on Vanguard records in 1972. Frank looked to me like a character right out of my father’s own circle of friends - scraggly facial hair, faded jeans, playing a beat-up acoustic guitar. He sang songs about getting drunk and getting stoned and spending the night in jail, the burr in his quavery southern drawl suggesting a man who sang from firsthand experience. 

If the song titles tell a good deal of the story - “Wino”, “Return to Skid Row Joe”, “Memphis Jail” - the rest is summed up by the loping, laid-back mood that the acoustic-with-harmonica sound creates. Scruffy, lightly comic in a self-deprecating way, the album evokes light breezes and weedy patches of grass. It’s back porch music; like when a sudden rain shower has soaked you to the bone and sent you scurrying for shelter. And maybe there’s a dollar bottle of rose grape wine on that back porch. 

Our little town suffered flash floods during Spring 1975 and I remember being caught in one. We were in the car and the rain came so heavy and hard that the windshield became a pure white blur. Opening the car door lightly we could see a river of water rushing by underneath. Luckily it subsided before we were completely stranded and we were able to get home. I remember the feeling in the air later that day, a kind of heaviness, elusive, like it was the end of something and the beginning of something else.

A mirage had appeared. My young brain couldn’t process it logically, so I stuffed it, fully, mysteriously intact, into the songs I’d been hearing.

In his song “Paradise” John Prine sings about traveling with his family to Muhlenberg County in Kentucky, going down the Green River (maybe the same one that CCR sang about, why not?) to see the abandoned prison and shoot bottles with pistols. With a keening fiddle and a melody that seems remembered from an echo heard long ago in a mountain grove somewhere, Prine’s song carries whoever hears it to their own long-gone childhood idyll, real or imagined.

That old-timey backwoods feeling rang in my consciousness like a railroad whistle during those days when it had been raining and everything was green and growing. Scattered gravel here and there, mosquitos buzzing over puddles.

Nostalgia’s no good, you can get drunk on it as surely as you can cheap wine. Even John Prine admits that his childhood memories are worn, and that’s before he explains that Paradise was ruined when the coal company came along and stripped the land. 

Likewise, distorted memories can do a lot of harm. We make unwarranted connections, assign motives and blame in spurious ways, often based on recollections that may or may not be completely dependable. 

Feelings are powerful, though, and so are the songs that we use to mirror and decipher and explain or expunge them. Songs have a tendency to absorb and retain feelings so that when we hear them years or decades later the feelings are as fresh and vivid as when we first experienced them. In this way, they are extremely useful. 

It’s up to us how we want to sort through our own feelings, and the simple nostalgia or cheap fantasy that a song can evoke are viable, relatively harmless options. If I wanna get that feeling of dampness and back porch breezes, it’s easy enough. That Bob Frank album contains it all in convenient song form. All the moss-covered rocks, high swaying cattails leading down to a dirt path beside a small stream that I may or may not be remembering accurately, it doesn’t matter, because it’s there, easy to access. 

It’s a feeling that I can’t get much of anywhere else, short of going camping. Please don’t make me go camping. Why bother going outdoors when you can just put on a record?

Your First Favorite Songs

What’s the first song you remember noticing? Not necessarily the first song you remember liking or disliking, just the first song that registered in your consciousness, for whatever reason. Do you feel as though that particular song says anything substantial about the person that you were, or the person that you became?

I remember hearing “Octopus’s Garden”. I must’ve been around three years old. That’s a fairly predictable first song not only for those of my generation (the one they call X, and in typical Gen X fashion I am alternately annoyed and blasé about being part of it) but subsequent generations as well. I’m betting a pretty huge percentage of people born after 1967 or so remember hearing this one or “Yellow Submarine” pretty early on in life.

Underwater Beatles songs plus childhood equals a unique kind of enchantment. I suspect it can shape the way we hear music from that point on. 

As children we are often confined to limited territory. Four walls, a few rooms. Maybe a decent-sized yard, if you're lucky. Given these physical limitations, the naturally expansive imagination of childhood can carry us great distances. At three years old I’m pretty sure I could imagine my way through several brick walls. Pretty sure you could too. But if our own willpower couldn’t give us the kickstart we needed, maybe the right song could get the job done.

I remember hearing Three Dog Night singing about being on the road to Shambala. All those tumbling rhythms and shouted gospel choruses induced a peculiar fascination in my young mind. I had no idea where Shambala was or what happened there, but it seemed pretty exotic. The song’s spiritual overtones seeped in, too, what with the promise that Shambala, or the journey to it, is going to wash away our troubles and fears. 

My only troubles at the time I heard the song amounted to a few lost or broken Tinker Toys. Fear, on the other hand, wasn’t in short supply, given the preponderance of mysterious shadows in my little world, not to mention the bewildering behavior of all those tall people. Shambala seemed like a pretty good place to escape to, wherever it might be.  

As we get older we lose trust in our own imaginations. We realize we can’t really go hang out with our octopus friends, so why bother even thinking about it? Shambala? Not even a real place, don’t try booking a trip. 

When I was in my late teens, I heard “Shambala” on the radio for the first time in years. My initial reaction was that it seemed quaint, like a childish thing I had outgrown. On reflection, and maybe on some deeper level, hearing the song again reconnected me with the sense of liberation, spiritual and physical, that so captivated my imagination when I was younger.  

It isn’t a matter of whether I liked the song or not. I’m not sure if I ever did. The point is the song established a feeling, an aura, that carried across years, a decade even, and remained intact.

Music triggers memories, it stirs feelings, it shapes resonances in ways both obvious and subtle. That might be a well-worn truism, but it’s hardly meaningless. It’s pretty meaningful, in a pretty huge way. It also might be beside the point. Music works in so many ways. 

Maybe hearing those particular songs at an early age served as a kind of guideline, prompting me to seek music that could provide a sense of escape, of flight and freedom, of an elsewhere worth visiting, if not living in.

When I was in my teens I also discovered Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix. Side three contains a suite of songs that venture into underwater territory, keyed by the title “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn To Be)”. In some sense the lyrical content of these songs might be a cheesy sci-fi adventure tale, but the overall sound, the mood, is dreamlike. Hypnotic, with spiritual undercurrents, so to speak. This was definitely a territory worth exploring, at the very least an escape from the same familiar roads of small town life, from typical teenage emotional perplexities, from going to the damn mall again.   

By this time those aquatic Beatles songs had come to seem like childish things. I came to love them again later (seriously, listen to the way Octopus’s Garden sounds, it’s a marvel of sonic production) but maybe they had already served a key purpose, priming me for this Hendrix music, providing a ramp for lift-off, or a safe vessel in which to submerge.

Later I would discover Can’s Future Days and Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom, each similarly watery and exploratory, alternately ruminative and reaching out with an unassuming sense of wonder. 

    

The territory mapped out in this music is not merely some kind of wistful remembrance of a more innocent time, and it isn’t necessarily an imaginary paradise to escape to. Or it doesn’t have to be only those things.

In a sense, it can be a real place. A place to exist, anywhere, at any point in time, regardless of age, or the perceived limits of your own imagination. 

We can go there now.

Man Of The Moon

     First thing I remember I was lying in my bed, couldn't have been no more than one or two. A figure with a triangular head and long, insect-like limbs hovered over me in the darkness. I wasn't afraid. 

     Another time I was turning over in bed and I saw a shadow glide across the wall. Eerie and slow. That took me by surprise. I didn't know what a shadow was. To me it was an entity, an enemy. I wailed like a baby because I was one. The insect figure comforted me.

     Maybe the shadow was my own, meaning I was scared of my own shadow. It wouldn't be the last time. 

     Another time my mother and I sat looking out the window. It was nighttime. The moon was full. Tree branches stretched up against the sky. Stars, clouds, huge patches of dark blue nothing. I had a sense that nighttime was a dense, deep thing, full of strange possibilities. 

     My mother was explaining to me that a man had recently gone to the moon. I couldn't quite grasp the meaning, I thought the man was still up there. For a long time afterwards I believed a person claimed residence on that pockmarked ball in the sky. I was vaguely jealous. 

     The man in the moon, the man of the moon.

     Why can't we all go live on that moon?

 

     

This Will Be A Year

Prediction: This is going to be a year.

There will be many days and hours and minutes.

You’ll lose track of it all and be very confused.

You will conquer all of your demons. But they will all be resurrected, a process that you yourself will oversee.

You will go somewhere, then you will come back again, and then you’ll pass out fully-dressed on the couch with the television on, waking up later with a mysterious stain on your shirt, and an unfamiliar phone number written in black ink on your hand, but the numbers will be blurred, leaving you with an acute sense of missed opportunity.

You will have the feeling that you are being watched. You probably are.

You will secretly, and in great detail, plot the murder of a co-worker.

You will be in a car, and you will wish very hard that this car could take you somewhere other than the place you are actually going. Then you will end up at work.

Orgasms will happen.

That thing you always wanted to happen will happen, but it won’t be as good as you thought it would be.

Something that you never expected to happen will happen, and it will be fantastic.

You will wake up, and wonder if you are dreaming.

Other things will happen.

Nothing will happen.

There will be words and words and more words and crying and flesh and smiles.

We are living in a golden age of days running one into another.

Have fun with it, if you can.