It’s a long walk home at 2am (or 3am, if I were feeling honest). And it’s Vermont, so there’s ice, and you concentrate so hard on not falling that you tend to not notice what’s happening around you as you try to get from this to that. And bullshit’s happening all over, swerving cars glaring at you through half-open eyes, cops observing you from the third floor of a parking garage, 2 white-caps stumbling home trembling with dreams of Pamela Lee … and something makes you think, and you wonder if anyone’s seeing it exactly that way, and you don’t think they do but really, you know that they do. You say you don’t really smoke but you light another cigarette. Hearts are broken as often as shitty books are published. We nudge our sorrow along like discontent tugboats.…
…and there are bright moments, sure. Times when you hear it working, when you can tell what color it is, when the random tones strike a chord … and then you try to figure out the key, and it’s a fucking crap-shoot, like shooting fish or punching blindfolded. A white rook, a black knight, a double-twelve domino you’re stuck with when the Mexican Train folds. Do you still not get it? What I’m saying is that it’s a cakewalk if you’re stupid, it’s simple if you’re lucky, it’s easy if you’re blessed … and still most of us move slowly forward under the weight of the heaviest of palimpsests, the joy that knowingly shares it’s space with sorrow.
Or let me put it this way: it’s like a B string that won’t stay in tune … it feels so good playing it– so right being heard– you don’t really care that everyone else thinks it’s wrong.