Sunday, May 30, 2004

You were only waiting for this moment to arise...

Nothing beats a little Blog to go along with your breakfast. Got the Beatles on my mind this morning, henceforth the title. My boy Dave McDonald played a formidable set last night at Sullivan's and commenced with a acoustically riveting version of Blackbird:

"Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free."

Dave's sort of a cross between a pesky-fisted leprachuan and a gruff chinned, hobo, rail-riding harmonica toting itinerant Bob Dylan. He has a long, cidery Amish beard and sort of talks like Theo Huxtable, i.e., "Right ON!" He writes these fairy tale folk ballads that simply dissects my limbs with evey chord. I was thinking about his song (more of an eight minute tempo-shifting acoustic opus) "Merry-Monday Happen Stance" when my own father was on his death bed. My father's face was sickly sallow--his skin correlating very closely to the offal hue of cheap beer left over from happy hour; his eyes were an even unblinking pools of copper and he my father's mouth was just sort of wedged open like some sort of cancerous lunar crater. Anyway, the moment my father shed his garment their was a scream in the hospital (also ironically, at this particular hospital, everytime a child is born a lullabye is swayed over the intercom...so here we have the entire circle of life represented. My father dying, leaving the corporeal port of life while a child is simultaneously being lifted into the world)...while all this was happening (the initial shock--more than anything else) I had the hard chord's of Dave McDonald's "Merry-Monday Happen Stance" resonating in my head and his gruff sweet-sandpaper monotone to accompany my tears. Thank you, David, for your tunes. Your songs serve as a blanket when I was very cold as well as a breeze when I am very happy and for that I am eternally grateful and will do everything I can to ferry your music (as well as Charlie's...more on him later) to the masses.

-For I proceed I need to apologize to a friend. I said something that I think might have been offensive, so, for what it's worth,(smiles) I'm sorry-

So much loneliness in the world. Met a beautiful girl last night named Jennifer. She was sort've with a cirlce of feminine heyena's having a wicked married girls night out. She kept chewing on ice and when I told her what that signified in terms of askance Freudian logic she just looked at me and smiled. As the night wore on and the crazy carousel of bodies shifted around the room, Jennifer kept talking about how lonely she was in her marriage (something about her husband and a dress) and when I left and gave her a hug and honestly told her that she was beautiful, she told me that no one had told her that for a really long time.

This hurts because growing up things are suppose to work out they way we always envisioned that they would and sometimes when we realize that sometimes, they don't, the loneliness that accompanies this self-realization can be emotionally splintering.

My cousin Amanda, eleven-months older than I am, the relative closest to me in age and probably one of the first five human beings I was introduced to, is going through a divorce right now and it's killing everyone....Amanda's a brilliant human being who graduated high-school ten years ago salutarian, nine months pregnant. Our parents sort of conducted the music at the Lutheran Church where I grew up (when I went to ruhi I would punctuate every memorizing phrase with Luther's infamous "This is most certainly true" bromide and everyone would just sort of look at me like I was weird). Classic case, she was knocked up by the son of a preacher man and the pastor himself fled town after the child was baptized. Amanda got married to a wonderful lad named Spencer in '99 and Amanda is apparently "seeking" now, feeling that the ennui of matrimony is to still-life-with-a-bowl-of-fruit and her husband just looks like he is standing over a dead puppy everytime you see him. There was death in our family a month ago and Spencer served as a pall-bearer, he worre his wedding ring while Amanda...well....

Then there's my friend (other friend-all my friends are named) Dave whose fiance told him a month before the wedding that she likes girls. She was in grad school and Dave was in the process of transfering jobs and everything.

Loneliness. Confusion. Perhaps we live in such an accelerated and marketable commodity-riddled culture that even things that are sancrosanct and important are granted a shelf-life, which hurts.

I heard an interview with novelist Nicholas Sparks, who (even though he writes very simply SUPERFICIAL sentences and portrays human beings like stiff- retail mannequins) wrote a book about a husband who, instead of going of and quote "finding himself" in an affair decides to date his wife again and I can't help but doff my hat to that idea. Sometimes, doing the right thing to do is hard and takes courage....

....can you tell I kinda struck out with Swissy-Missy? Found out what channel her commercials are on and all I can say is thank god I don't have cable anymore. Oh well, if you're going to strike out, at least strike out swinging (was I at the plate? Was I bunting when I should have hit a sacrifiece fly? Did I only grace the webbed-walls of the batting cage??????)

"You were only waiting for this moment to be free,"

On a more positive note concerning the current state of male-female relationships--my favorite movie of all times..,the movie that is perhaps the only true mediation of love I've ever seen, the movie that is merely a Gen-X talkfest; the movie that, if you've ever been in love and for some reason (space-time-identity)you find yourself unable to be with that person; the movie I first saw my senior year of highschool at 4:30 in the morning and thought about how, afterwards, in four-thousands years, if our planet is nothing more than a gigantic nuclear trash heap where commerce has destroyed culture, somehow, teh counter-archeologists of that time period will dredge up this movie through the battered nuclear detritus and understand the concept of love....the movie Linklaters BEFORE SUNRISE is making a sequel coming out in July!!!!!!

Click here to see what I mean***

http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&id=1808547751&cf=trailer&intl=us

Yap yap yap. I know, that's all I ever do. I'd go home and watch the first Before Sunrise only I gave it as a gift to Swissy-Missy, oh well. What song are you going to whistle when you already know the color of the tune? Oh, how 'bout this one...

"Blackbird fly Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise."

5 comments:

Arya said...

tip: when you want to create a clickable link, highlight the text you want to be clickable and go to the toolbar above your post and click on the chain icon. then type in the link and there you go. this post really hit me. i'll comment on it in my blog... aj

David Von Behren said...

I know, I know. Pants first, then shoes..

Arya said...

Swissy Missy is a fool

David Von Behren said...

A fool; a beautiful, beautiful fool...

Daniela Kantorova said...

On the subject of love, I recommend the book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Times of Cholera. Wonderful stuff. And then of course, what comes to mind is the story from the Seven Valleys... There was once a lover who had sighed long years in separation... you KNOW how it goes, right? (-: