Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
“Even Now” began streaming in my head like I was listening to the radio in 1983. There’d been nothing in my head except, “Where’s the towel?” Then here’s Bob singing, “There’s a highway, a lonesome stretch of gray.”
I said, “Bob, baby, why?”
He said, “Even now, she’s all that I want, all that I need.”
“Bob, that’s answering my question, is it, Bob?”
“She’s givin’ it all, she’s givin’ it free.”
I accepted it; the Universe had chosen my Sunday morning music.
1991.
I usually think that INXS was performing this song. The beat and vocal delivery reminds me of INXS although, listening, it’s clearly not Michael Hutchence singing. The driving, fast rhythms always moved people in the clubs. It remains a good walking song. I have also sung it to a number of cats through the years. They always just sit down and wait it out.
The monthly black mood is coming on, one with a rich ore of self-pity. Trying to wrestle myself out of the mood this morning, I started telling myself what I really wanted. That transitioned to all I really want. Lyrics from the Alanis Morissette song, “All I Really Want” (1997) crashed the stream.
And all I really want is some peace man
A place to find a common ground
And all I really want is a wavelength, ah
And all I really want is some comfort
A way to get my hands untied
And all I really want is some justice, ah
What I really want turns out to be a complicated network of hopes, dreams, desires, and longing. Some of it requires a time machine. I think more of it requires different DNA.
The heat is rising. For some reason, my music stream suddenly feels with songs about heat and fire. Johnny Cash’s “Burning Ring of Fire” flexes its tones. Glenn Frey steps up with the Beverly Hills Cop tune, “The Heat is On”. The Lovin’ Spoonful brings in “Summer in the City”. Nick Childer steps into the stream with “Hot Child in the City”. Ella sings “Summertime”, and then a chain of other summer songs stream in.
But, dudes, this is about the heat, not the summer. Today is projected to be 105 F. The song that firmly plants itself is Robert Palmer fronting Power Station with “Some Like It Hot” (1985).
Feel the heat, pushing you to decide
Feel the heat, burning you up, ready or not
Some like it hot and some sweat when the heat is on
Some feel the heat and decide that they can’t go on
Some like it hot, but you can’t tell how hot ’til you try
Some like it hot, so let’s turn up the heat ’til we fry
Read more: Robert Palmer – Some Like It Hot Lyrics | MetroLyrics
Let’s all be careful out there.
Watching some people do some shit, reading about people doing shit, I trend toward thinking about karma. The woman who runs the red light, narrowing missing people in the crosswalk, the lying politicians who claim that there’s nothing to be done about so many problems, corporations cheating and lying for another penny of profit, and a motley collection of other idiots doing mean, cruel, or nasty things. You probably have your own list.
I think about their karma. With some of them, I can feel their karmic energy radiating out, repulsing me. For them, today, I began streaming a Ratt tune from 1984. It goes, “Round and Round”. What goes around, comes around, I’ll tell you. Dig.
“Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” is all over my private music streams today. It kicked into the stream yesterday. I don’t know why. Maybe I caught a piece of it airing out of a passing car.
The song, performed and released by Stevie Nicks, is one of my favorite Nicks songs. Tom Petty sings on it, and the Heartbreakers played the song. It wasn’t surprising to discover that Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers and Tom Petty were the song’s co-writers. It has their flavor all through it. I like the song for its anguished sense of what’s been going on, and the decision that a line’s been drawn, and this needs to end now.
Baby, you come knocking on my front door
Same old line you used to use before
And I said yeah, well, what am I supposed to do?
I didn’t know what I was getting into
So you’ve had a little trouble in town
Now you’re keeping some demons down
Read more: Stevie Nicks – Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around Lyrics | MetroLyrics
You know that’s how it often goes. Love is difficult to find. We don’t like letting go, or giving up. Makes us feel like unwanted losers, doesn’t it? Yeah, and momentum and familiarity are easy to form and hard to break.
Today’s song, “It’s Only Rock n’ Roll (But I Like It)” came out in 1974. I consider this song part of the theme music for my eighteenth year of life. I graduated high school, turned eighteen years old, and joined the U.S. Air Force in 1974. I think the song celebrates my attitude toward rock and roll; it’s just music, but —
I use the song for references, to celebrate, and to time-travel through memories as surely as Marcel Proust’s madeleines. I know it’s only rock and roll, and not significant in many universal schemes (although there’s a potential story, there, isn’t there, about how rock and roll changes things?), but I like it.
The song’s opening, too, offers exasperated questioning about the past and new expectations.
If I could stick my pen in my heart
And spill it all over the stage
Would it satisfy ya, would it slide on by ya
Would you think the boy is strange? Ain’t he strange?
I’ve found that opening question appropriate for my life. What will it take to satisfy the bosses, lovers, friends, family, and gods? Each employs a different measuring system. The tricks are to find what works, what annoys them and causes me enough pain to avoid doing it again, and then monitor it all for changes – ’cause change is, like, you know, probable. Beyond all that shit, it’s a great song to sing to my stream as I walk or drive on my lonesome.
Today is all ’bout looking ahead. We were discussing different things while drinking beers the other night. The conversations invited nostalgia into my streams. I’d been in the military for twenty years. Being in the military with a mission and purpose was much different than this semi-kind of life of writing. After that came some startups and then more than a decade at IBM.
There was a gap in mil service though. I got out after four years, bought a restaurant, was running it while going to college, and then got mighty sick. Broke and weary, I went back into the military. My break in service was almost one year. It was a tumultuous twelve months.
1979 was when I went back in. This song, “Don’t Look Back” by Boston, was out. Back in a barracks at Brooks AFB in Texas, waiting for my wife to join me, this song struck me hard. Don’t look back.
I look back often. It’s mostly in context to remember where I’ve been and helped me adjust my course and remind myself where I’m going. It’s uncharted lands. Walking the next day after I had my conversations and bursts of nostalgia, I reckoned there are different ways of looking back. Looking back is fine as long as you don’t shove yourself into reverse and try to get back there by driving via your mirrors. The mirrors of nostalgia only show a few items.
Of course, the filters of the futures let’s us see even less. That’s why the future is more fun; there’s far less known and much greater potential to be shaped.
I’ve been thinking about the Bruno Mars song, “Marry You” (2010).
It’s a bouncy song with a 1960s dance bop flavor to it that begins with a little setting.
It’s a beautiful night
We’re looking for something dumb to do
Hey baby
I think I wanna marry you
So, the essence I take is that they’re bored, so they’re getting married, not for love or romance, or so you’ll have someone with you to cope with disappointment and strive to get ahead, but because there’s nothing better to do. There is a touch of romance because he later confesses that maybe it’s the look in her eyes. But, it could also be the dancing juice. So…you know….
Later, he sings that if they break up, that’s okay.
If we wake up and you wanna break up that’s cool
No, I won’t blame you
It was fun, girl
But, you know, why not, right? Just say yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah. There are a lot of fun flash mobs out there around this song. Naturally, they involve someone asking someone else to marry them. I keep wondering if they plan to stay together, or was it just something fun to do?
Michael Seidel, writer 