...spin me down the long ages, let them sing their song...

....and as promising and precious as that song is to me, I still can't stop listening to Danzig's "Mother." It's so much...wilder and fiery. Whatever the undertones are, whatever the shades of meaning in the song have wrought, I love it. I love what it does to my blood, what it suggests to my spirit, what it means to me.

....not about to see your light...

I'm somehow regaining some of the vitality fibro deprived me of - at least, that's how I feel. It might just be the mania talking; even if it is, it makes me feel like myself again, gives me the energy to wreak my own havoc on my own universe, on my own terms. And I like it.

...so enlist every ounce of your bright blood, and off with their heads....

Sometimes the world is so full, so bright, so wide and wonderful, it's hard to conceive of evil, of war, of hatred....can we climb this mountain? I don't know....

*shakes head* I don't know. I know what I feel; I don't always know what I know anymore. But it's okay. They say the devil's water ain't so sweet....and I'd believe it, you know? Man, there's so much I used to believe. So much I still believe. So much I want to believe. Hot damn, the world is just so BIG and so FULL, we just don't see it anymore. We've shrunk the world, and made it lonelier somehow. I don't know how we accomplished that as a species, but we managed to do it, and as efficiently as we do most things, which means randomly.

How beautiful this line from such an innocuous and bubblegum filter: "It was all in her head, an engine for dreams, an engine she built with her blood." We find the flowers in the cracked pavement in the ghetto; can we do more than just find them? Can we love them, too, in spite of the heat, the poverty, the gunfire?

And brilliance, wisdom: they should never be the sole purview of the damned ivory tower; here again the bubblegum bursts into genius and goodness and thriving thought: "If Gods didn't eventually wear out and asked to be replaced -- if we didn't insist on changing and evolving every generation, if our societies stayed static, needing the same Gods as the week before, and the week before that -- maybe people wouldn't have to die in their name so often. Observation lends existence."

I takes my fortune cookie intentions, tears them up, and sing another song: "'Listen. You may feel like hell, but sometimes lost is where you need to be. Just because you don't know your direction doesn't mean you don't have one.' We're all on a trajectory; she was lucky to know it, even for a second. She looks up, younger than before. Stronger, maybe. Maybe strong enough to live."

...we're burning down the highway skyline
on the back of a hurricane that started turning
when you were young...

Maybe I'm finally young again. I checked out of young when I was 11. I'm not sure I really checked in again, ever. I checked into wild; I checked into restless. I checked into broken, into hungry, into the World, into the Road. But I think I gave over young in favor of surviving, of functioning, of learning how to live, over and over again. Maybe I can be young again, in a different way. A better way. A way that lets me reconcile all those things - wild, restless, broken, hungry, World, Road, surviving, functioning, living - in a meaningful and blessed way, a way that blesses the Self, the Soul, without condemnation, without damnation, without judgment, with the ability to distill wisdom, to engage in learning, without destroying innocence. Without compromising our basic humanity.

...sometimes you close your eyes and see the place where you used to live...

What I'm wondering is: can I close my eyes and see the place where I want to live, where I hope to live, where I will live?

Then I wonder: what can I do for others who find themselves at odds with themselves? Who have forgotten all the wonder in the world?

I'm too restless to be sitting here right now, and almost too manic to focus. *frowns* Usually mania enables me to focus better. I guess the embers in my blood are burning hotter than my mind. The furnace of the flesh is often thwarted by the power of the spirit, and this is apparently one of those times.

...if I shut down these bones, blot out these neutral walls, feel through the glass to the air outside: I can have a vision of the sky over New Orleans, the sky over Firenze, and smell nights that are more precious than can be expressed. Remember nights that will never die. Days that are written in the roads that run up to Assisi, in waters that line I-10 right into the ribs of the City and deeper.

...he doesn't look a thing like Jesus, but he talks like a gentleman...

How do we learn to forgive ourselves, learn how not to hurt ourselves, how not to hurt others ever? Do we ever really learn that? I'd like to think we can, that we do. That I could.