June 7th - Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod

If Song For My Stepfather is John's pain at its most naked, this is perhaps John's pain at its most transubstantiated. Both songs describe blunt and unforgivable violence upon a child, but the points of view and the way the reality of it are processed couldn't be more different.

This song, and its huge and soaring organs, aren't about the violence that was experienced, painful and traumatic though it was. This song is about the not the consolation that it might end but the consolation that one day we will be beyond this. "Rise above my station" is the key line here. Not the fantasy of revenge but the fantasy that one day this will no longer be important. That this will be an incident along the road to a better destination.

And that's a better revenge, isn't it? Not getting your own back, because that's rarely possible and even more rarely satisfactory, but managing to sever the hold that the past has on you. I'm notoriously bad at this, and have a Greatest Hits of my fuckups that plays almost constantly. I made a girl cry at a party in 1996 by being dismissive of her CD collection and I've felt bad about that at least once a week for thirty years. But at least, in the main, I'm only tormented by the things I did, not the things done to me. My dry land is myself.