October 5th - In League With Dragons

So this is the "mundanity of heroic fantasy" album, so if course we get a Boris Vallejo name check in this story about marking time until the world gets to feel real again.

This feels like a sibling song to Up The Wolves, where time has taken the fury of needing revenge and replaced it with the cold certainty of faith. This too shall pass. In fire and blood and a settling of accounts.

It's my brother's birthday today. He's 52, and four years older than me, and when you're socialised male and have a brother who is four years older than you, that's sort of your model for masculinity. Your dad is too distant, that's a full grown up, but an older brother is close enough to be a real person. I didn't hero worship my brother, we were too unalike, but I did and do admire him, and his ways into things gave me ways into them. Younger brothers get the hand me downs, which was true of books and music and computers and other things. I know I get a lot of my love of fantasy and science fiction filtered though him.

It's tough to say that we drifted apart. I'm from a family that was never the closest, and I was always furthest out. I compounded this by moving to another country, then moving to the corner of this country where the least of my family were, and honestly probably also by not having children although that wasn't a choice.

He's a good man, and probably if we sat down and had a conversation we would remember how much we still have in common. Maybe this weekend.