September 19 - Stench of the Unburied

Something weirdly suitable about my birthday song being an anthem to being fucked up and in trouble, but in a curiously good way.

This is one of the things John does best, I think. Vignettes in miniature of perfectly realised moments in lives. Not good moments, not moments that anyone will point back to as the best of times, but sometimes what people will point to as the most of times.

Every life is full of these. I remember lying on a broken bed in a tiny mill house in North Carolina in January 2002, my girlfriend taking a nap alongside me, and realising that this was both the furthest away from home I'd ever been and the place I wanted to remain forever, and realising this on the same day that an ice storm knocked out our power and turned the outside of our car into an inch of clear ice, stranding us there. I remember sitting in a car outside a clinic a couple of years later as my wife cried and I cried and certain futures closed to us. I remember making my peace with that and breaking my peace with that. End every one of these moments was now. It's now now. It was now when I write that last sentence but it's become then.

When I was a child I would sometime shave moments of clarity on long car journeys where I would repeat to myself in my head: I am here, this is now. I am here, this is now.

I still don't know if I believed myself.

and in the interests of weird stuff not enough people are listening to, this is The Do Do Dos who are basically what Ash would have been if Ash had been Japanese and grown up listening to Tragic Story Rock n Roll and two of them had been girls.