10 | March | 2007 | A Year of Songs

When Ashley said goodbye...

Each new dream… same as the last.

And yet they kept on coming. A procession of rosy futures… glimmering… flickering… fading.

He stared at the surface of the coffee sitting in the stained mug on his warehouse desk. There was just something wrong with the way he was doing this life thing…

A decade earlier, starting out in life, he thought he had it all lined up. A smart, cute, funny girlfriend who put up with his bullshit, his wandering eye, his compulsive, no-end-to-it truth-telling. (“Well, at least I never lied to you!” he said way too often to his tearful, agonized girlfriend.)

But now, looking at a string of broken relationships stretching back to those golden-seeming days, it looked like an empty, bitter joke…

But, as always, a new dream would come… a new girl, a new set of possibilities… a new set of lies he would tell to her, to himself.

A new dream — but always the same, sad story arc.

He remembered a brief moment when he was about four or five, watching himself standing over a toilet and thinking, this can’t be a TV show, ’cause no one ever goes to the bathroom on TV. But it sure does feel like one…

His bitter laugh echoed against the concrete walls of the warehouse when he thought, Man, I should just fire the writing staff…

OK…. enough of all that. Today’s version of this song is kind of fun, I think, a funky, glam-folk reading of what I’ve always thought of as kind of a sleeper.