A day ago — an hour ago — he would have given up anything for her. He would have quit his job, broke up his band, dropped out of school, given away his dog… ok, not the dog. But we’re talking highest mountain stuff, here.
And yet now here he was staring at her carpet between the toes of his boots, thinking, I don’t feel anything.
And he didn’t. Or, maybe, really, what he felt was nothing. There seemed to be a whole lot of nothing smack in the middle of his life, a life that only a few hours ago had seemed troubled but full, but now seemed on the verge of imploding.
We might have been drinking in the kitchen of room 7 at the old Hussongs Motel on the beach north of Ensenada. It was stormy outside and waves crashed on the rocky beach. Inside, there was a warmth fueled by liquor.
Empty tequila bottles littered the table and it was at that point of the evening that the conversation turns to the rareified…
Someone asked me if I liked any religious music. I said sure. Everything from Bach to gospel to Sufi trance music.
He wondered what drew me to some of the music I did like.
And I said, Well, I like songs of struggle more than songs of praise — but sometimes songs of praise are paradoxically transcendant.
At which point my friend passed out and I finished off the bottle.
The song below is about the struggle to maintain faith in a troubled world. It puts that struggle in frank lyrics. (Lyrics I couldn’t quite get out correctly this time around.)
I wake up each morning
and I reach for my bible
I reach for my razor
and I reach for my gun
I reach for the dream
I was dreaming last night
but each single morning
that dream is gone
’cause it’s a big nasty world a terrible place It’s hard to stay alive and it’s hard to keep the faith
its a rotten world a grim shabby place but out of the endless depths of time
you’re here today
I’m tired of living
and I’m tired of dying too
I’m tired of tomorrow
and all the shhh that I’ve been thru
I’m tired of forever
and I’m tired of yesterday
I’m tired of never
and the man the child became
’cause it’s a big nasty world…
I used to love ya baby
and you know that’s true
I used to love God
and you know that too
I used to love myself
It was the hardest of all
I loved the whole GD world
but that was before the Fall
’cause it’s a big nasty world terrible mean place It’s hard to stay alive and it’s hard to keep the faith
its a rotten world a grim shabby place but out of the endless depths of time honey, you’re here today
Neither of them meant for anything to happen. She had kids, a husband. Her husband loved her, took care of her and the kids. And she loved her husband, too, but…
He wish he’d looked down and saw her ring instead of looking straight into her pale, blue eyes that first day. After that, it was too late.
They tried to be just good friends but he could feel the gravitational force between them, pulling so hard it distorted time and space around them.
One day he knew he had to leave.
He wrote her a long letter and put it in the mail the morning he was leaving. But the fates decided to get fancy… the mailman, recognizing the address, delivered the letter directly, at about the same time his clutch blewout in front of his apartment house. He had the car, packed up to move, towed to a local shop and he was sitting on the stoop of his empty apartment when she showed up.
Her eyes were puffy. She sat on the stoop next to him in the early afternoon sun. Her knee bumped awkwardly against his, more gesture than accident.
“I have to go, you know,” he said, looking at her Taurus in the street absently.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
He could see the child’s safety seat and some kid’s toys in the back seat.
She reached across and lightly pulled his face toward hers. Before he knew he was kissing her. In public. On his stoop. In broad daylight.
It was a strangely innocent kiss — but a passionate kiss, too, even in its bittersweet deilcacy.
She got up, didn’t say anything, walked to her car, got into it without looking back and then she was gone.
After a few moments his soon-to-be-former-landlady appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
“Wasn’t that Kristin from…”
“No.”
“I coulda sworn…” and she wandered off, making a show of sweeping tiny specks of something or other off the sidewalk and into the street.
Kristin was never here
You didn’t see her slip in the back way
You didn’st see her float up the stairs
You didn’t see her perfect hand on my door
Because Kristin was never here
She loves me twice as much as him
Lord, I know that’s true
but she loves those kids 10000 times more
and, man, I know that too
Nothing adds up or works out right
Nothing’s gonna make it so
I’ve run the numbers a million times
at the bottom line I gotta go
Kristin was never here…
one last time I swear we only kissed
for a moment there were only two
eternity is where parallel lines meet
and all lies are true
You didn’t see her slip in the back way
You didn’st see her float up the stairs
You didn’t see her perfect hand on my door
Because Kristin was never here
Somerset’s pals would have told you she had class. And she was sexy. Mostly she was sexy.
But not in a, you know, vulgar way, like Eddie’s mom, who was nice when you got to know her — and not really very sexy at all — but who dressed like a hooker even though her husband was some kind of Wall Street West guy.
No, Somerset’s mom was beautiful, like Grace Kelly or Lana Turner. She went to a gym even back when they were kids.
He’d be over at Somerset’s house when they were, oh, 12 or 13, and Somerset’s mom would come in from the gym or tennis, sweating a little but just glowing. The time she came in from the pool unexpectedly in a filmy one piece that was wet and clinging to her was seared into his memory all the way through grad school.
[A note about this song: What’s to say? Sometimes you just get a bonehead idea stuck in your head on an evening when there are no Law & Order reruns and… well, it’s a good thing I have cable. PS… if you don’t know what a bad pun the title is, that minor ignorance is, in this case, bliss.]
![[CIrcuit Breaker]](https://ayearofsongs.org/ayearofsongs/images/blogimages/CircuitBreakerV2.jpg)
