03.22.04 - 11:30 a.m.

Some mornings, Karl Haas is a little too much to take. I don't think his accent really is affected - I think it's natural - but it sounds affected. Today, I remembered to grab my Townes van Zandt tribute CD - one of my favorite CDs of all time. I think I re-discovered it in January, when I found it at my parents' house. Now, I've reclaimed it. God, these songs are so good.

Depending on my mood, the alignment of the stars, whether pluto is in the house sagitarrius, how the sun is slanting across the valley, whether or not my mattress was lumpy, what I'm dreaming about when I half-close my eyes and imagine some other trajectory, a little more romantic, a little more tragic, than the one on which I currently find myself, I obsess about different songs.

This morning, I'm obsessing about "Highway Kind," this yawning, dreamy, desert-road-star-spangled-sky-weary homage to an imaginary lover. It helps, of course, that the Cowboy Junkies performed the song on the tribute album. The lazy, rich intimacy of Margo Timmin's voice and the spare, evocative instrumentation are perfectly suited to the lyrics and minor chord structure:

My dreams, they are the highway kind
they only come to leave
but the leavin' I don't mind
it's the comin' that I crave.
Pour the sun upon the ground
stand to throw a shadow
watch it grow into a night
and fill the spinnin' sky.

This may be my favorite verse. Should I call it a verse? My favorite stanza, then, and the love starts with the first line, even if I don't know what it means. I've seen the first line two ways: My dreams, they are the highway kind or My days, they are the highway kind, and either way, the phrase evokes half-formed images of the vastness of America, the wide stretches of nothingness, flyover country, canyons, mountains, everything in between, into which one can so easily disappear and remake oneself, the lonely twilight as dusk is closing in and distant headlights flash through the gloom, modern cowboys, living at the edge of life where everything has to be sharper and more meaningful.

And that is only the first line. And that's why there's NO WAY I'm going to exhaustively analyze everything I love about this song. Trudging onward, however: how about "the leavin' I don't mind/it's the coming that I crave." Crave is the perfect word there: it's more than want or need, it's more than desire, it's an animal feeling, inexplicable, for something as necessary to survival as oxygen, but it opens differently in the chest, it sort of blossoms darkly, a constant, dull pressure. Now add the last four lines - stand to throw a shadow, that's pretty manly, isn't it? Without being chest-pounding: it says, I'm here. I'm right here. If you're standing to throw a shadow, you're not hiding, you're out there. ...and the spinning sky, bah, it's all dizzying, but Margo Timmins' voice just opens on the last line, so that you can almost feel the wheel of the stars through time in the afterthought of her voice.

Time among the pine trees
it felt like breath of air
usually I just walk these streets
and tell myself to care.
Sometimes I believe me
and sometimes I don't hear.
Sometimes the shape I'm in
won't let me go.

Okay, this is my least favorite of the stanzas, but it's fine. They can't all be ridiculously great: you need something between the fabulousness. It's not bad, it's fine, and it fits with the rest of the theme, with the background of the character, in what I think is a common image, at least among mildly artistic straight guys and, you know, romance novelists: the hero, disconnected from the world but trying to feel it and fill himself, finding some solace in exile from ordinary urban life. The apparently apathetic but Really Deep (And Deeply Troubled) Hero is a common-enough theme, isn't it? Maybe with RP, one gets exposed to more of those than people in the general population.

Well, I don't know too much for true
but my heart knows how to pound
my legs know how to love someone
my voice knows how to sound.
Shame that it's not enough
shame that it is a shame.
Follow the circle down
where would you be?

Awww. The Romantic Loner's (tm) anthem! It wouldn't be a clich� if it wasn't somehow terribly compelling. It becomes a clich� because it's so terribly compelling that lots of people do it terribly lots of times. That doesn't mean that a good expression of the image/feeling/idea doesn't rise above clich�. This one does.

Hey, who doesn't want a broody knight in (slightly tarnished) armor?

You're the only one I want now
I never heard your name.
Let's hope we meet some day
if we don't it's all the same.
I'll meet the ones between us,
and be thinkin' 'bout you
and all the places I have seen
and why you were not there.

And to follow-up on my last question, who doesn't want a broody knight in slightly tarnished armor as a destined, fated soulmate who already loves you and is constantly thinking about you even though he doesn't know your name! If you break up with the current guy, it's good to know he's out there. Also, maybe if you believe in reincarnation, he's seeking you out across the years. Awww. I don't mean it like that, not really. Or, not in the entirely mocking tone. I do love Plato's idea that souls are split in two and spend their lives searching for their other half, even if I never could believe it. With my luck, my other half is a grumpy, butt-scratching garbage man who enjoys torturing house flies.

In real life, something like the above would be scary and more than a little pathological. It's so easy - once you have the map down - to fit someone into little grooves of thought that become trenches over time. And it's easy to imagine a perfect person, and everything they would be, but it's impossible and a little crazy to expect someone to be perfect. Better to be kind, serious, attentive and... I don't know, thoughtful, but all that's hard to manage. I haven't been able to manage it for a while, and I'm not sure where to take all those things and put them, how to consume them, for the rest of my life.

But - who knows - maybe I really do have a slightly tarnished knight out there, who doesn't yet know my name.