1.2.2002 [Still mid-morning]

A flurry of new entries today. Happy New Year, by the way. I guess I didn't mention it, but I'm not in San Francisco right now (hence the mad missing-it rant down below); I'm at my parents' place up in Seattle. It's their 30th wedding anniversary this year - well, not really, not yet, not 'til the 20th of January - but we just celebrated it on New Year's Eve cuz, well, why not? They were throwing a party, and anyway me and Mandy (that's my little [well, 23 now] sister) will be long gone by the 20th.

It rains a lot up here in Seattle. Puts you in a thinking sort of mood. There's something lonesome about distant thunder, isn't there? When it's overheard it's loud, exciting, a little scary, but when it's distant, like way far off in the line of grey clouds, there's something echoing and lost about it.

Hmm.

There's this song called Brothers in Arms, which I might have alluded to before. It's by Dire Straits, and it's one of the most (quietly) beautiful songs I've ever heard. Very muted. It starts out with some bass, and thunder rolling softly in the distance. In some game or movie or other I saw this sequence of an apocalyptic sky, all sepia-toned and aflame with thunderheads. I think it must be clouds like those that echoes thunder like that.

Something about thunder. Just that distant sort. That sort of muffled, cracking noise. The intro dies down to a single guitar line with the thunder still rolling quietly in the background, but more continuous, and there's this moment where you realize it sounds like a distant war.

It's one of those songs that you can't listen to three times in a row. There's something magical about the first time you hear it in a few days, or a few months. It takes you and wraps you up in its imagery. Very simply lyrics, but it's so very evocative.

Mist-covered mountains, a home now for me; ...lowlands, your valleys and your farms; sun's gone to hell, moon riding high. Let me bid you farewell. Every man's got to die.

It's a song about war. But it's not patriotic fervor (and I think I've said it before, and I've gotta say it again, but patriotic fervor during a war is a frightening mob-mentality kind of thing. Just look at the posts going up all across Diaryland around Sept. 11th, including my own. Just look at them.)

It's not about that, though. It's a very ...intangible, drifting kind of song, where you kind of realize camaraderie and love aren't quite the same thing, or...

It's very hard to explain. But it's a beautiful song, and you wouldn't believe the sort of melancholy an electric guitar could evoke.

That's the word. Melancholy. That's how the whole song is. Like mist-covered mountains. Only not floridly green and sunlight-bright. The sort of mist that drifts down from a heavy cloudbank. The sort of mist (rain, really) that trails, skirt-like, from the bellies of large thunderheads. That kind of heaviness in the air, the blue-purple hue of distant, and large storm. Those sort of distant peaks that are half-hidden by mist, becoming dark silhouettes of themselves.

Distance. That's the other word for this song. Alienation? Like you and your crew were the last in the world. And I don't say crew lightly, like the people you catch a movie now and then with. I mean the people you love so much that to just cruise down the streets on a nice spring day is a gift in and of itself. Only in this song, it's nothing quite that light, is it?