m. chills

We were going to do High Violet.

Something had changed in the air. We were done hybernating in a sense; winter depression had passed and our neomammalian brains had taken back control. Amazed at how blood did not rush from our heads to leave us faint with the immediacy of our ascent from supine misery to upright victory. We had literally morphed from a state of utter disrepair to smiling balloonheads. As if our dopamine had itself snorted cocaine prior to release into the synaptic cleft. We were in the garden staring at the sun extended inhales and open-mouthed-eyes-closed exhales - fuck the city, we said - raising arms like goalposts and making our bodies X's arching backs heads back the sun boiling our milky-white maps into full smiles...life! We bipolar manics.

'And I can't fall asleep without a little help. It takes awhile to settle down my ship of hopes.'

He was a merciless intellectual. A total prick grammarian - searching and attacking. 'Who' vs. 'whom', any absence of 'ly' in adverbs, the supplant of 'me and you' for 'you and I', and other such imperfections. "Goddamn, I'm tired of being correct." He spent 70% of his time correcting others. A verbal accountant. He cared more than anyone I know who and how many would be at his funeral. It's amazing what insecurity will drive us to.

'I don't have the drugs to sort it out, sort it out. Little voices swallowing my soul, soul, soul'

We rarely talked world events - the reds running amok in Thailand just two years after the yellows shut down the airport and such, new revelations about France and Spain strong-arming Germany into this socialist Euro project to save the laggards - and how Greece singlehandedly proved the Germans' point, and the conservatives shitting themselves over our President, his evil ways, and his latest nomination of a woman without many womanly features to the high court - we always thought that if the news big enough then we would find out sooner or later.

'Lemonworld' is the kind of song you listen to three, four times in repeated sequence to bathe in the impact. Wash yourself in this song. Get emotional about it. Make the lyrics mean something personal to you. Say "fuck" and mean it. Tell your brother about it and try out some new adjectives. Keep it for yourself. Hum the melody when you're laying with your wife. Cry when you see them play it live. Listen to it in your car, in traffic, on the way to work. Lipsync to the mercedes to your right. Think about driving into the guardrail or a tree...Some bands get it just right, don't they?