The Cure, "Just Like Heaven"

Behind the song. 

“The song’s about hyper-ventilating – kissing and fainting to the floor. Mary dances with me in the video because she was the girl, so it had to be her. The idea is that one night like that is worth a thousand hours of drudgery.” And, after all, isn’t that what love really is? Knowing that aside from all of the mire that the modern world seems to spew at us every single minute, that we have some solace in someone else.

Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick

The one that makes me scream she said
The one that makes me laugh she said
Threw her arms around my neck
Show me how you do it and I'll promise you
I'll promise that I'll run away with you, I'll run away with you

Spinning on that dizzy edge
Kissed her face and kissed her head
Dreamed of all the different ways, I had to make her glow
Why are you so far away she said
Why won't you ever know that I'm in love with you?
That I'm in love with you?

You, soft and only, you lost and lonely
You, strange as angels
Dancing in the deepest oceans
Twisting in the water
You're just like a dream
You're just like a dream

Daylight licked me into shape
I must have been asleep for days
And moving lips to breathe her name
I opened up my eyes
And found myself alone, alone, alone above a raging sea
That stole the only girl I loved and drowned her deep inside of me

You soft and only
You lost and lonely
You just like heaven

Not just a Nirvana song

I've added lithium to my psychiatric retinue. The difference is pretty amazing. When my shrink first suggested it, I laughed. I mean, come on. To me lithium is a punchline. But really, who gives a damn? It helps me get up in the morning. It's giving me hope where before there was darkness. I'll take it. And I do.

Just written

You’re trying to write. Doing it in the living room: that’s your mistake. The husband, the kid, the dogs. Nowhere to go in the outside world. Cafes and restaurants, takeout only. Those are always your haunts. That’s where you go to be you, the purest version of it, really, unencumbered. Except you are always cumbered. Stress makes its home along the slope of your neck, the curve of your shoulders. Especially now.

“Baz,” you say, “stop getting in Jack’s face.”

The signals: swish of a tail, flip of the ears. But the dog is rolling on his back, paws stretched to the sky, and you don’t know what to make of anything anyway.

“Baz,” you say, “just stop it.”

Adam, distracted. Adam, always distracted. “That’s not true,” he says.

Perhaps not. Life, the accumulation of the stories you tell yourself. Nothing more than the truth you believe is factual, or that you make factual. You believe it and so it is.

You don’t know when your house turns into a circus, only that your definition of it sours over time. When Baz is young you post pictures on Facebook, him and the dogs: my circus, 3:23 a.m. Charming, but really, is it ever? A draw-and-quarter of the mind, brain tearing rather than flesh. More painful? More searing? More immutable?

“It’s okay,” Adam says. “I’ve got them.”

This should make you feel relieved. It doesn’t. 

 

Workin' from home

 

Marcus op-ed

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Last night

The marriage is my rock. I can do anything because you're here.

This song, over and over