tracks of a leaf
rolled by the wind
across the white snow
pristine — save those delicate tracks
testament to what had once been here.
will what I do endure any more than that?
will my sweat, toil, heartaches,
tears, pleas, cries,
be no more lasting
than tracks of a leaf rolled by the winter wind
upon the pristine face of the snow?
Here’s a clip from back in the day, Mr. Greg Dulli on Craig Kilborn’s show (remember him? – Nah, me neither), taking an oldie and turning it inside out. I love the way Dulli takes a cover and OWNS it. His criteria, as he’s said in interviews, is that he has to wish he’d written the song, and then make it sound like he did. He succeeds on both counts here, even with a chestnut like this one. His performance makes me envious that I am not, in fact, having a party with him, or even that I’m not cool enough to even think of being invited to said party. Still and all, for the rest of us, the great unwashed…there’s YouTube.
I had a dream once (which also featured a cameo by Amy Winehouse, relatively not-strung-out for those of you scoring at home) in which Mr. Dulli appeared, looking very much like he does in this video — almost exactly, in fact. Perhaps that’s where my subconscious sourced it. Or maybe my id wants to be invited to Dulli’s party. Or something. At any rate, pop the top on a cold one or pour yourself a cocktail, and enjoy this song.
I get up a couple of times during the night with our younger daughter, who’s seven months old. I don’t really mind it; mainlining coffee all day and the occasional ten-minute nap get me by. But sometimes it comes with wierd side effects.
Take today. I got up with her at 6am, then she went back to sleep at 6:30 am, so I laid down again because my sore body and groggy mind informed me that I wasn’t done sleeping yet (or I shouldn’t be.) I dropped off immediately, and the dream I had was short, vivid, and strange.
I dreamed I was wandering around through a huge, elaborate building, which had several areas — polished staterooms, dim sterile institutional hallways, stairways with flickering flourescent lights, etc. There were lots of other people around, and most of them were carrying guns. I had one too — a beaut: a scoped and accurized Colt .45. (A big, heavy automatic that makes a big hole with a big bullet, for those who are not gun aficianados.) I was wandering around, occasionally chatting with people I evidently knew, and every so often a wizened old man in pajamas would pop up in front of me and try and scare me by shouting “Boo!” in a reedy voice out of a toothless mouth. I’d flinch instinctively and jerk the trigger on the Colt — and clik. The firing pin would snap on an empty chamber. Nothing happened because the gun wasn’t loaded. This happened at least three or four times. Clik. Clik. Clik. What could this possibly mean?
The sound that gun made as I pulled the trigger echoed through my head a long time after I woke up (and it still is, right now.) Why is even such a little sound like that so memorable, if you hear it in the context of a dream?
Where does this stuff come from?
The Free Speech Fight 