"tell him" - the exciters

"i know something about love"



i have had a sad evening. not earth shatteringly tragic in the scheme of things, but enough to put me in a real downer.
my wonderful wife bought me a saxophone from e-bay. not just a saxophone, a 1954 conn 12m baritone - the sax of my dreams (though in my best and pickiest dreams its a mid 40s model with mint gold plate finish - and for free rather than the many thousands market forces would expect for such an item). i was so excited that it was arriving, but then so shocked when i opened the case. it instantly didn't look right, though the true horror was hidden until i lifted it up. the loop of the crook had taken a serious blow in transit and was bent right up against the body. this crushed the octave key meachanism, bent the top f key and snapped the top e key right off. coupled with the sadness of disappointment was the greater sadness of seeing something so beautiful that had been abused so badly. and it really was beautiful. and it really was brutally damaged. in its own way it was kinda heartbreaking.

stupid parcelforce clumsy delivery drivers. what have you done? what have you done?

"sleep to dream" - fiona apple

"i tell you how i feel but you don't care. i say tell me the truth but you don't dare. you say love is a hell you cannot bear so i say give me mine back and then go there for all i care"


i got into fiona apple simply on the recommendation of some guy on the old nirvanaweb board known as apple. his opinions on everything else were pretty much spot on, and he loved her, so she had to be worth checking out.
when i finally got my hands on a copy of tidal i was blown away. the whole thing is good, but there are 4 or 5 tracks with real emotional power i could happily listen to round and round.

i don't seem to dream much any more. i guess i mostly just go to sleep to sleep.

"today" - the smashing pumpkins

"today is the greatest day i've ever known"


today is one of the best songs about suicide ever written. it is also right up there on the list of songs that people misunderstand and like for the wrong reasons. these are mostly about suicide or drugs. i think the way that song about heroin by the las keeps getting used on adverts probably puts it at the top of that list though.

almost every day i read emma kennedy's great blog which today featured the recounting of a dream she had. the line of dialogue "i will never be as happy as i am today, i am going to die" was one of those step-back-and-say-whoah moments of random beauty that spark off strange thought processes and cause earworms.

as well as this song i also have the opening to this poem punctuating it in my head. i wrote it when i was 17, so please forgive the mawkish angsty romance

when i die i want to be
happy. when you're with me
i feel happier than i ever have before
so let me walk down to the shore
of your cheeks and drown my-
self in the ocean of your eyes
my love
let me drown in the ocean of your eyes




the really sad thing is that there were originally several stanzas of this drivel i can no longer remember

"noises for the leg" - the bonzo dog doo dah band

"i found the men sir. God i wish i hadn't"



on a night when the act of getting to sleep proves more difficult a challenge than it has any right to, the last thing you need in your head is a cycling 24 bars of sinister vaguely oom-pah-esque saxophone bottom end honking topped by a theramin rendition of tortured screaming.
its not exactly guaranteed to be relaxing and restful.
it must have soundtracked some fairly warped dreams since each of the many times i woke it was still in my ears.

"mental dreamers' club"

"sina olet hyvin kaunis
porquoi est-ce que je revais
ces sentiments? about to drown this
time in words my conscious mind cant say"


this was a song i started writing for someone else at a time when i barely managed to finish anything i started , so its little surprise i let her down. one day i'll finish writing it, and one day after that i'll make her sing it.
if i can ever remember what its supposed to say

"here is what i dreamed" - mike keneally

"then i was jostled by police to hand my wallet over"



the strange, zappa-esque, mildly self indulgent hat album has been in my cd rack for some time and i'm not entirely sure how and why i came to own it. im pretty certain i wouldnt have bought (or even lifted) a cd by someone i've still never heard of in any other context, i dont think i know anyone who would have lent it to me for me to forget (deliberately or otherwise) to give it back, and its not something most people would give as a present. but however it came into my life, its an album i fairly regularly rediscover having forgotten it and there are some real gems on it.


i was reminded of this song, with its bizarre narrative of repeatedly being stopped by the police who gradually steal everything he owns, when i saw 3 policemen pushing a young black guy against a wall. despite his protests, he had the resigned look of someone to whom this happened a lot. its ages since ive been stopped by the police, but when i used to walk home alone late at night a lot it was fairly regular. i felt a strange, if fleeting, sense of solidarity for the guy, and then i started to think that maybe hed actually done something to warrant this treatment which made me worry about the moral implications of siding with a criminal.
before id had time to think about it much though, i had walked past the situation and away, got distracted trying to remember the lyrics to the earworm and forgotten everything else.

"no such thing" - John Mayer

"They love to tell you: stay inside the lines, but something's better on the other side"

I woke up with these two lines from the song in my head. Only these two - not the rest of the song, in which the melody is very different - so I wasn't sure which song it was. They're the kind of lines too, that you can sort of play backwards in your head, and they become all muddy and weird, or sometimes they sound like a broken record.A

So I must have hit the "snooze" button at least a dozen times, because I was supposed to get up at 9 and I only emerged from my dreams at 10.20am. Oh well.

I dreamt that my brother was in prison (originally it was my BF who was in prison for using the word "crack" in an email that he sent from work) and my mum and myself visited him. The prison was at the top of a sandy hill, in the middle of town yet in the middle of the ocean. We were wearing swimming suits and kept climbing up these hills to get to the top, but kept sliding off them (they then became wet), they were like huge tobogans! Once at the top we could buy some wooden dolphin-shaped hairclips made by the inmates themselves.

Did I mention it was my 6 year-old brother who was in prison?