Slappy sunlight coming down, collapsed trusses of 3pm light breaking in through the miasma, we would run down the valley, me and the kids, in the Honda at Christmastime. This was years ago, but I don’t know when. The kids were younger. Charlie and Henry were in kid seats in the back. Violet was still Violet then. They’re Blake now. The seasons come and go.
In the rustic country where we live there are these ridges that go leafless dirty in the late fall. Everything returns to the earthy tones/ spreading from the tawny cut cornfields back towards the bleak horizons in the distance/ and on the way there are the hills/ ‘the mountains’ as we call them/ old and tired and hammered by time.
That’s where I would play the music. On the Spotify, I’d search it up and find it fast and play it suddenly with no words. It was the surprise. That was part of the deal for me. I wanted to see the kids react in that instant when the basic hum of the ride was destroyed in an instant by the burst of music from far away.
The transitions are often the thing in life. But capturing them or clocking them in real time is tricky. More often than not, being able to watch a single instant turn that corner, to see kids go from staring out the window listless and bored to eyes lighting up at the onslaught of magic, it’s easy to miss. It doesn’t even happen that often to begin with so knowing how to catch a glimpse of it becomes a kind of witchcraft trick for those of us with the experience and the desire.
And for such sorcery, I learned after a while, it was going to take a special blend of madness and beauty, of fogs and snows.
Which is why I always went with The Pogues.
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Not your Pogues either, you pain in my fucking ass.
I’m serious. I’m not going to piss around the facts here. Nothing makes me angrier than having to share the Pogues with you. It’s personal, I guess, and I can own that. You and your Pogues have always pissed me off a little because I always got the feeling that they didn’t like you all that much. And also, that you didn’t like them as much as you pretended to either.