Half a World Away, R.E.M., and a drive thru the south

Budapest.

Half a World Away by R.E.M.

This could be the saddest dusk
I've ever seen
Turn to a miracle
High alive
My mind is racing
As it always will
My hand is tired, my heart aches
I'm half a world away here
My head sworn
To go it alone
And hold it along
Haul it along
And hold it
Go it alone
Hold it along and hold, hold

This lonely deep sit hollow
I'm half a world
Half the world away
My shoes are gone
My life spent
I had too much to drink
I didn't think
And I didn't think of you
I guess that's all I needed
To go it alone
And hold it along
Haul it along
And hold it
Blackbirds, backwards, forwards and fall and hold, hold

Oh, this lonely world is wasted
Pathetic eyes high alive
Blind to the tide that turns the sea
This storm it came up strong
It shook the trees
And blew away our fear
I couldn't even hear

To go it alone
And hold it along
Haul it along
And hold it
To go it alone
And hold it along
Haul it along
To go it alone
And hold it along
Haul it along
And hold it
Blackbirds, backwards, forwards, and fall and hold hold

This could be the saddest dusk
I've ever seen
Turn to a miracle
High alive
My mind is racing
As it always will
My hands tired, my heart aches
I'm half a world away and go


Read more at http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/106830/#ly1rPjDLh3KyAyOY.99

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I spoke/wrote about music and memory a couple weeks ago and it has happened again.

I was reading thru the Black Friday sale ads online, and just checking up on the world in general, and decided to play a little music rather than the podcasts that I typically listen too.
Ms. X and I are in that post-Thanksgiving-I'm-awake-but-not-really-good-for-anything type of over-indulged-on-the-apple-pie-and-turkey fugue where you just want to unbutton your britches and stare at the tv.

Ms. X, The Source of the Trouble, and yours truly went over to Keith and Kerry's house for an enormous Thanksgiving dinner and to play with the twins.

Keith and Kerry are great hosts and I got to see his folks, who I've known since the Middleburg days, way back when.

Ms. X was a big hit with the twins, especially little Kelsey, who is typically pretty shy and almost never lets me any where near her.  But, thanks to Ms. X, I actually got to sit and play puzzles with her and give her a big hug and kiss before we left.
Sweet!

This morning I went to the Itunes for something I hadn't heard in a while.
Since I had been reading about Tunisia, which made me think of William Burroughs, which made me think of Morocco, I somehow connected that with R.E.M. and the Out of Time record.
(Yeah, I know.  It's a thin thread.)

But then I plugged in Out of Time and all those beautiful songs started playing.

I started going back in my own time, which is always a bit mysterious and wonderful.
You can feel that tug of memory like the undertow when you stand in the ocean.
At first, very lightly pulling on your feet and then gradually stronger, and if you let it, you can just float away and let the memories carry you out to sea.

I remember very well when Out of Time was released.
The video for Losing my Religion was all over MTV and although it seemed to me overtly homosexual or homoerotic, the overwhelming theme of the loss of love and hope and of "self" seemed universal.
It's just a gorgeous song about heartbreak, and whether that heartbreak is b/n a man and a woman or b/n two men, who cares?
The heart wants what it wants and when it breaks, it just sucks.
That's pretty universal I think.

A friend, quite possibly K.K., gave a me a cassette copy of Out of Time which I carried on what I consider to be my very first vacation.

It was in 1992 and my buddy Dale Dowling and I decided to take a road trip out of Florida and up into the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia for a little back packing.
Dale and I have been friends since our days in Cub Scouts and I still look back on those memories as some of the happiest moments of my childhood.

A young "Pinche-r" puts his borrowed back-pack back on and gets ready to start hiking the A.T. again. I'm guessing this aound '82 or '83.

With a couple hundred bucks in cash and my little Nissan Sentra Hatchback all loaded up we struck out for 2 weeks of wandering the back roads of the south with no real agenda.
It was great.
We went thru Savannah, Atlanta, Rome, Boone, Grandfather Mountain and even hiked a couple days on the Virginia Creeper, which is an old railroad line turned into hiking trails.
I still remember going to see Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure at the movie theater in Boone, NC.
Mostly, we just drove around with our only rule being, "No Highway - only backroads".
We coasted back into my folks place in Middleburg, FL on fumes and I had only .95 cents left in the ashtray.
Perfect!
Funny, that twenty years later I would do the same thing on a little bigger scale.

The R.E.M. cassette was constantly playing and I'm sure I drove Dale crazy listening to it over and over, but it proved to be the perfect soundtrack for our little trip.

This morning when I started to hear it again it took me right back to those days driving thru the North Carolina mountains, windows down, Dale navigating with my big, new copy of the U.S. road atlas in the passenger seat.
I kept that atlas for almost 15 years, carefully marking any places I had driven to over the years.

It was my favorite vacation and one of the few "real" vacations that I've taken in my life.
Between 1992 and late 2006 I didn't take what most people would call a "honest to God" vacation, where you go far away and not check in with work.
I had a couple long weekends here and there, went to Jamaica once, up to Chesepeak Bay once, mostly family related stuff but not a real vacation.
It wasn't until after my radiation therapy in the fall of 2006 that "the Lyon" and I went down to Tulum, Mexico to stay on the beach for a week to rest and recover that I had an actual "out of the country" vacation.
Since then I've been lucky enough to go to Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Amsterdam (twice), Japan, and Spain.
I highly recommend all of the above.
Budapest, Kyoto, and Madrid are all on my must go again list but there's still so much to see here in the good ol' U.S. of A.

A man plays for kibble and spare change in Prague.

Budapest