In the Mind of the Wanderer
Things are feeling shaky at home so …
… I go out for a drive. It isn’t just that, though; things have been feeling shaky all over lately. People who used to just scream at each other on Facebook are doing it in the supermarket aisles now. Everyone jabbers on about justice, but nobody seems to be any closer to agreeing on what that word means.
As I roll to a stop seven blocks from home there’s a bedraggled old man sitting on a lumpy, tattered backpack in the median strip, holding a sign that just says “HELP.” For a minute he looks a little like Uncle Sam in those old World War Two posters.
As I pull away, a song comes on my car radio.
It’s a lighter-than-air confection of warm synth washes, bouncy bass line, intertwining jangly guitars, and lush, gauzy background vocals. Its gentle hooks dig in deep as the refrain “In Dreamland” draws you farther inside its folds, toward an impressionistic fable about privilege and poverty, of both the wallet and the soul.
Minutes pass and I’m out of the city now, winding steadily down the coast, windows open and the wind buffeting through my hair. The cliff’s edge is near, but my hands feel steadier now.
A moment later, another song comes on the radio.
The luxuriant synths and background vocals are back, but now the world has slipped off its axis, spinning into a languorous, haunted waltz, one-two-three, one-two-three, as the singer contrasts the revolutionary masses (“Now that I’m free, I can breathe, without trespass or care”) with the authoritarian figure who had been tormenting them. The lyric’s repeated rhyming of the word “guillotine” foreshadows the end result, while suggesting a kind of fractured genius.
After the second song finishes, I feel better. Not quite resolute, but refreshed. They haven’t solved anything, of course, but after listening to these two songs I’m thinking maybe, just maybe, the human race might have a chance. That ideas like love and justice might yet endure.
There’s just one thing.
My car radio hasn’t worked in years.