21: Trilogy of Pain pt.3

Lets say you start life with a bucket of joy, but that bucket has a pinhole in it. Just a small one, so you don't think to fix the damn thing. And then 30 years later there's f all left in the bucket and you're left sitting all alone and crying, in a Weatherspoons in Milton Keynes. Tears dripping from your sweaty chin into a cheap pint of... Bitter.

You can hear this episode.  HERE

This week it is dedicated to despare.
Track Lisitngs

'I Never Came'  by Queens of the Stone Age
When Pandora opened her box of human suffering, the last thing to come flying out was hope. When they tell this story to children, they tend to sell hope as a kind of concelation prize. Something that makes all the other problems in the world bearable. Sometime I think that hope is just as bad as the others. when you get hit, hope makes you get up and get hit again. Makes you que in line for an audience with Simon Cowell, makes you think that all your hard work and dedication will be rewarded rather than abused. Hope is not a friend... hope... she is the bigest bitch of them all.

'Juliane' by Ben Folds Five
At one time I thought this was a happy song about new found freedom. It's not it's about a man over-compensating for the massive blow he has been dealt. Weighed down by the weight of despare he is unable to walk and can only run and dance like fool. Like a man on hot coals, he waves his arms not in celebration but in desperation. The garbage he drags up and down the road is not physical, but emotional. He himself is inside that black polythene bag, kicked around and gasping for air.

'Take this Bottle' by Faith No More
They tell you not bottle it all up inside, but if you wander into your place of work and lay all your junk out on the desk they tend to call security. Perhaps it's best to flip randomly between the two. Bottle it all up in public but then the moment you are alone, wail like a dog towards the moon. Let it all out my lupine friend, let it all flow out into midnight sky.

'I Will Survive' by Cake (First performed by Gloria Gaynor, but written by Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris.)
The killer line in this track is this one 'It took all the strenght I had just not to fall apart'. Forget about progress. Progress is impossible, the best you can hope for is for things not to get worse and it may well take all your strengh to make that simple dream come true. Last night I dreamed I was the rain, falling from the sky pulled down, first onto the ground, then poluted and dragged into the drain before becoming lost in an endless sea of obscurity.

'Home of the Brave' and 'The Individual' by Spiritualized
Home. What do we think of when we think of Home. That place exists only in the past, sometimes in the futures. Home is the lie, the great lie of a wasted sunday afternoon. a summer's day, a clear pool of water, a singing fish, a picket fence. Home is a place you have never been. Home is being dry humped by a labrador while sixteen cops simultainously put tickets on your car.


'Still Alive' Written by Jonathan Coulton and performed by Ellen McLain
How much of your average day is speant staring at a computer. How many people do you know that you would rather not talk to face to face. Birthday messages flash up from friends you haven't seen for fifteen years and will not see again. They seem to be doing ok. It's hard to imagine how they do it. Was there some fork in the road. A seminal moment. Something you should have said. Perhaps that job interview up in London a couple of years back. The one you didn't get. Maybe that would have turned things around.

'Here's Looking at You Kid' by the Gaslight Anthem
What would you say if you could meet yourself. Your ten year old self. The shy worried creature which still exists beneath that bluff layer of comedy that you built and built until it was loud enough and abnoxious enough to get it's own show on BCFM. What would you say to that skinny sun-tanned little boy. Would you tell him not to worry, would you tell him everything was going to be ok? Would you lie?

'Dance Me to the End of Love' by Leonard Cohen
Cleaning my house I pause to look through a draw full of photographs. Youthful faces, young hearts beat beneath morter boards and gowns. We are graduating. the world is our oyster, but we have no idea what we are in for. Not one of us has ever been hit in the face by an oyster before.

Only one link this week.
This one