Fleetwood Mac Friday #15: Blue Letter
Forty-five minutes in and neither he nor she could tell you how the fight started. It was going in circles, seemed to resolve, only to roar forth stronger. Tears from both of them, alternately consoling each other, then heading cautiously back into the fight. The trick is to unpack the entirety of your initial swell of angry grievances over the course of several hours, so you can choose your words more carefully.
It’s dusk, and they’ve been working on songs and recording demos since the previous night. They’re sitting on a pier, and it’s been lightly raining on and off for the past ten minutes.
The point, the thing she can’t get past, is how he– flamboyant, goofy, wiry poindexter and sensitive songwriter, has revealed himself, on perhaps one too many occasions, to have a different, contradictory element to his personality. He always seemed so unlike other musician guys, but here we are. You can be sweet and romantic, talk all day about grandiose plans of adventure, beautiful trips you’ll take together, all art and daydreaming, and be brought to tears by Simon and Garfunkel… nonetheless it seems like inside every one of them is this ambitious, narcissistic rockstar type anyway, this kind of beast, just made to consume. Every song they write, they think they get to cash in tenfold in money, in coke, in getting to be impolite, to storm off and pout like a child. Why sing at all if the end result is just becoming unpleasant, needy, demanding, arrogant?
He feels the same way about her. She was always such a sweet, easygoing chick, so far from every groupie out there, man. Intelligent, talented, headstrong (and how!) Always holed up with some book. Writes her own prose now and then, using the characters from her favorite books, Lord of the Rings, A Wrinkle in Time, puts them in different scenarios. Taking somebody else’s art and trying to do your own thing with it– seems like kind of a weird waste of time, right?
So a sweet, mellow chick half the time and then it’s like– you ever read Kafka? So Kafka said that Sancho Panza was the real guy in charge, who really wanted to go on all those adventures, but he couldn’t do it himself. He needed to convince Don Quixote to run around making a fool of himself for it to happen, but Sancho was the one really manipulating everything. That’s her. All these long, reasonable discussions about our future, our talents and what to do with them, what would be the grooviest but also most sensible thing– and here we are staying up all night on dope, so sure we’re on the verge of this breakthrough because a clearly insane drummer called us to contribute songs to his troubled, improbably-cursed-with-lineups-problems psychedelic rock project. How could they have both arrived there together, when he is a rational man, a kind of musical scientist, and they are both college-educated, from good families? How could they have gotten there without her leading him, without him even realizing it, into the great pink fog of her imagination’s future, beguiling and yet– possibly, who knows– entirely sinister?
The rain starts to really pour. It won’t be over between them for another several years, and even then, it never really will be.
The Tusk 
Leave a comment