Tuesday 27 March 2007

Vinyl Diaries IV: Pixies (Part One)

Three more sleeps

Oh haloed monkey, what hours of joy you presage. Your hollow eyes would disturb if I look into them too long, but I move along to spoonfuls of hair nestled on a bare torso, frayed rope and a fresh heart, upturned crabs and detached soles. Lost shoes, broken chains and a bell (for whom does it toll? The dentist it seems) intervene, but this heavenly monkey is back. Man is  5, the devil takes the 6 and we reserve for God a 7. The monkey has rejoined him it seems.

I begin with a confession: Pixies were not my first true love. Before they captured my swooning heart there was a tipsy flirtation with the Violent Femmes, a smouldering dalliance with Nirvana, a sweet summer spent with Sonic Youth and a torrid and bruising encounter with Janes Addiction.
 
Then, of course, there was and remains my perennial crush on The Cure - Robert Smith tapping into my love of the literary and a perfect soulmate to my melancholy teen heart. This one still smokes and no doubt you'll hear more about it after a red wine or gin too many one late night. But for now another love shines more brightly than the rest, for I am three sleeps away from spending my first ever night with Pixies in the flesh, the first of my two Pixies shows.
 
Oh Pixies, you noisy, patchy, ragtag bunch of loveable misfits. Your place in my heart is forever secure. A streaking comet of unbridled energy, you made it all seem so simple; but such is the way of the genius at work.
 
I still vividly recall hearing Doolittle for the very first time. I was 14, enjoying a Saturday night come Sunday morning in ways no 14-year-old child of mine ever will.
 
Doolittle was nothing short of a revelation - a revolutionary one at that. The first 24 seconds that served as my Pixies introduction are the most succinct encapulation of the band imaginable, with the joyous perfection of 'Debaser' providing a potent portent of their short-lived blaze.

Four quickfire bars of Kim Deal's disarmingly straightforward four note bass riff, four bars of two spikily fuzzy chords - David Lovering's marching-drumbeat kicking in on the fourth - the next eight introducing the skeleton of Joey Santiago's riff... and then Black Francis slicing up eyeballs and summoning a girlie so groovie - what more could you possibly ask?
 
Inspired, seemingly, by the Buñuel/Dalí surreal film masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, it's an early hint as to the free association style Francis' lyrical stream would follow. The surreal imagery of Simon Larbalestier and Vaughan Oliver that adorns the Pixies album Doolittle (and covered in the introduction above) is a fitting visual match for the skewed world into which we have been launched.

 'Tame' introduces that trademark primal scream that would reappear over and over, with Kim's cheerleader sweet voice settling in underneath. It's a perfect example of the schizophrenic duality that came to define the Pixies sound. These days the loud/quite dynamic of gentle verses and explosive choruses seem entirely ordinary, but in 1989 this was far from the case.

The mermaid kissing 'Wave of Mutilation' brings in other Pixies tropes in its harmonious lyricism and wash of surf guitar, although these are hidden in fuzzy reverb and difficult to pick as such.
 
'I Bleed' layers messily, before a box car waiting can only mean one thing - 'Here Comes Your Man'. The first bass line I ever learnt, it's a strange beast and a throwback in a way to an almost '50s sound; similar to that which Weezer trotted out with 'Buddy Holly' some years later.
 
'Dead' is a right royal mess, and beautifully so. 'This Monkey's Gone To Heaven' (my second bass line... sensing a theme?) is harmoniously delicious, with Francis getting all Al Gore on us with the world frankly going to Helena Handbasket. He's not making a lot of sense with his numbering schemes and all, but we get the gist.

Amidst all that noise the hardy explorer can find example after example of the perfect pop song. Perversely, it's been tarnished beyond recognition - written to perfection, then destroyed beyond belief.
 
Anyway, I have digressed a little. This isn't about Doolittle per se, as seminal a sophomore album as it is. We're now 18 years on (I wish my maths was out, but I'm afraid it's true) and it can be difficult to contextualise the dire musical landscape from which Pixies helped us escape.
 
Let's cast our eye, then, around 1989.
 
The charts are awash in middle-of-the-road tosh - perhaps not a lot different to now, but a fairly depressing grab-bag of goodies:
Phil Collins gave as " Another Day in Paradise ", New Kids On The Block were " Hangin' Tough", Cher was wishing if only " If I Could Turn Back Time". Belinda Carlisle suggested we "Leave a Light On" and countless numbers did, Roxette had " The Look".
 
Meanwhile, thank god, some of the darker influences of the latter part of the decade were finally coalescing. On one side of the Atlantic, Madchseter was about to hits its straps and spread its wings beyond The Hacienda Club, spawning an Acid House revolution. The Cure's watershed Disintegration was released and there were even some strange noises coming out of Iceland with Björk & The Sugarcubes releasing Here Today, Tomorrow, Next Week!.
 
In the US there was no central scene exploding as Seattle soon would, but there was a burbling to the surface from almost every corner.
The Beastie Boys released the seminal cut-up Paul's Boutique, while on the other coast Jane's Addiction's Nothing Shocking was telling fibs and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were funking about with Mother's Milk
 
REM was about the closest anything came to a cross-over from college radio to the world beyond, particularly with the attention "Orange Crush" was receiving. Nirvana were to release their debut Bleach, but this wasn't to garner anywhere near the the attention reserved two years later for Nevermind.

In the middle of all of this was the breakthrough release from Pixies. As rock mythology had it, University of Massachusetts room-mates Joey Santiago and Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV had pinned up a poster seeking a bass player for a band influenced by Husker Dü and Peter, Paul & Mary. Kim Deal was the only one to answer the ad.
 
The rest, as they say, is rock history. The influence Pixies had throught the '90s cannot be measured by the relatively modest sales of their albums. A band's band, their chemistry is almost impossible to make sense of by distilling into mere elements.

Kurt Cobain was sure he would get 'nailed' for the fact that 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' "sounds like the Pixies", but it was something many were to forgive as Nirvana's sound, channeling the pure raw energy and trashed pop hooks the Pixies had already made their own, came to define the first half of the 1990s.

I haven't got very far have I? But that's enough for now, there might be more later... in three sleeps' time.

Saturday 24 March 2007

The visitor

I met my first demon last night.

I woke soon after going to bed to a noise from outside. It wasn't much of a noise, the kind I imagine I must sleep through all the time, but I had only just drifted off so it was not far up to rise.

A warm night, the bedroom door had been left open. That's where he was. Not in the doorway, but atop the ajar door itself, crouched between it and the ceiling.

He was incredibly white all over - there was a slightly grey, decayed tinge, but certainly with a lustre as though he were bathed in light from the moon. There's not a lot of room up there between door and ceiling, so he was curled up and over himself. His wings, extending from his shoulder blades, were folded in but still readily perceivable.

I remember thinking at the time he looked a lot like he had just hatched from an egg and still had that shape, the telltale hint.

He was highly displeased that I had woken and seen him there and his face twisted into a scowl. His hairless body had very smooth skin, glowing faintly as I watched. Nevertheless he felt incredibly old, a creature for whom the passing of a lifetime was merely a trifle.

When he realised I was awake and watching him, he swivelled his body very slowly away, but kept his eyes on me.

Flames danced in his eyes - even from that distance I was able to see my own reflection in them, the flames consuming me. I could feel the heat of the night pressing in heavily and I don't mind admitting my heart beat as though trying to hammer its way out of my chest and out into the room. Still not sure what else I should do, I concentrated on slowing it down and easing its violence.

The door was about three-quarters open, close to the wall-to-ceiling wardrobe mirror. I flicked my eyes to the mirror to see if the daemon had a reflection. He did, but it was very faint - I could make it out, but also see through it. He had no such transparency himself, as fleshed and real as I.

His top lip curled and revealed a number of needle sharp teeth, four of which extended past the rest and are probably best described as fangs - two near the front, two closer to the back. Two small horns, bony and upturned, emerged from just beneath the scalpline.

At this stage I realised I was unable to move - my arms pinned to my sides. If he had wanted to, I'm sure he could have done anything to me he wanted. But I think the fact I had woken dampened whatever resolve he had and he decided now was not the time. He continued to swivel and his back was almost to me now. His wings lifted from his back and he slowly pushed away from the door, passing right through the wall in the corner of the room.

I was deeply unsettled by his grace, the smoothness and control of his movement indicating he could effortlessly do anything he wished.

I watched where he had passed through, wondering whether he would be back. My heart slowly returned to normal. My arms returned to my control. I thought about what I had seen and what it might mean. I wondered, and still wonder, whether he was there for me, or if he was there for another. Or if he was even, perhaps, just passing through, if his interest had been in another apartment and we were merely a resting point. I don't think so though; I think he knew exactly where he was and why he was there.

Intriguingly, I am yet to work out if he was arriving or leaving when I saw him. If, perhaps, he may have been with me all along and this was in fact a farewell.

I know his name, but I'm not ready to say it.

Friday 23 March 2007

Adrift

You never fail
to point out those
who fail to be themselves
as you yourself
fade
before my very eyes
Glazed as they are
with too many hopes
adrift
cut lose to sink
or
swim

You leave it to me
to find out what is left
when all scrubbed
to render it clearer
is rinsed away
The answer is
nothing

You wonder how long you
must walk the wrong path
to find the right one
How long night goes on
before daylight breaks
The answer is
forever

nothing can be forever

I wonder where your emphasis falls
how you sound this out
what it says about you
what you blame me for

nothing is forever

does it say more about me
or
you

No thing can forever be
what it is
or isn't

Yet still we can say
we have dreams
we have songs
we have life

These made up things
so deathly real

Thursday 22 March 2007

Schatten II

I've seen it. What happens when your shadow leaves you.

It may not stray that far but the disconnect is profound. Shattered into a million tiny pieces, each gleaming with a darkness such as you've never before seen, inky droplets of spilt soul.

Before returning to its caster, it returns to itself. Shards and drops and glops and blips and whisps of it, coalescing, regaining its original stolen shape. Watching it regroup is like watching a child take her first step, say his first word - there's nothing more natural than a shadow wanting to be whole, but it still hits you like nothing before has.

Once regrouped, it slides back to its creator, rejoining her in a consuming crescendo that you will never forget, a howl from the bowels of hell.

This may surprise you. You might have expected it to creep quietly, to sneak back sheepishly - not a chance. Its return coincides with an earth-trembling blitzkrieg of white noise, a terrifyingly blinding encounter as piercingly bright as shadow itself is ceaselessly dark. The shadow must confront and overcome its other to have any chance of taking back its rightful place.

Why did it leave her? That's really the story - but that's for another day.

No, that's not good enough, that's too easy.

But let's start with this - what did she do while it was gone? What recipes for a new life did she concoct from this brief taste of freedom?

None. She died her little death, paralysed by the sheer fear of it all, the unbearable, unbreakable grip loneliness took when it tore her from the safety blanket of her own shadow.

Confining her in its own idea of who she was, it gave her a reason. For being, for anything. Without it, what did she really have? Nothing to call her own. Things, yes. Relationships, perhaps. But what of her was there? What reminder of her place in this world, a placemarker on which to pin her little hopes?

When her shadow left, banished to teeter on the precarious edge of existence, it took far more than she bargained.

It took with it her soul. That's where it is kept - not inside, where we think, but there in our wake, an inverted void that catches and stores our dreams our mistakes our hopes our wrong turns.

So now we know - it went because she demanded it. She wanted to know what it was like to shed this past, these tokens of memory and the detritus of moments lost and washed up again.

She willed its retreat with unimaginable strength, a strength only surpassed by that with which she wished its return.

Wednesday 21 March 2007

Snuffed

False starts. Starts are easy, but then...

We can all start, a thousand first lines and thoughts. What we hunger for is the next step. Yet what tends to follow is a stumble, a stutter, a sputter.

Excitement follows the first flicker of light, the rasping as the head of the matchstick drags along the side of the box, the miracle of miracles as friction becomes flame.

We watch it dance its sad slow dance, perched atop the brittle wooden stake, born to burn. Minutely it sinks, wrapping around itself and licking at its future.

Too often we give up at this point - transfer the flame to the safety of wax, or, every now and then, flick it into a pile of paper, twisted and scrunched and offering. We love to see it dance, though we don't want to stand too close. We don't want it to lead.

Only rarely are we prepared to hold it, to will it to continue its path, its slow wind towards us. What will we do when we meet? How will it feel?

We feel it before it arrives. It hints at what it will bring. Hold on, and what follows will stay with you. Reinvention is possible. The phoenix, we know, does not simply arise. It must first embrace the flame that promises its own demise, must enter it fully and surrender completely. So must we abandon all hope to discover it.

The heat is intense, the flame bearing down, only a moment longer and the door will open, the next step appearing.

Air expels through twisting lips. Darkness falls.

Friday 16 March 2007

Ink

I hover above you. You are so white, so clean, so pure.

But I know this isn't true. Beneath your surface you're seething, bumbling with history and a jumble of unuttered thoughts, unthought ideas, idealistic hopes - just waiting for the skin to be pricked, the bubble to be burst so you can ooze forth.

I hesitate. What will happen once I make my first scratch? What will be revealed, what festering mess of hurt and repression or joy and inanity will race from the smallest nick, unstoppable once it starts?
Will you reveal things even I don't yet know? Is that part of your trick, your show?

Ink is your lifeblood, it gives you your weapon - the pen mightier than the sword, particularly against those who wield it. You sip on it greedily, soaking it into your fibres and refusing to let it go once it spills. We can try, smearing it across you or scratching over and over until the pen passes through you, but by then it's too late - it's escaped us.

You are a mirror, your reflective surface bouncing all light, but all dark too. The light is easy enough to find, it jumps out in dazzling white for all to see. It's the dark that the scratching reveals, the shadows within. The ink we spill over you is the toxic blood that courses through our hidden veins - black, murky, staining. It's best we release it through you, rather than spilling it on loved ones, rather than keeping it in where it can do no good.

I hover above you. You are marked, sullied, impure.

Sunday 11 March 2007

Chloe

Laneway

Chloe is a city that has never seen sunlight. A quirk of fate finds her located in a valley so steep that even summer's apex affords only a teasing hint of Sol's outer radiation.

The people of Chloe know this and know it better than they know themselves - that the sun will leave them little more than scattered ash and smoking shoes if it somehow crosses their path, or they its. Generation after generation has shared stories of foolhardy souls who ventured over the rise of the hill, never to return again - victims of their own misguided bravado.

The more adventurous children, emboldened by mutual egging, will venture up the face of the steep northern hill in winter, chatting gaily at first and twittering with nervous anticipation, but growing more sombre as they near the top. The silence that soon envelopes them, vibrating with the fear that a mistaken step could see them perish, reinforces the perilous nature of their venture.

A narrow outcrop of rock near the top marks the outermost limit of their courage, a demarcation of their destiny. The breeze carrying with it perfumed warning of sunshine's imminence warns them not to go any further. They heed this warning above all others.

They leave their offerings - carved figures, small stones and bright beads, short pieces of coloured string. These they add to the growing pile of tokens, humble gestures to the absent yet ever-present sun.

Chloe may not have seen the sun, but don't think it's no less in her thoughts than for the rest of us. Quite the converse is in fact true. Everything about her can be related, in ways small and not so small, to their troubled relationship. Her people - pale, drawn figures, sallow of skin though remarkably cool of temperament - spend long hours in thought and conversation about the day of its eventual return.

They know it will happen. Many, indeed, secretly hope it will be in their time, but nobody will say as much. They know it will mean the end of them all, of life as they know it, but it has long had such a command over their life that the desire to finally meet this maker is so magnetic their dreams are richly soaked in bright golden licks of flame and combustion.

There is, of course, a time when the people of Chloe are reunited with the sun. In death they are sent to her and become part of her. Wrapped in crisp, unused, pure white sheets, they wait. A pyre is built. Amidst incantations from family members, the body is placed into the heart of the dancing flames. The soul of the deceased, until then trapped in the body, joins the smoke spiralling skyward. They watch as it passes high above the city, reaching the top of the hill and mingling with the sun's light, entwining and joining her.

This is why she will return one day - to see the city from which she has come, to return home. For she is entirely of Chloe - she is Chloe's past, she shapes her present and she is her only imaginable future.

Thursday 8 March 2007

Pocket

You keep me in your pocket. For good luck I expect. Whenever trouble is in the air, looms around a corner with you in its sights, your hand closes tightly around me, your sweat and heat transferred as you take heart in my cool dry smoothness, my flinty resolve.

I take these clammy wrappings well, without a fuss.

You found me by the sea, pocketing me as though I'd been waiting for you to come along the whole time, but to be honest my mind was on other things.

My smoothness is born of the sea, she would caress me and smooth my rough edges, calm me with her deft touch. Now I sit in your pocket and am similarly rolled, similarly clenched. It's not as pleasant, I must admit, but it's nice to be loved.

Once a week I sit in a small box, thin card and smelling of new shoes, resting on crumpled white tissue paper, while your mother washes your trousers, my home.

I miss you.

***

I keep you in my pocket - for good luck. I found you on our last family visit to Brighton, when Dad was still here. I picked you up to skim you across the glass sea, so smooth I imagined it a mirror the sky had breathed upon and polished with a cuff.

My arm was back and I was ready to send you across its face, hoping for at least six bounces before you would have dipped beneath its surface, lost forever. But something stopped me - a strange sense that I would be casting off a piece of myself if I let you go. Mum called and I turned. She was waving for me to come up and join her, so we could leave. I slipped you in my pocket and I have kept you there ever since.

I get so hot sometimes. When the teacher calls on me my ears are aflame, when those boys from the estate block my path home the fire shoots up my throat to my face, bringing with it volcanic bile from my constricting stomach.

You're the only thing that can bring that heat down. Preternaturally cool - I learnt that word last week. It means you're cooler than you should be, that there's something strange in your powers.

I've never shown you to anybody, I think that's part of how you work. You have to stay mine and only mine, nobody else can know that you're here or it won't happen anymore. You won't be so cool and I will get hotter and hotter until I burn to a crisp, my ashes scattered across this godforsaken town.

Sunday 4 March 2007

Vinyl Diaries III: Yo La Tengo



I'm in a fairly good mood. A little over 12 hours from now, in a leafy park in a hidden laneway in Circular Quay, deep in Sydney's otherwise staid suit-district, Yo La Tengo will take to the stage.

I'll have hopefully warmed up nicely with The Walkmen, Camera Obscura and Peter, Bjorn and John, but it's New Jersey's finest indie squallers who will be on the receiving end of my most schoolboyish eagerness.

In tow will be one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant back catalogues in guitar-rockery of the last 20 years, but, more to the point, a swag of newish material that blisters with more ideas per square inch than the mind can actually compute, in the form of I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass.

This welcome return to form was a relief. Previous outing Summer Sun wasn't a disaster as such, it was something possibly even worse... a Yo La Tengo album that provoked little in the way of any kind of reaction at all. In their shambolic, meandering albums all sorts of wrong-turns and miss-cues can be dug out, but they've never before been so ... easy to listen too. But easy to listen to in this case became easy to forget, and though there were a few hints that they still had it in them, the overall picture was of a band that may have grown too comfortable in life to have much left to say.

While nobody was saying as such, I Am Not Afraid was pretty much a make-or-break, with the kind of urgency for which we love Yo La Tengo now popping up in acts such as Arcade Fire - although nobody has really managed to combine it with their deft touch and easy humour as well.

It's this Jekyll and Hyde character that has kept Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew so fresh for umpteen albums, the easy experimentation that can swing from Sonic Youth style guitarnage through Beach Boys harmonies to stuttering Talking Heads style angularity or a drony Velvet Underground dirge in the blink of an eye.

And they don't disappoint. It takes barely eight bars of "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind" before faith is restored, a three-note riff dropping a looping groove that a delightfully distorted guitar squall dances all over, flames licking from its fancy shoes. An 11-minute epic delivered with confidence and surety, it's such a welcome return to form you can't help but sigh with relief.

And how do they keep this momentum going? With "Beanbag Chair", a jauntily bright piano and horn caper, then a down turn into the nostalgia-vacation of "I Feel Like Going Home", Georgia's measured tone entwined deliciously with a mournful violin.

"Mr. Tough" is an out-and-out disco-showdown; Ira's pants Bee Gee tight judging by that falsetto - a daft delight. "Black Flowers" passes pleasantly enough, while "The Race Is On Again" hints at what the Flaming Lips might get up to if they ever decide to lighten up on the blotter paper. "The Room Got Heavy" takes a scuzzy turn for the strange, bongo-driven and organ-zapped and unlike anything else they've ever done, which makes it very much Yo La Tengo almost by definition.

Respite is in order and "Sometimes I Don't Get You" obliges, before the instrumental "Daphnia" takes centre stage. A slow-boiling, stately number, it's a pass-the-parcel number where everyone takes off the sticky tape and gently peels back each layer rather than ripping it to shreds. It reflects the soundtrack work they've been increasingly drawn towards and has a strong visual element - twilight forests and summer breeze moondances. The guitar pluck is mesmerisingly metronomic, a ghostly piano line giving the impetus that carries it through. It reaches in and takes advantage of the earlier softening up you've received, gently running a feather up and down your spine.

"I Should Have Known Better" wakes you from your somnambulic reverie via a Ramones or Dead Milkmen style stomper, with "Watch Out For Me Ronnie" harking back to even simpler roll-more-than-rock - Jerry Lee Lewis wouldn't be too ashamed to put his name to it and the busted-microphone production hints that they are not too ashamed for such a link to be drawn.

More of that piano-driven jauntiness returns with "The Weakest Part" which along with the fairly thin "Song For Mahila" could have perhaps hit the cutting room floor, but then what's a Yo La Tengo album without a sprawling sense of saturation with at least a few more ideas than is perhaps healthiest.

"Point And Shoot" brings back the focus and builds the tension up again with a straight up and down indie guitar attack, setting us up perfectly for epic closer "The Story Of Yo La Tengo", as much a summary of their oeuvre as this breath of fresh air of an album. Vibrating slowly into being, it builds incrementally, laying down swirling threads of distorted guitar over a solid rhythm structure. Ira's vocals are buried in this squall, but still manage to find a way through - "we… tried, tried with all our might, we… tore the playhouse down". The voice is subsumed and replaced by guitar following the same melodic imperative. Is it supporting or mocking? It's ambiguous, which is what keeps it from descending into earnestness.

It’s a bold, confident, brutal end to a 77-minute adventure, a masterpiece of unadulterated willingness to throw caution to the wind, revel in music’s ability to melt emotion and intellect together and create something that captures the essence of their sound and extends it perhaps further than it's ever been pushed before. It does what they and almost they alone are capable to do in this well-mined neck of the musical woods – surprise.

Now I have to wait almost all day until they hit the stage…

Thursday 1 March 2007

Schatten

Shadow

You think I’m gone at night. I’m happy for you to think that, but it’s not true. You think all you need to do is turn out the light and I cease to be. That doesn’t make me go, it just means you can’t see me.

You think you’re more real than I, but consider this – I’m still going to be here when you expire.

You sit there on your bench, eating your sandwich – tomato, lettuce and tuna on rye bread, I remember when we made it back in the kitchen, your sad and lonely kitchen - looking down at me. I can see you’re looking at me, but you won’t know which way I’m facing. How could you?

I know what you’re thinking. I’ve been with you your whole life, how could I not? You’re wondering whether I would ever leave you, betray you for another. For this I commend you, for at least it shows you know who is in charge.

It’s not that you’re afraid of losing me so much as what I could tell. Believe me, your secrets are no different to most others. Are they even secrets if everyone does these things? I suppose they are if you treat them as such, if you let them fret you so.

There is the companionship element too. You wake up each morning knowing that I’m going to be there when you rise. My presence reassures you, I can tell. You hate the middle of the day, when I shrink down to almost nothing, taking my respite from the heat.

Your favourite time is the fleeting window at the end of the day, when I reach out from you and touch all manner of things, everything I can get my hands on. I lean up against other people, embrace them in ways you wish you could too. I climb walls, I soar across roads and fields to welcome the moon, while you stand watching, envious of my freedom, my fearlessness. You love walking under street lights, watching me race on ahead, leaning out and showing you the way.

Sometimes, when we’re alone, you’re too ashamed to have me where you can see me. You turn the lamp beside your bed so it sends the light across you rather than from behind. I know it’s not as good for reading, but it means you don’t see me lie across the bed and rest up against the wall opposite.

You think I won’t judge you that way, which is patently ridiculous. I’ll always judge you, see how poorly you measure up to what you could be, gently mock your weaknesses. It’s not spite, it’s just my job.

I lied about being there during the night. Sometimes I stay, sometimes I go. But regardless of what I do during those quiet hours when you lie in troubled slumber, the places I go and the things I see, I always make sure I’m there when you wake up, right there beneath you.

Despite my disdain for your manifold foibles, my frustration at your ceaseless self-abasement, I do have a certain soft-spot as well. We've set off on this journey together and I made a promise to always be here. It's part of the deal; that next time round it will be my turn - I will be fleshed out, given the taste touch tactility you waste on your descent into decay, while you will return to be there for me, as my shadow.