Blue Moon

When I was a kid, I, and this is really going to shock you, had a fairly active imagination.  You are probably thinking, either, well, I can certainly see that (the friendly patronizing voice.)  Then again you might be thinking the professorial, I'd love to know what you mean, Andy...

For me, it's a toss up between the two.  So I suppose I'll just deal with them both in order (I'm a predictable chump, with an active imagination.)  

Yeah, I am always saying in this blog how I am interested in everything.  Which is pretty self serving, since most folks would love to say such a thing, and it goes without saying that to actually come right out and say it, sounds either insecure (a real possibility) or conceited (having trouble with my vocab there...)

So I guess insecure wins!  So I'll try not to say it again.

On the subject of the active imagination being obvious from this Blog, I am not so sure, it really is that obvious, since, for example I am constantly wanting to say things, every day, and desiring to get across ideas, every time I do anything, and wishing to honor some of the fertile expanses of my past, and my colorful life, and basically completely failing.  In a manner you cannot even imagine.  I need a novel to get some of this crap across.  Though I feel that to be a crazy thing to begin just now, since before I write such a thing, I need to do a lot more research, and dredge a lot more stuff from my past up.  Like stuff from the the bad neighborhoods in Indy, and the truck stops where I used to hang out (just drinking coffee and reading and sleeping in my car, but still there were conversations with people that were fascinating).  Like the years I spent virtually alone working on a sort of hobby farm for a wonderful man, who grew up nicknamed "Patches" for the clothes him mother made for him.  Nobody calls him patches anymore, and yet the company of the admiring is something you can tell this man is not comfortable with.  Talk about a rock and a hard place.  But it's something people relate to.  

I could talk about the first time I saw a white shadow that was blue, on a white fence and realized my eyes were tricking me with colors.  With digital cameras and computers that is insanely easy to see, but I never did color photography lab work, and was, after all merely painting a fence.  The thing I kept thinking of when I noticed the white, turned blue in shadow, was the song, "Love Makes A Fool Of Us All," which aside from being both entirely true and false simultaneously (a sure sign of the meddling of God) has a line, 

"Morning blue shadows

Cross a room with clothes scattered

And a bed with two bodies entwined.

The one's that he's lied to

Aren't the one that he's tied to

And his own family, seldom crosses his mind."

The spectral usage of a kind of illuminating optics seemed to be on the mind of country writers a lot in the Seventies.  Then again Pink Floyd basically takes the cake, with their iconographic grade school science experiment as a design element.  So perhaps the country guys really are the bumpkins after all.  Though I doubt it.  Take these lines:

"Then one night he heard a sound,

And he laid his pencil down,

And traced it to the door and turned the handle...

And the pale light of the Moon,

Through the window of the room

Split the shadows where two bodies

Lay entangled."

That's from Kris Kristofferson's "Darby's Castle" about a man who lost his wife because he wanted to build a mansion instead of a McMansion.  Subtlety is an art.  

Perhaps with all these bodies lying around in a state of non linear order, all this music is telling us is that Twister had just arrived from Milton Bradley.  It wouldn't surprise me.  But that doesn't really change the significance of such lines to the dreamer and writer such as myself.  Even if something was written, "just because," I still wish to tangle my hands in its hair.  It's a mystery.