Twin Towers

I can't believe the year is almost over... It seems impossible. I guess time speeds up for all of us as we get older.

Thanksgiving this year was good... it had a little bit of everything: food, family, friends, fbeer, fsleep. You get the fidea. As good as all the socializing and carousing was, I think my favorite moment of a much-needed long weekend was my quiet Friday night at home, which I spent in my recently-assembled office sitting in front of my Mac, sifting through the songs I've demoed over the last few months, and recording the songs I hadn't yet...

I wound up with, I think, 18 tunes. Most were written this year, with a couple holdovers from late last year. Seeing these tunes all there as sound files, lined up in one folder, I got a true feeling of accomplishment... a feeling of excitement for the future recording of this jigsaw document of a year of my life...

I can start to see the common threads that run through this group of songs and it feels like this group is almost complete... maybe a couple more to add but... it really seems like, if the first Paper Arrows' disc is about loss, this group of songs is about how you reclaim your heart after loss... how you start to rebuild yourself... how you have to navigate the push and pull of the past and future and how those forces act on your heart and your head... how the process creates these feelings of nausea and nostalgia and hope and fear all rolled into one...

And as I went to bed on Friday night as the winter wind worked the trees outside my living room and the blue light of the TV pulled my already heavy eyes even closer to sleep my computer screen flickered in my head and I could see all the song titles and I could see all the sound waves which somehow stood for an entire year of my life which somehow stood for me and as I got closer and closer to sleep I went deeper and deeper into the computer screen into the sound waves until I got to the deepest point possible and instead of it being a small place a tiny place like at the bottom of a well it was a giant place a place as big as the sky and in the distance I could see what looked like two towers rising up and I walked closer and closer and started to run and ran closer and closer and the towers were way farther away than I thought and I had to run what seemed like a marathon to get there but as I got closer I could see that the two towers were rising up out of an island and they weren't towers at all they were actually two human hearts and there were crews of men working on each heart building it up and up and up and up towards the sky construction crews with cranes and scaffolding and the hearts were reaching up and parts were unfinished and I could see inside and see blood running through giant arteries and as I got closer still I could hear something I could hear something I could feel something I could feel the ground vibrate and there were two distinct sounds and beats and I instantly knew there were two heartbeats and the hearts were beating and I came upon a workman near the base of these giant hearts and I asked him what they were doing and he said today they were trying to sync up the two heartbeats and I asked how do you do that and he said they were planning on stopping the hearts and restarting them at the same time together and I said isn't that dangerous to stop a heart and he said yes and there was a yell from above explosions below someone yelled and at that moment there were tremendous explosions from both hearts and suddenly there was just nothing no beat just a faint echo of the explosions mixed with the final jagged beats of the two and every workman stopped what he was doing and looked up at the hearts and we waited and waited and waited for what seemed like forever and ever and waited some more and I still heard a single heart beat and I realized it was my own heart and I realized I was holding my breath and then again there were two more explosions and we waited again for what seemed like hours but was really a moment suspended in time and then quietly at first but with gathering intensity both hearts began to beat in one united beat and the workmen cheered and the heartbeats grew stronger as they beat together and seemed to feed off of one another and the workmen cheered louder and louder and hearts beat louder and stronger and I couldn't hear myself think and I realized that somehow my own heart was beating in time with the skyscraper hearts

and I smiled.

jbg