Mark's Pages

August 30, 2004:

There were a small number of songs which helped in that time. I played them over and over, to the point that visitors complained.

Lindsey Buckingham's Countdown, explicitly a song of hope for recovery from a period of trial. "How the madness fades... Things about to turn around..." I left it on infinite repeat and played it 24 hours a day for weeks at a stretch.

The Reivers' album Saturday. Kim Longacre's voice soothing like childhood lullabies. John Croslin as the poet of everyday moments: "At the end of the day, the greatest love I've found..."

Then the wrong instant listening to a car radio and it's all over. Annie Lennox's Why? makes me late for the revolution: half an hour to regain composure before entering the building where the student group I worked with were planning their monster antiwar conference.

In time it faded, so slowly it was like the receding of glaciers at the end of an ice age, happening in geological time outside our usual measurable chronologies. Then for half a decade my head radio stayed tuned to Kate Bush:

I should be crying but I just can't let it show
I should be hoping but I can't stop thinking
Of all the things we should've said
That were never said.
All the things we should've done
That we never did.
All the things that you needed from me
All the things that you wanted for me
All the things I should've given
But I didn't
Oh, darling, make it go away.
Just make it go away now.

Give me these moments back
Give them back to me
Give me that little kiss
Give me your hand.