Jayson and I sit listening to this song. He comments on the guitar part, the vibrato and its repititions and how it creates a mood of otherworldliness. It is 1991. We shared many scintillating hours with this album. We go to Chili’s and discuss how Tony and Chris have become close, moved in together and how he and I were doing the same.

He says it may be as life should be that we become close as we are the most lyrical of the gang. He always sang along with everything. (I lapse into past tense again.) He was for sure more lyrical than I, in general. Texture was more my worry, though I did not know it back then. If I had, we may have done what Tony claimed - taken over the world (if we could indeed have played our instruments). Texture. It is my current goal.

I am walking with my iriver playing insistently in my ears waiting for another message from Honeybunicka. It is the posh part of Dejvice. Near Podbaba. I walk often these days, often to rid myself of the alcohol which permeated endless (seemingly) hours before. My recovery phase.

She is my only deep contact at this time.

I send her a message (You can’t spend the whole song in space). She replies with something along the lines of … why can’t you then spend it on earth?

I purchase a sandwich and head for the center, through Hradcanska.

I am sitting not at my desk before my computer and laptop, but behind, adjacent to Karen’s empty place. I am playing with scanned photos, preparing them for places on a website I have not created yet. I am at EIN, my first job in Praha. This is one of the only CDs I brought with me on my flight from NYC through Warsaw to Praha. It strikes me as something Draza would love, though I don’t know her well, only know that she made me welcome in this alien place. I have only been here a few weeks, nigh a month.

Redana has been a sympathetic friend. Her man, Killian, and I have enjoyed many a morning and evening with Scotch and bizarre and occasionally confrontational conversations about the nature of the affect music has on our humanity. He places The Church in the same category as other overwrought goth bands of the 80s. I do not. I find it ironic that he uses ‘Glow Worm’ from this very album to be a prominent part of his wedding ceremony. I am not invited.

Draza plays through my head, another unrequieted love - or substance of what could be love. Later I lay in bed with her (much later - months - many) after a bout with Fernet. She is kind to me and we become friends, only to drift silently from each other as our paths part. I miss her. She was a good friend.

Three bottles of wine at lunch at a pizzeria near Staromestske Namesti pull my mind back to those days. Soon would me my flight to Andrew and away from my first circle of ‘friends’ in Praha.

Was it Tranquility. I was still suffering from shards of my broken relationship shredding my lungs and heart.

Tranquility.

Marty Willson-Piper makes a good point.

I am walking from a small town in north-western Spain with this song playing in my ears. Ah, the whole album, not just this song. The most telling and touching one comes next. The sign says 100 metres to the turnoff to the campsite and the beach. I count steps along with the 4/4 of it. I am glorified in my solitude. I am not looking forward to reaching the tent, intend to purchase a flask of beer before arriving though I know she’ll be angry, questioning the reason though she knows it gives me temporary escape - pleasure even. The songs still echo through my brain as I explain to her one of my goals - my dreams - to own a cafe which plays music winding up an atmosphere of deep sentimentality. Is it for me, or is it for the patrons? For the former, I am sure. Though the dream is perhaps the best - a way to love what I own and project it onto others, let them share what in my rotten soul may be names as Love.

I am in El Paso. Perhaps this is playing in the background. Acy is on the phone. I am running up a bill that I’ll never be able to pay. We speak and laugh. We always laughed at our absurdities. It healed me whilst I was alone. I lie on that small, uncomfortable bed. Papers are scattered on the floor around a keyboard on which I wrote the bass part for ‘Tomorrow Never Came’. Tony played it pretty much to perfection. He is always diligent in that manner. It plays also in my truck, uncared for but functional, as I drive semi-randomly around west El Paso, perhaps in search of Maggie’s mansion. I find it. I sit. I drive on - back to the house adjacent to Lacey’s place to listen again and again to ‘The Blurred Crusade’.

I am on my bed in Jester Hall in Austin … the University of Texas. John is not with me in the room. I am alone with his posters of Stryper and other hair-metal bands of the day. (Days long gone.) The chords Marty Willson-Piper fades in and out grip me with their raw value. I would say power, but this is not metal. Acy introduced me to this album and it remains etched even to this day. But I am flying to the future. I wonder were there days when I wandered around the campus listening to this very song - the whole album - as I did ‘Pleasantly Disturbed’ by Simple Minds. This is healing music, a reprieve from the loneliness which engulfs me. I drift from past to present tense. I suppose the latter is better. Other albums come to mind which had the same healing power. The aforementioned Simple Minds and ‘Fugazi’ by Marillion.

It is a commentary on progress and the way it rots closeness and intimacy. It is still valid to this day - an eternal hymn. There is no ambiguity. Our destination is self-oblivion and detachment from all who were or could have been close.

I struggle with the guitar part in my flat in Seattle whilst Brynn does other unknown things in the bedroom. When my guitar sits in my lap and my lips try to force the syllables which churn from my breast. I don’t complete it. But the sentimentality of the piece coats me senses as I begin again and again. Brynn enters and I show her the chords and the melody. She dares not play, so I do it. She sings a bit. We retire to hear the original (the same which plays in my ears at the moment, sometime in the future).

I decide to record my own version, a cover of it. It never comes to be, but the chords come to my fingers on many upon many times as time flashes by.

It’s 1991 and I am in my room in College Station. It is only a few minutes walk to Chris and Jayson’s place. I am staring blankly at the white walls adorned with a few posters (one of Kate Bush). This song plays and I am melancholy, as the music demands. Kindle floats through my mind and ideas of a liaison with her taunts. It is an unrequieted future. I should have known from the outset.

I cannot understand it, though many years I have listened to it. It is grand, but bizarre. I calamyty.I grant my soul as a bitch. Scratching pages don’t matter. I am wasted.

Clap your hand because you want to die. Every victim is searching for his hangman. Sigh.