The Look on Your Face Is Delicate

If you're following along at home, the look of this post has changed about five times over the evening. That should tell you something: yes, it's the kind of night in which an attempt at crafting legal excellence has spiraled downwards (or upwards, depending on how you view the world) into sitting Indian style on my bed trawling through pages of cases and statutes and listening to sad French music on KCRW; and no, I'm not finished with anything yet.

But the original text of the post said the following:

We interrupt this radio broadcast of relative silence to inform certain members who may or may not be hanging about the peripherary that there is such a thing on the Internet as a bootlegged version of Damien Rice singing a "Cannonball" and "Hallelujah" medley and that, circumstances notwithstanding, you should know that it is and, specifically, that it is here. In addition, the live version of "Volcano" they list is particularly devastating and should be downloaded with all deliberate speed.

You give me miles and miles of mountains and I'll
ask for the sea

And then an editor's note added this postscript:

Um, if you're reading this, my closet-reader-Damien-Rice-ice-cream-and-coffee-run-fan (and you know who you are), download everything from the Austin City Limits show, "Lonely Soldier," and "Lay Me Down."

And now I'm listening to/watching Damien Rice and Josh Ritter and the Frames and the Arcade Fire and various others perform on Nic Harcourt's "Morning Becomes Eclectic" and thinking,

things are difficult for a time and then what's difficult becomes what's commonplace. Sometimes that's right, and sometimes that's wrong, and you never know which way it's going to end up. And that's fine. There, I said it. The way I spoke a year ago will inform what I say tomorrow, in two weeks, the next twenty years. Or it won't. We'll either forget or we'll remember. We'll fight and cajole; we'll tease and press and push and pull and ask too much of the other, and sometimes we'll come through. Sometimes we won't. We sing the same songs and we dream the same dreams and we keep on walking when there's a dim threat in the night because what are you going to do if you can't, at some point, turn around and laugh at how redundant fear can be?

So grow sweet on wine and tired French voices, at once world-weary and well-rested. The line between poetry and prose is never far off from where you are, especially if where you are is early in the morning, marathoning through the last few pages of what's been made indelible in your heart: that more than words need white space to be legible; that what isn't there gives, to what is, meaning; and that there is a first word and a good song and a long goodbye, and O, Telemarchus, if you're listening -- it's never easy, is it, growing secrets in the bass line of your favorite refrain, when every song you hear says hello, I'm waiting for you to say well, all of it is madcap and you are the most ridiculous thing, now aren't you. Because you'd be right.