That song and video break my heart each time. I didn't hike yesterday - I mowed the lawn, did yard work, my next weekend is booked, Saturday with something that will both spectacularly suck and be exceptionally entertaining, something I will dearly want to write about (and may, but not here), Sunday with something that will be nice and boringly entertaining that I will not want to write about anywhere, I thought, I may not get to the yard for two weeks better do it today. I'll try to sneak a hike in next Sunday morning, perhaps Earthgirl will be healed enough to join me. At dinner with my parents last night for Father's Day with Planet and SeatSix, SeatSix asked me why I just don't make it either a Sillyass Deserted Island Six Game or add a fourth permanent post in the Five. Silly SeatSix.
I don't do this lightly - it's been years since I swapped out a permanent seat. It's not that I love Guided by Voices/Robert Pollard projects less, it's that in this time in my mind in my life in my notebooks on my hikes on my drives when falling asleep nothing pings my chords, triggers cascades, more than Lambchop, now the third permanent member of My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game.
HAPPINESS
Jane Kenyon
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.
No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.
It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
