I'm an Island in a Blur of Noise and Color...

It's been an interesting week... It's been an interesting day. It started with some very weird dreams in the wee hours of the morning, led into some deep and intense reflection on life and what I'm doing with mine, and then a whole sort of stream of consciousness path that oddly seems to make sense (at least in my oddly constructed brain).

While digging around online this afternoon, I caught an interesting little bit of info on Bruce Cockburn, who is playing near me on Sunday at the Sol Fest. I was trolling the web for info when I found the True North site. In a really great article that covers most of his career, there's a comment about the fact that his song Night Train was written after " a long night of Absinthe drinking." I'm a great fan of absinthe. I'm even a fan of the faux American version called Absente, not to mention the made in New Orelans knock off known as Herbsaint.

The thing that captured my imagination about this particular bit of information is the factual tidbit that the song in question is a particularly psychedelic stream of consciousness poem about images and people and the state of the world. It happens to be one of my favorite songs by Cockburn because like so many of his songs it plays lightly along the line of dark and light, life and death, despair and faith. It's the first song on an album called "The Charity of Night" which displays (as you can see in the first picture here) a collection of disparate images including an angel, a machine gun, the yin and yang, the Muslim Crescent (an image that Cockburn has made use of before), pikes and stars and mysterious wisps of nothingness. The whole feel of the album is a bit hallucinogenic, but it's a reflection of the world, both in the late 90s when the album came out, and prehaps even more now, when the songs Cockburn is doing are as strange and profound as they have ever been.

The thing about the absinthe reference is that all of that strangeness feels completely appropriate. Whether it was Halloween ten years ago when I stood, in full costume, clamoring at the gates of Bartholomew Park Winery while my friends sat in the car, laughing hysterically, waiting to go to a Cockburn concert in Petaluma (the Charity of Night tour incidentally), or the interview I did with Dan Noreen of the Sonoma Wine Exchange, an avid collector of Absinthe Art, or the strange way I keep coming and going from the current heart of strangeness (and home of Absinthe) in America... The Crescent City.

It's a strange world... and the more I try to gauge a through line on the whole thing the more I seem to get lost and the hallucinogenic curly cue of distorted reality actually begins to make sense. How else to explain so much of what has gone on in my life over the last few years... few months... few days?

I used to think that things were supposed to make sense and that it was really my problem that I didn't get the concept. These days, I'm pretty sure that The Strangeness IS the basic reality... and if you've got some Absinthe handy... I think I'll have another drink.