Unexpected visit from the Muse this morning...

You’re in the foxhole, once you have had kids.

Before you could be blithe about death, 

Your own, other's- affect some posture of 

Cynicism or indifference or rueful depth

Meditating on it with tented fingers, keen to impress 

at parties or down the pub. But now 

At least for me, it’s all just- please, please, please

Keep them safe or,

If it's going to be something bad, not too bad, not

Life-changing or death and as for me. 

Let me live long enough to get them through to adulthood, then 

You can deal with me as you please.

Entreating, something, anything, whatever agency 

sits at the centre of things 

And tips disaster your way on a whim.

It’s God, I suppose, I’m talking to.

Some force that can be implored with to intervene, 

So we won't be subject to pure contingency 

-banal accidents crossing roads or climbing trees,

Caught up in the spasms of the mad, the careless or the predatory. 

Or illness or disease or..please 

Please, please just let us make it through 

All the hazards. After all, most people do.

 

Or at least leave us be long enough so I can know- 

I paid my dues- 

to the Universe, 

to you, 

to your mother

When we were all down in the foxhole, 

Briefly together.

My most listened to artist of 2024 was...

Vampire Weekend. They are never far from my most listened to artists of any given year and this year I mostly listened to them while playing with my son, who turned two a few weeks ago, while my wife was getting our daughter to bed.  Making towers of blocks, pointing out objects in books, batting balloons around, bouncing up and down on daddy’s tummy, getting spun and tumbled. There are certain songs now that are indelibly suffused with the experience of playing or dancing with the kids, mostly silly, slight or joyful songs of the kind that are also within the broad taste range of someone born in 1970. 

Spotify has informed me that I was in the top 1% of Vampire Weekend listeners, a super-fan, and this doesn't even capture the fact that I mostly listened to them on youtube. I have learned to enjoy Father of the Bride over the years but mostly I listened to the new album. I don't know exactly what my most listened to track was but I suspect it was this sublimely beautiful song, a song, with its truncated whoops of joy and the choir raising it's voice in a slow, stately euphoria to bridge the dark, that I'll always now associate with the tenderness of soft summer evenings with that little boy, the only son I'll have, and a time in our life that will never return when we were feeling our way through my dusk and his dawn toward each other.

Finally found a Van Morrison album I like.

 Could this be the way in to the great man's work?