road movie to berlin

 The first time I heard They Might Be Giants was at the summer day camp I went to that had two vans. The red van did not have a working stereo. The WHITE VAN had a cd player/ cassette player and the two cool guy counselors who drove the white van would play the album Flood by They Might Be Giants on it and you got to listen to songs like Particle Man, Birdhouse in Your Soul, and Istanbul (not Constantinople). It was a huge deal to be in the white van and get to listen to the crazy songs and I remember the time me and my friend got on what was ordinarily the big kid van. 

At some point after that or around that time there was also an animated music video to Particle Man on Tiny Toon Adventures.

My next memory of the album is my dad buying it and my sister and I and my dad listening to the album all the way through on the way home and stopping in the driveway and until it finished. I remember my dad saying that he liked that it was a bunch of short catchy songs.

Recently I was driving a group of campers and put on Flood again. It's the same CD that my dad bought at least 20 years ago. For a while my favorite song from the album has been the closing track, Road Movie to Berlin. It's a song about mortality and accepting life for the finite one-way journey that it is.

My favorite verse goes:

We were once so close to heaven

Peter came out and gave us medals,

declaring us the nicest of the damned.

And then there's this really long pronounced silence

Time won't find the lost

it'll sweep up our skeleton bones

so take the wheel and I will take the pedals.

I just think those are such good lines. Time won't find the lost, it'll sweep up our skeleton bones. Like, the passage of time won't uncover anything or bring anything back. It will only brush things into oblivion. That good good existential finality. But then the last line is sweet because there's a sense of camaraderie and togetherness as we go forwards in the only direction we can go. Right? Two or more people driving in a car together. It's a great example of choosing your attitude. Like the facts are gonna be what they are, time goes on and we aren't getting to heaven, but gosh darn it we're together and we're gonna be nice about it. 

That's that on that.