now the colors convene

This week’s song isn’t quite as much of a fossil as the previous ones.

This week’s song can be filed under the Isn’t it pretty to think so? category of tunes. If yesterday, I was overly concerned with reality, today I’m acknowledging that love is blindness or, more importantly, blind spots and hazy vision are necessary in the business of living.

Last night, I had a little tussle with insomnia. It was stupid really- bedtime reading is generally not thought to involve someone getting stabbed 22 times in the chest. Every time I closed my eyes, my imagination went a little crazy.

I started with honesty. I turned the light back on and started writing something, but it was filled with too much truth. It was so frightening that I had even more trouble going to sleep after that. It was time for oblivion. Time for lies. 2:30 is time for lies.

Life is better now that I’ve found you. I erased the bad parts. Edited out the ugly pasts or the hopeless futures. I found the window. When I imagined it that way, I realized I have a knack for windows. Life has a knack with windows. If you let it, life can lull you into some real highs- the only condition is that you cannot ask for it to sustain, cannot expect it to fix everything that came before.

It was easy once I was down with poetic license. It took me less than 20 minutes to fall asleep, and it only took that long because I was starting to enjoy thinking of all the perfect memories. Some were just beautiful places, some were people I loved in all sorts of different ways, and many were different laughs. The laughs are for another post, maybe tomorrow.

If, however, I had spent even an extra minute lingering on any one of those images, any one of those memories, the illusion would have surely been shattered.

Set all of that aside, though, and note that Norah Jones sounds weirdly like she has some soul in this song. Maybe not weirdly, because Q-Tip is at work here. And Q-Tip is in prime form. Even if you correct for my ridiculous bias (I have a serious thing for his voice, regardless of whether he’s spewing nonsense), Q-Tip is staying in the moment here. He’s celebrating what he can, both what came before him and what followed, without getting weighed down in the complexities. But it’s Q-Tip- it’s not like he’s unaware. He’s making a choice, he states it up front:

one step at a time, a man walked on the moon

You can’t always think about things in their entirety or you’d never get much accomplished. If you think about 2009 and everything that has gone wrong, the idea that anything will improve is nearly impossible to imagine. If, however, you think of 2009 as a window, cut it free of the bonds of the past and the future, who knows?