Week 59 // The Amazing Uncertainty Of Tenses

by Mount Everest

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about

This week I once again look to the new year for inspiration, but unlike last week, I am not talking about frustration and anger. This time I’m talking about the ever steady passage of time. I traveled through southern New England on New Year’s Eve to make my way to a celebration in Rhode Island. I avoided all of the major highways and found myself criss-crossing through old mill towns that I had never visited before. They were all remnants of another time, and time had clearly taken its toll. A heavy fog had set in and I could see little more than what was just in front of me. Amazing hulking smokestacks and rubble would periodically emerge from the white, and damnit if I wasn’t driving through a poem about the loss of industrial America and the dawn of an uncertain era. It was truly beautiful, but at first I felt sad. Perhaps if it hadn’t been New Year’s Eve, I would have remained that way. But it was quite clear to me that the strewn remains of mills and factories were part of a natural process. The years will march on, and things will be born and things will die. If time doesn’t pass the future cannot be. I chose to focus on renewal and the potential that exists in the present. Needless to say, I felt the whole thing to be quite profound, so when I came home I wrote a little song about it.

lyrics

On my heart like a personal scar
On the day I submerged in the fog in my car
As I made my way blindly through wreckage and wastes
The next day marked a new year, a welcomed embrace
And how lovely it was

Oh I saw hundred years behind me
And tomorrow’s seeming strange

And human beings are just machines
All wired for hope and living it just the same

And while the final factory wall
Came down on New Year’s Eve, the hour came

Listen up: It’s not falling apart
Cuz the past isn’t physical
It’s a place we can start
It’s a concept like future and present
And time’s like a beating heart
And one day’s gotta end for the next one to start
And how lovely it is

Oh I saw hundred years behind me
And tomorrow’s seeming strange

And human beings are just machines
All wired for hope and living it just the same

And while the final factory wall
Came down on New Year’s Eve, the hour came