Big City Wonder: Cindy

Try to cram your whole hand into a small jar of cherries. After you've got as much of your hand in that jar as you possibly can, do the same with the other hand, with another jar. Go ahead and remember your gymnastics lessons from when you were 8 years old, because you're going to need them. Now balance in those two tiny cherry jars and walk on your hands around a big city for the next 9 hours.

While nothing might seem so awkward and painful as doing what was just described, you may have seen a close second. Cindy is a sadly inappropriate match for the current, incredibly senseless (and extremely ugly, in many people's opinion) fashion trend of wearing impossibly pointy and uncomfortable spike heels with faded, often ripped jeans and other unlikely casual clothing. The net effect of this maddening garment juxtaposition is one that renders an entire outfit uncomfortable by the simple fact that one's feet are being strangled like a handful of sausages.

Cindy was a cheerleader in high school, but since she graduated from tech school ten years ago and has been living by herself in the best neighborhood her bachelorette income can afford within 10 miles of her tiny advertising firm in northeast Chicago, she has let fitness slowly slip away from her. The daily 10-minute tug-and-wiggle into her jeans has become a 15-minute yank-and-screech. Her bleach-damaged hair resists her persistent efforts to casually add volume with a nonchalant flip of her hand, resembling more of a straw cellar door being forced open and falling shut, pivoting on a dark-roots hinge.

She uncomfortably glares at her tired reflection in dark window of the commuter train, and then despondently at her naked left ring finger. She diffidently peers at the man with the shiny head and blue shirt, with his wide eyes glaring at the emergency exit sign at the end of the train and jaw grinding with what looks like focus or anger. She wonders if he notices how much her feet hurt.

He does.

Lyri-clue: The dark side of freedom

I have to include all of the lyrics to this song: it literally gives me goosebumps when I read them...

Sam Stone came home,
To his wife and family
After serving in the conflict overseas.
And the time that he served,
Had shattered all his nerves,
And left a little shrapnel in his knee.
But the morphine eased the pain,
And the grass grew round his brain,
And gave him all the confidence he lacked,
With a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back.

Chorus:
There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes,
Jesus Christ died for nothin' I suppose.
Little pitchers have big ears,
Don't stop to count the years,
Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.
Mmm....

Sam Stone's welcome home
Didn't last too long.
He went to work when he'd spent his last dime
And Sammy took to stealing
When he got that empty feeling
For a hundred dollar habit without overtime.
And the gold rolled through his veins
Like a thousand railroad trains,
And eased his mind in the hours that he chose,
While the kids ran around wearin' other peoples' clothes...

Repeat Chorus:

Sam Stone was alone
When he popped his last balloon
Climbing walls while sitting in a chair
Well, he played his last request
While the room smelled just like death
With an overdose hovering in the air
But life had lost its fun
And there was nothing to be done
But trade his house that he bought on the G. I. Bill
For a flag draped casket on a local heroes' hill.

Repeat Chorus

John Prine, "Sam Stone", John Prine Live

Lyri-clue: Frantic Sadness

Alright I'm on Johnson Avenue in San Luis Obispo
and I'm five years old or six maybe.
and indications there's something wrong with our new house
trip down the wire twice daily.
I'm in the living room watching the Watergate hearings
while my stepfather yells at my mother,
launches a glass across the room, straight at her head
and I dash upstairs to take cover,
lean in close to my little record player on the floor,
so this is what the volume knob's for...

I listen to Dance Music.
Dance...Music.

The Mountain Goats, "Dance Music", The Sunset Tree