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How do you keep your flavor funky fresh?

I think of Rush’s new album and from what I’ve read and experienced at my tender age, I am convinced there are less right answers and that you just have to run harder. Not faster. Get it? I will delineate thusly.

“Sprint toward the finish line,” is what my beloved Mr. Dorman always said to lift morale at the end of the school year. If we apply this to the larger context, THE context, of life in general, then Rush is running harder than anything I’ve seen toward the finish line. Peart’s morality that has always been rooted in pragmatism has shifted. I’ve seen all too often the wild-eyed elder seizing the last drop of vitality life has to offer. The song Headlong Flight terrifies me. It’s all in past tense and the line “Oh I wish I could live it all again” really frightens me. What are you planning on doing, Neil? Are you packing for the next trip? It’s William Wordsworth who christened the phrase “spots of time,” to express how memories are never experienced linearly, and are rather flashes from life distilled down to a spark, a spark from the big steel wheels running ever harder into the ground, six feet under. Wordsworth also proposed that the closer one is to the “other side,” which includes children, the keener the sense of what lies beyond. It’s a magnetic pull, drawing you nearer, faster, the closer you approach. Our loving Watchmaker loving us all to death.

The direction I’m going is, I just graduated college and have received the final reprieve from having a gun held to my head to stay sharp. I want that fear and vitality forever. I have to learn to produce this from within. I’ve always watched and admired Neil’s allegiance to staying sharp and fresh. Rush has never stopped growing, Rush has never sold out. Come what may in terms of how I pay my future bills, I cannot ever give in, or cave in. I’m approaching the middle of the race—I’m in the thick of the wilderness and have already seen some of my friends puss out.

Humanity is hierarchical by nature and sees the world through categories. Many see only two types: the manly man and the metro man; the pioneer and the historian; the priest and the punk; the republican and the democrat. Funny thing, for all of us lies the same endgame. As we get older, we are pulled closer to the other side and that treadmill has you running so fast.  

I was looking out the window when I should have been looking at your face instead. Freeze this moment a little bit longer, make each sensation a little bit stronger. Experience slips away.

You couldn’t put it any better way. Thank God for Rush, despite whatever you were BU2B.

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