Ice for the drive, bone marrow for the mind

The temperature dances just below freezing this morning as I ease my way in at an ice-induced leisurely pace.  Fewer cars on the road this early morning, more time to get where I'm going, more time for more tunes over my phone-based music stream.

The tires crunch over crusted snow and slush on the side streets, giving good feedback about road conditions as I go.  But the arterials are bare and wet looking.  The road could be just as it appears - wet. It could also be ice, or both.  So we drive for conditions, as the State Patrol likes to remind us, via their Twitter feed, to do.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
    - Robert Frost, Fire and Ice

Kris Orlowski and Andrew Joslyn's tune I Will Go popped up.  Not sure when or where I picked that tune up in my musical wanderings, but it is a beautiful song with well written (if sad) lyrics.  To quote just a bit of the lyric:

soul, the fullness in her stare
first of many reasons we are
glow, her color fills the air
it’s hard to exist when we're afar
she proclaims
i will go
won’t you stay
i will go for you, go
i will. no
time will show
i will go
for you stay
grow, positively pained
bending not to break from being strong
go, letting go -- or pausing to refrain
withered like the trees among the storm
what remains?

Somewhat like Goethe: "You must sleep but I must dance... "

Good music is balm for the soul and good bone marrow for the mind to pick over contentedly. And importantly, these days, it is not the news.

I can’t get my head around it. How did we devise

a concept like just war: the slain of the Lord
are dung upon the ground. I know there are distinctions
it is important to make and I don’t expect perfection
but the chicanery of subtle thought . . . if I pick it all apart
will anything be left to sew back into sense?

Cleverer minds are reconciled. Cultured, poised,
the government official (Should I give him spectacles?
Should they reflect the light?) pauses and replies:
The President regrets . . . but consider the alternative …

would you offer succour… and I can almost understand.
   - Brook Emery, from Monster [I can't get my head around it]

Today's playlist:

• Charlie Darwin, The Low Anthem
• If I Don't Get Involved, Bobby "Blue" Bland
• New Religion, Alice Smith
• I Will Go, Kris Orlowski & Andrew Joslyn
• I Wish / Everything I Love, John Stowell
• You're Just Never Satisfied, Fountains Of Wayne