…Still tentative times but not so isolated n desperate as before.

<> >< <> >< <>

I know how much this sorta thing doesn’t really fly ‘round the dbis, but I must: I have to say thanx to db for having written and recorded Born For Love. Yeah, I also know this may be one of the few Baerwald songs that can actually get one ridiculed for admitting one likes it, admires it, and just simply really fucking gets it…or, at least, can adapt one’s own interpretation of it into one’s own lifely brush strokes.

Anyway, during the most terrifying, alienating, lonesome, desperate and persevering time of Maya’s lengthy stay in one and then the other of the two hospital wards, totaling better than 4-months straight in a hospital bed, those counted sorrow and sleepless times when I commuted to and from home or just sat in silent desperation with or without other lost souls in a moribund visitor lounge somewhere on one storehouse floor of the hospital or another, with a half-assed laptop and headphones, it was Born For Love that I played 3 or 4 times through to meditate and tear-or-ize myself back into some semblance of mental health…thereby getting-together with the heart and spirit needed to go back into my place in the scheme of things that was liaison between Maya’s struggle and the scientists and matriarchal caregivers shuffling around her bedside manipulating her back to health. There where I held her &/or rubbed oil on her skin…but not so close or instinctively intimate as to evoke the harsh side of the wary laws written to protect the patient from an overzealous lover without commonsense. Her bedside, there, where I could sometimes and then eventually more often talk her into having a catch with a hackysack ball and a koosh ball using both hands and rotating from clockwise to counter-clockwise in circular flow as a therapy of many drawers, opening each new possibility one catch and toss at a time, or getting up and strolling lap after lap, …or just holding her and listening/talking her through one drug induced vision (hallucination) or another.

I’ve come to believe that Born For Love is not the song choice of the à la mode (that steely & darkly somnambular maybe at times and other times swift and vigilant Baerwald music snob who can define cool from a mile away and spit vitriol at a conundrite with rifle bore accuracy), but it’s one that the artist had the audacity to write and record and place neatly at the closing act of one of the heaviest pieces of music these ears have ever been lent to; no it’s not biting enough for the resolute, not angst-filled enough for the testy, it’s just one heart & soul or whatever catharsis laid out on the shirtsleeve, as an end song with a quarter-turn where a dead-end may have been placed just as definitively. Perhaps to offer just a little credibility of hope to counter the hopelessness of it all, …and, in my case, a nearby winding road. No, not my road but one with a split second of parallel connectivity, enough so to perform as just one effective cliffside lighthouse on the jagged edge of one angry storm front. That meeting place where so many human plights can see eye-to-eye without hesitation, before the defenses retake hold of the moment at hand to cloud one’s judgment again. There, as a means of creativity for one soul. A means that in the studio was just that, one soul with a worthwhile heartbeat and some well directed energies, but recorded and released becomes like the eerie voices of foghorns blown-tossed on heavy winds, providing the interested, whether premeditated or not, with some divider lines between sanctuary and certain obliteration of the spirit-being that holds tenuously onto this wearied earthy domain; this place of brutal injustice defined.

This perception that notions of love can sustain one even in the deepest places of pure loneliness…is a keeper…and a blessing…even, possibly, a grace.

Just simply: Thanks.