I was innocently enjoying my bday martini last night when this song came on in le bar that I hadn’t heard in years — Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe — and I was TRANSPORTED to another time and place. The strange thing was, I couldn’t quite name the time or place, and still can’t put my mind finger on it, but I think it was some time in my 20s in NYC, and that this song was one of many songs I murdered to death by listening to it on the train over, and over, and over. It’s one of those fantastic songs that feels like a story journey. A journey story. It makes me feel something really intense that I can’t even name. Some hybrid emotion that a better writer would have a word or metaphor for. And if one were to google the lyrics, like I just did, and remove spaces, like I just did, and pretend like the song is a story, like I am currently doing, it turns out swell.

It’s just a bad movie, where there’s no crying – handing the keys to me in this Red Lion, where the lock that you locked in the suite says there’s no prying. When the breath that you breathed in the street screams there’s no science. When you look how you looked then to me, then I cease lying and fall into silence.

It’s just a house burning, but it’s not haunted. It was your heart hurting, but not for too long, kid. In the socket you spin from with ease there is no sticking. From the speakers your fake masterpiece comes serenely dribbling. When the air around your chair fills with heat, that’s the flames licking beneath the clock on the clean mantlepiece. It’s got a calm clicking, like a pro at his editing suite takes two weeks stitching up some bad movie.