(but i ride a bike...)

i walk a lonely road/the only one that i have ever known/don't know where it goes/but it's home to me and i walk alone...

so the ambulance was sitting at Tim Horton's today and i was being more than happy to hear this pretty cool song. i have felt like this all my life. and then i heard Oasis, too, and I was thinking, as you most certainly are too:

what is it with emergency services personnel, ridiculously unhealthy pastries, and cheap coffee? c'mon dan--Timmy Ho's?--it's so cliched. but...it's also completely true. that every single post in the city of Cheektowaga is within a half-mile of a Tim Hortons or Krispy Kreme. Post 63 is, in fact, the Krispy Kreme parking lot--where on duty EMTs and Paramedics get free donuts and koffee (there's a very good reason the koffee is free...)

and then you thought--what's Oasis doing in a Green Day song? why do i think they're playing "Wonderwall?" i will tell you. WEDG was playing both songs, mixed seamlessly. If you can manage it, try--they fit perfectly. and the emotional power squares itself in the combination. wierd. but that was not the end.

summer has come and passed/the innocent can never last/wake me up when september ends

for those not in the know, this is the second radio-released track from american idiot, Green Day's latest album. walk alone was the first track released. my partner-in-Timmy-Horton-ing-it-up informed me that american idiot is a concept CD on which all the songs follow a theme: a critique of post-9.11 america, the american mentality, the church, the media, and the iraq war. if he had a more...specialized? arcane?...vocabulary he might have used phrases like "suburban nightmare," "consumerism," "mass culture," "politics of fear," and "mass media."

i know this because i biked to Barnes and Noble tonight and bought it. i couldn't not. the cd isn't great art, it's not a great statement, it's not amazingly technical or even really poetic, by any means. it's a raging ball of anger and frustration and a little dash of hope, like a diary of the betrayal and disappointment and disillusionment and hopelessness of the 9.11 generation.

it's stomach acid on the twisted american soul. it's a man at his wits end, reaching for a grenade to wake a warped insensate glutton sated with self-importance and power. it's a rage against complacency, inner and societal, laden with the hopeless exhaustion of commitment to an unpopular and unpretty reality.

it's almost prophetic. or it's so filled with the spirit of prophecy, the grating, burning, intrusive and rude truth about ourselves that...well...you should listen to it.



Are we we are, are we we are
the waiting unkown?
the rage and love, the story of my life
the Jesus of suburbia is a lie