July 27, 2008

Escape to Snake Rock

There’s an episode of The Wonder Years where Kevin and Paul are hanging out with a new friend, sort of a bad kid, and they go out to a campfire spot by the tracks and drink beer and listen to an 8-Track of Sunshine of Your Love. The riff is so heavy the first time you hear it, at the inaugural moment of the buzz, when you first feel your body's motions being tracked in distorted overtones, before the riff is weakened by an overdubbed blues lead and then neutralized entirely by the IV chord. Every town has some bridge, pit, quarry, culvert, well, jetty, landing, clearing, trail, tree, or trestle, some concrete slab with a little charred cairn and Bonham circles, some magic mountain or hobbitland where joints of stems and leaves may have been passed, where in the glittering beer glass you can still find pull tabs from old cans like the ones Kevin and Paul might have cracked. What are these places?

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