There was something that I read the other day that keeps creeping in as I'm listening to Australia's Cloud Control. It was a simple line where a man admitted that he'd never been enamored with the thought or the drive -- the insistence that everyone puts on being a day laborer or a wage earner. There is that hyperventilative state that people get in about needing to be gainfully employed, about the definitive assertion that you will need to wake up every morning, bright and early and get out there and put in an honest day's work so that you can eat and drink later on, when the long days have come to their ends. There is no other way and the need to stay humping away at some occupation that you might not even believe in is great. Our leisure time is usually only measured by its potential earning power. What can it be used for so that more of the cash comes over the counter, into the hands. Our leisure time should be appreciated more seriously than it is. The parts that it plays are invaluable and we tend to squander it.
Lead singer Alister Wright sings at one point here, "I can't tell the way I feel," and it's this innocent thought that should inspire a walkabout, an afternoon where nothing else matters but the emptiness of his leisure, where a grassy knoll and a good stare off into the blue-skied distance could do some good. These songs have all the characteristics of being in the wavy and malleable here and now, where there are no deadlines or instructions to go by. The moments are filled with glorious laziness and indecision, but with options that all lead to some kind of nowhere that makes us feel like we're getting somewhere.