Dammit if we aren't some complicated beings. Well, we do have the choice. We don't have to be so complicated. We might still never figure ourselves out, but we could tone down the calculus of our relationships, our interactions, our responses, our offerings, our gestures and our tics. We could make it a little easier for cohabitation, if we really wanted to. We could maintain most of our mystery and still be accessible to most others. We could still lightly smirk inside when someone gets us wrong, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
The music that Belgian songwriter Jonathan Vandenbroeck -- who performs under the name Milow -- writes is the collected work of someone wholly intrigued by all of our many oddities, even while they're oddities that are developed, mostly, to protect. He writes about people who refuse to feel the daunting weight of slipping one day off and putting another on after a few hours of sleep. It's a bit much to think about -- that conveyor belt of time that just moves through the picture. The bottles must be filled. The caps must be placed on the bottles at the end of the belt and those bottles must be placed in boxes -- the tops glued shut and slid off to the side for stacking. We can get to feeling like a bottle until we realize that we're the operators of the belt, most of the time. We don't have to cave if we don't want to. We can stick it out. We can ascend. We can loll if we want to. We can spin ourselves into the ground or we can splash like fish. We can just sail and Milow says it best below, in "Sons Of Our Fathers":
"Wherever we're going
There's no way of knowing
Sometimes it's good to be wrong
Saturdays on the bed
Don't want the feeling to end
We all want to run where the underdogs run
And we all sing along, sing along
I came home a little drunk last night
Tired of being young, tired of being young
I came home a little drunk last night
The things we could have done
The things we should have done
But we don't
Just playing our records and wondering why
We're sons of our fathers and kids of our time
I came home a little drunk last night
Let's flush our guts down the drain
You Saturday nights never change
Let's raise our glass to the underdogs, oh yeah
Let's sing along, sing along."