She's got blood in her eyes, in her eyes for you.

At some obscene level, anxiety is what keeps us going. I live in an apartment a block away from freight train tracks, and every hour or so a rumbling comes and a heavy train carrying things north towards Chicago hums past. The trains are a combination of shapes and cargoes, and I don’t know what they carry. I assume it’s important, but what’s more important than the trivial?

There’s a beautiful winter here now, with snowflakes that look like snowflakes and wind chills in the negative teens. We wake up and go outside, we catch the bus and get to campus. There’s a certain level of commitment to get where we need to be.

I’m behind the times on Andrew Bird—it’s one of those albums I’ve always kept around, but rarely listened to for various reasons (mostly that I never felt like it). He’s been recording for years, and people have loved him as long. I thought he was okay. Before last night, my iTunes counter tells me, I played his most popular album The Mysterious Production of Eggs about four times. But there’s one song, “Fake Palindromes”, which has, for lack of a better word, started to glow.

And this is where anxiety enters. Because, what do we get for listening to a song over and over again, other than the reassurance that it’ll be in our minds forever? Other than the idea that we’ll remember the song, or the song will remember us? Which one of these is the most false?

“Fake Palindromes” opens with a rush of strings that I’m sure was used in the past year for some montage in an indie film. I can’t remember what film. I can’t remember if I liked or hated it, though I’m fairly sure that I saw it (and here, again, some anxiety). The lyrics, which start immediately, “My dewy-eyed Disney bride, what has tried swapping your blood with formaldehyde? Monsters? Whiskey-plied voices cry fratricide”. The lyrics are strange, and brutal, but have a lovely Dylan-esque quality that I can’t help but appreciate. “She’s got red lipstick and a bright pair of shoes and she’s got knee-high socks, what to cover a bruise. She’s got an old death kit she’s been meaning to use, she’s got blood in her eyes for you.”

So, we are anxious. There are all sorts of theories about death and knowledge, God and nothingness. But there’s another thing, and it’s pretty monstrous. At some point, we wonder what has happened to us and it’s not really clear. Nothing is really clear. But the words are exceptional. The ending (and I think it says enough), “Some lonely night we can get together and I’ll tie your wrists with leather and drill a tiny hole into your head”. I could say all sorts of things about the breakdown of language and the utterance of violence and self-blame, I could parse this several ways. But I don’t really want to say anything. I just want to listen to the song again.