Some weighty events took center stage for my family in 1993, and I didn’t pay much attention to the music of the time. But even when our own small lives were in turmoil the rest of the world kept churning out the tunes, and as always, the better stuff hangs around until we have the time to appreciate it. There are a handful of my choices sprinkled in today’s post.
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This is the summer of the swallowtails. Those gorgeous butterflies are all over our neighborhood, seeming to have a definite preference for the color purple. If you’ve ever held a butterfly in your hand you realize how fragile those wings are, where the colors are made by tiny scales which come off on your fingers at the slightest touch. And yet these insects navigate in winds that keep me indoors and they can travel great distances on those fragile wings. My mind is properly boggled.
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All Apologies was released in September of 1993, as the last song on Nirvana’s third album. In April of 1994 Kurt Cobain killed himself. His suicide caught the world by surprise, even though his soul was certainly not an untroubled one. With a man of his talents we were left wondering what he might have done had he made a different choice.
During his final years, Cobain struggled with a heroin addiction and chronic depression. He also struggled with the personal and professional pressures of fame, and was often in the spotlight for his tumultuous marriage to fellow musician Courtney Love. In March 1994, he overdosed on a combination of champagne and Rohypnol, subsequently undergoing an intervention and detox program. On April 8, 1994, he was found dead in the greenhouse of his Seattle home at the age of 27, with police concluding that he had died around three days earlier from a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.
Wikipedia: Kurt Cobain
Guns are so easy to get hold of. So easy to employ. So irretrievably final in their results.
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Our longest day of the year came and went once again without fanfare. This early in summer we don’t really notice that the tide just turned, and is sweeping things back out to sea. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, then more and more rapidly as the weeks pass.
I know, I know, why bring this up when we are just beginning the most easily enjoyable part of the year? It’s a bit like giving a “Memento Mori” sweatshirt to someone for their birthday. But the days begin to shorten at least two months before the temperatures begin to cool and then BANG! it is September and everybody wonders where the summer has gone? Well, if we had kept our eyes open, it began to go away on June 21.
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As I write this, I am angry. Not a good time to take computer in hand, perhaps, but there you are. Quite a few of the scenes in my life have been composed of a mixture of accidents and poor timing.
Robin and I started to watch the “debates” Thursday night but turned it off after perhaps twenty awful minutes. We expected Cluck’s toxic meanderings and were not disappointed. But Biden … what to say … if there needed to be a film made about how a the seasons of a man’s life come and go it could have been taken directly from the political tragedy we were witness to last evening .
So why be angry? Because it need not have happened. If Joe Biden and his advisers had looked clear-eyed at what our country needed instead of confusing it with what they wanted, we wouldn’t be staring down a gunbarrel at the possibility of a second Cluck term.
Mr. Biden might have bowed out a few months ago and helped pick his successor. It would have been a dignified and graceful end to a long career in public service of which he can be proud.
A second term for a liar, conjurer, fraud, felon, bigot, and rapist? Unbelievable that it is even a possibility.
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Little Home In The Valley 
Yes, that debate really was a car crash. I just hope Biden steps aside quickly, although I don’t really see it.
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