Click images for desktop size: "If We Kissed" by Julia Nikolaeva February has never been a kind month for me.
Maybe its just that its the shortest month. Or maybe its that the northern hemisphere is in the last throes of winter.
February's the month of dull skies and impending sunshine. Its the month where an honest cop feels the new years bills and finds himself taking a $50 from a speeder. Faithful wives notice the cute walk of the delivery man. Bachelors, desperate for spring, join the gym and hope. Little kids , desperate for summer, join street gangs, just because they need something to do.
Its when all the bright promises of January first have finally been squashed.
Its the time when your hourly paycheck is short but the bills stay the same.
People die, but people die all year long. Its a short month so they all seemed jammed in there.
Yeah, February is a lousy month.
Thinking about the bad times always brings out memories of the good times.
Back before being homeless became pandemic, back before we all were forced to accept it as natural. Way back then when you notice bag ladies and homeless guys it always struck me how they had managed to zone in on a time. Consciously or unconsciously they pick a time when the world meant something to them, when they had happiness.
In LA we had General Hershey who wore a military uniform decorated with outsized colorful plastic planes and stars. He had a moment of notoriety during the love-ins of the 60's and some how his mind would not let him move forward. In 1989 he still handed out brochures demanding we pull the troops out of Viet Nam.
There was the green coat lady who wrapped herself up tight in a green coat that was a solid mass of pins advertising various punk bands from the 70's. She had a nice round face. She accented the roundness by wrapping it tightly in a green wool scarf. I never saw her hair color, or if she even had any. Maybe she was a nun, one of the orders that demanded you shave your head.
When you spoke to her she would gaze at you and smile pleasantly and sing you a song from the Dils' set, or the Weirdos or the Screamers. If you handed her a dollar she'd snatch it away. You didn't get a song. You knew her world was prettier than yours. Once it was actually real.
There was the Vocabumat trio, who all spoke a gibberish that they at least pretended to understand while they listened to tinfoil radios that seemed to broadcast big band music. On Hollywood Blvd there's a house owned by an ancient woman. She refuses to sell. Its old clapboard gothic. She makes money by selling dinner place mats. The place mats all have different foreign phrases written on them - hence Vocabumats. The Vocabumat Trio were 3 guys. It was generally assumed they were gay. They bopped and swayed in perfect rhythm to the tin foil music, executing some nifty old school jitterbug moves. They bopped and swayed and gibbered at each other and seemed happy and immune to our concerns or stares. I often wondered what happened to them there. They weren't street performers. They took the money if offered. They weren't stupid, but they never would pick up money that was thrown to them. They were at that spot because that's where the fun was, some fun they all shared. Some fun that kept the rest of us out.
We all like those places where the world seemed right. For me its the beach anytime that the waves are big, or the sand is warm.
Its a good thing for people to have a spot in the world or in time where they can look back and feel and remember what it was like to be whole, optimistic and even content. We all need it if only to prove to ourselves that such spaces existed in our lives.

Click images for desktop size: "Unknown Anime" by UnknownIt is good unless it overwhelms you, or some shock in the present convinced your brain the only safety lies in moving back to that space or time and your brain decides it has to protect you by dragging you along with it. Or you're a politician.
In politicians its crazy. None of them ever seem to understand that this is their personal interpretation of the world and that most of it is fantasy, so they spend most of their careers trying to preserve a fantasy that usually only applies to the rich boys and girls.

As usual I took a lot of stick for picking a song. I like violent emotions over something trivial. A few wanted me to list my top 100! I've no authority, just opinions.
I can't list that many songs. I couldn't put them in order either. The other songs I thought about were Alkaline Trio - This Could Be Love; White Stripes - Dead Leaves and The Dirty Ground; Gene Vincent - Dance To The Bop; Sam Cooke - A Change Is Gonna Come; Johnny Burnette Trio - Tear It Up; Del Shannon - Follow The Sun; Human Beinz - Nobody But Me
. Just songs.