Searching For Forever

by Stephen Dunstan

Wouldn't it be good to be lost in the woods? Four young men are standing slightly self-conciously in the small clearing holding their exotic music making tools, knowing that there's a crowd of goblins, ghouls and ghosts behind them--but you better not look 'cos if you do you're cursed or you're dead--and life goes on.........

Faintly Blowing the sweet fresh air, mingling with traces of bitter insense to get higher then you, me, all of us. Gales of surging guitar and charging, propulsive cymbals--on and on, forward, forward and upward, over and over again, higher, higher we're carried along like kites searching for the rainbow's end but sometimes the rainbow is in negative and while you search for the right way to go the sun comes on strong and all you've got left is a few pathetic, doomed puddles that are no use for fishing at all; just some muddied reflections of someone that you think you know but you still go home with a smile on your face and that full stomach feeling because you have to, you absolutely have to, otherwise there is no purpose at all.

You stumble across the Snapdragon, a cupfull of Eastern Promise without the corniness that all of that stuff usually means. Dance to that bassline. Sensual, senseless, elastic syllables snapped and broken. Promise fulfilled.

An opinion in one line. Some people could make one line into a book. Some people already have.

Hello Tom Bitz, tell us your story. Bob Dylan meets John Ford with a cast list that features Joan Crawford, Slim Pickens and the bastard son of Buster Keaton. A story of the wild west and we like it fine. A story of a victim but a victim of greed and stupidity--and it's all his own--and of the greatest of all urges--to love. But if it's selfish love on your own terms and if the tables are turned what else can you do but run away otherwise it just ends in tears.

So then those children throw down the keys to their dreams and you pick them up and you take a long, running jump and you crash through the hole and you end up neck deep in a bizarre dreamscape where all of the signposts are bent and everything is crying out for help. So you take a bus to the heart of town where the weird creatures always hang out and you uncork a bottle and toast them and treat them kindly 'cos one of these nights you might find yourself locked in a cage in someone else's dream and they might never wake up. No way back--no--no--no way back no matter who you are and how big a hero's heart beats inside your chest. All you can do is pray--yes pray--that the place you find yourself in is blessed and fit to host the meek and the poor. Blessed enough to call home.

And life goes on---life goes on---on and on as life always does but you know, you positively, certainly know that life will never be this good again.