My Secret Career 32: The Goddess Of Love And Beauty Lives In Champaign, 1994

“Are you strung out on some face?/Well, I know it ain’t mine” - The Replacements

Truly unrequited love is easier to get over than that murky hybrid that also can exist, where there is always the sense that a tiny struggling ember might catch a breeze and burst into flame.

But more often than not the air stays still, the pulsing red in the ash grows fainter and fainter with each moment and you dread the moment when the cold fully asserts itself.

I was still gathering leaves to throw on the fire when I wrote this song. This is one of the songs I have written that I have absolutely no idea how to play on the guitar. At one point I could pick up a guitar and play this song on command.

Now the ash has long blown away, scattered to everywhere and nowhere all at once. We haven’t been in touch since just after the turn of the century.

Here is The Goddess Of Love And Beauty Lives In Champaign, played live at Theater-By-The-Sea in Matunuck, RI in the late summer of 1994.