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The Best Day You Could Imagine

by Charcoal Burners

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1.
Winged Bird 04:07
I can hardly say your name It's a spell I have broken Your plastic bags to pick up trash You released to the wind's fingers It's easy to let go when you've been let go Close the door your home's a planet The planet's not your home Walk outside untethered you'll just fall into the sky Plastic bags like winged birds Flutter down to the river I can hardly hear your words It's all stick-shake and shiver But I know we're going down somewhere we can't choose Someone's kid out walking's gonna keep us in their room To die beside an untouched bowl of milk and soggy bread
2.
Unknown, unrecognised A hostage of dread Past the point of no return But it's suicide ahead Tear yourself from the boundaries you enforce There's nothing left to hide And I could wish for nothing more Battlescarred, we are battlescarred One and the same, our stories retold countless accounts, the struggles of old Watching and learning as a way to conceal Aching and burning Why won't these wounds heal? Battlescarred, we are battlescarred I said leave us alone We don't want your sympathy A fractured surface, yearning release I am not like you Stay away from me Battlescarred, we are battlescarred
3.
Days Behind 03:24
Have you no letters from the priest? I've popped all my bubblewrap Burned my car and crashed my house Intermittent faults that won't appear They wait for you to turn your back Then they'll reverse over me again Have you no new promises to make? Keeping all these broken ones Forgot what they remind you of I was in your ecstasy and you in mine Took a while to reconcile The days ahead, the days behind
4.
Deadass Sea 03:06
On the chapel lawn forgetting whose side you're on Back from that old road of mine, this time How was your summer, how was my summer? How was my nuclear winter by the deadass sea? And if you'd seen what I had seen Maybe you wouldn't ask And if you'd been where I have been where I Surely you wouldn't ask
5.
Locked out of a parody of life You were always at my side on the outside, lost Light spilled from the terrace houses onto the streets I renamed you That we walked drunk through All these rings run circles round your heart How d'you let it end When you never know why you let it start Black circles running rings round you Everything you've done an extension of what you can't undo And the silence won't let you explain But the questions to the answers remain Reappraise the visions I once had Make them ornaments instead on your mantlepiece Hats off to the living and the dead And the dead still living on waiting for release
6.
Alleyway to the penthouse Eliminate all who cross us But I still dream of the bodies You want my loyalty more than you should You ask for honesty more than is good for you We're trailer tragedies Have we made good for nothing? They sleep the sleep of dead believers In afterlife skips and heaven's rivers But we still stand and deliver Shall we go down to the parliament? Realign our rearmament Or fuel the jet and just forget it
7.
Reticent 02:09
Always the quiet ones With their boxes of birds What a way to go now Look at you in your barrel of laughs and words Reticent Every inch the king Undress the slave Don't say a thing Down in your channel You can get no purchase on its sides Fell into your travel And you fell out of ours then out of mine There's a force afoot now It's been rumoured for a day or two Get these knuckledraggers off me If you want me to tell you if it's true
8.
Darkroom 04:26
Here's a thought thought I'd share Now we're still on speaking terms Now that nothing's changed What do I have to do to leave you? From the darkroom tray Those reborn make their way To the peephole in the door What do I have to do to leave you? How does it feel to be finished? How does it feel to be banished? How does it feel to be free? I wouldn't know No, I wouldn't know What do I have to do to leave you?
9.
Do you love me or is it just that I'm here And you know I've no place else I can go? I didn't ask for this, I guess you understand But I guess you blame me even so I remember back before I disappeared When you could sometimes still meet my eye When you go back to your room I let you be In your silence tell myself you're just quiet I believe that if I'm less of myself Then I could mean more to someone else time is empty until I fill it to the brim I can only drink the drop that spills I imagine meeting friends in the sun and the shadow of myself being one But my face is a hockey mask that no one sees At the counter when I turn and run In the silence of the space where I was Maybe you'll remember when you loved me I'll never try to stop you doing what you want And what you want is not being around me When I whisper to myself in my bed I can find the words that I must believe Keep them hidden as best I can these shallow days Until I give myself back to sleep
10.
Tell you what I could do I could really get to you I could be the face you see In the mirror eventually Tell you what I could do I could follow the tracks you made Through the snow to your empty room Where I'll find your bed still unmade You make me drink with the living dead They've got the intel on where you go inside my head Tell you what I could do I could swallow my pride instead I could wait for a full moon I could shoot myself in the head You Tell me what I could do Please you Tell me what I should do Tell you what I could do I could turn myself in right now I could say I had the motive But the means were beyond my power to
11.
Blind You 02:37
You're losing your friends you're making amends but you're making mistakes Too little too late And our story will end Who will tell it again? But you can only do what you know how You don't have to prove a thing to me before you go now You've taken your time You've taken all mine, now you're giving it back we're slow on attack It's another defeat, it's another retreat Everything's always behind you Moving towards the light that will only blind you
12.
Time will tell you what you want to hear Will you bend Will you break for me? We've been robbed and beaten We lie shot and discarded Fucked and thrown in a garden on your watch Time will heal The full moon she breaks Get the idea Got the shakes We've been robbed and beaten We lie battered and broken The best day you could imagine Sealed with this kiss

about

I always think of The Best Day You Could Imagine as being a Hamilton record, rather than a Dunedin one, which is what it actually is. This is because the cover shot was taken 6 years earlier, before we moved back ‘home’, in our backyard in Hamilton South. I assume it was the double rainbow arcing across the somewhat menacing cloud formations, rather than the old school rotary clothesline with its desultory hangings of towel and rug, that had me reaching for my cellphone - then a recent acquisition. Pretty soon after we moved in, the pleasant meadow vista was overrun by a platoon of HEB Construction workers. Because I had decided I didn’t want to go to work anymore, I took some pleasure from spending my days sitting and smoking at them from my elevated vantage point, speculating as to what might be the eventual outcome of all these deep foundations, lobbed girders and lofty scaffolds. I rather hoped for some new labyrinthine micro-city on my doorstep, or a towering Babel of mirrored glass that would take our frumpy and crime-infested suburb upmarket. I was particularly impressed with the compact and agile Indian foreman, bounding about the field from dawn to dusk, sending his helmeted troops up cranes and down cavernous holes. He really seemed to have his shit together, and everyone did exactly what he told them to do. Sometimes he would seem to lose heart and spend minutes on end peering, flummoxed, into the reams of what I assumed was ‘the plan’; but I knew whatever this was going to be, he would get us there, he would get it done. It turned out to be something subterranean, to do with the water supply. One day, all the promising above ground structures were gone, along with the can-do foreman and his merry crew, and it was like nothing had ever happened. I got another job.

There was a pretty cool little creek at the bottom of the garden where my second daughter would make friends with the eels, who were much more congenial than the vicious little pricks who populated her intermediate school. Sometimes I worried about her playing down there, but it turned out to be a hell of a lot safer than the enormous but cheap Para Rubber pool we set up at the top of a precipitous slope behind the house. One day, she had somehow enticed a human friend to come over, and the pool, which wasn’t quite level, exploded, sending both girls at penstock force on a downward trajectory through all manner of rockeries, tree trunks and other unyielding objects, which they miraculously surfed past. Zooming out to an aerial establishing shot, there is a fucking great river flowing through Hamilton, the Waikato, which seems to make a point of killing pretty much anyone who sets foot in it.

Ten years (of the hardest time you can do) in Hamilton left little trace - no pets got out alive, both daughters and wife were previously acquired in Nelson - and the point is elusive; like the big HEB Construction party my unemployed ass invigilated, it was like it never happened. Oh yeah, I got an album cover from the river city. Whilst there - and a factor in my sudden indisposition towards my employment at the time - I visited my first daughter in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We walked in the woods by the Grand river, and I wrote about that in a novel which almost got published, but didn’t, again fueling a problematic rethink of my place in the universe. The central image from ‘Winged Bird’, that of a child taking plastic bags to pick up the trash she had previously noticed on a river walk, then for some reason thinking fuck it, and releasing the bags to the wind to become themselves even more trash, comes from the fictional account of this visit. If you will, a Biff ‘what happened in Boston’ moment from Death of a Salesman, not that I was giving anyone any stockings from my valise with a twinkle in my bloodshot eye. Disillusionment with the grown ups. Mum’s like ‘sure, if it’s fine tomorrow’ and then dad, crushingly: ‘But it won’t be fine.’ The phrase ‘the best day you can imagine’ is partly filched from the head of James Ramsay, with a bee in his bonnet about getting to that godforsaken lighthouse, and partly from a concept I also used to kick around in Hamilton: that of my perfect day, which had as its constituent parts a good workout with the free weights in my garage, mowing the lawn if it was summer (the masculine sward is a big deal for some reason - this is why Marty goes nuclear in True Detective when he comes home and suspects that the singletted Rust has fucked his lawn and mowed his wife), writing anything approaching 3000 words on whatever writing project I had subjected myself to and then drinking and smoking as much as possible whilst looking at the lawn I had mowed and thinking about the words I had written. Of course, for all this artistry, shredding of vegetation, imbibing and self-satisfied reflection to occur, someone would have to take the child to the lighthouse for the day, in this case Raglan beach, and give her the best day she could imagine. This would be Sally’s job, many, many weekends, and the later Das Phaedrus song ‘Killing Child at Zoo’ with its opening lines of ‘come we’ll go anywhere you want, out to Raglan or the zoo’ is not really about the chapter from American Psycho but rather about the damage dad did by never going too. Actually, James with his ‘axe, poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast’ is getting into Patrick Bateman territory there himself, and good on him.

Suffer little children. When I was 5 in 1977, my parents deposited me in a basement apartment in Columbia, Missouri for the year - the same city where my favourite band (as the angsty teen, not the angsty 5 year old) Husker Du would play their last ever show ten years later, on December 10th at Blue Note, torn apart by the usual dark matter (ego: too much, methadone: not enough). Ah, drummers. When we (it quickly became I) turned up at Tom’s studio in Port Chalmers to record The Best Day You Could Imagine, it soon became The Worst Day I Could Imagine, with a text from the stick man I had sourced, groomed and feted for the project announcing that he had found something better to do that day, like being a session drummer for a pub rock covers band in Nightcaps. I always liked that joke: What do you call someone who likes to hang out with musicians? A drummer. But I am working on a new one, which is: What do you call someone who likes to hang out with drummers? I haven’t quite nailed the punchline, but it will be along the lines of that knock-knock joke: Knock knock. Who’s there? No one. No one who? Silence. On May 1st 1987, Husker Du played the Pine Street Theatre in Portland, Oregon - the same day that Martin Amis fans could stroll, fagging away, to their local bookstore to pick up their copy of Einstein’s Monsters, a collection of nuclear fables. Amis was even then warming to his theme of the vulnerability and suffering of the young, with the fate of his cousin Lucy Parkington still hanging in the future - although it already happened, it was already thirteen years too late. The second daughter would move to Portland, the Willamette replacing the Grand as the river to not walk beside with her father, not picking up discarded Starbucks cups, crushed Sierra Nevada cans and empty Camel packets. At the conclusion of ‘Insight at Flame Lake’, a mentally ill teenager is dead, drowned in the lake, and his uncle (for this family vacation stretched the electrons of the nuclear family too far: that is why things got so fucked up) is left contemplating the ‘ad’ for some missing kids on the back of a milk carton. Ned’s resigned musings that they have been ‘done away with, probably, fucked and thrown over a wall somewhere, fucked and murdered, yeah that’s the most likely thing,’ echo in the song ‘Robbed and Beaten’, with its refrain of ‘we lie shot and discarded, fucked and thrown in a garden, on your watch.’ The second chorus, improbably, contains the glittering pinnacle of the wildest hopes harboured by James, by those setting out for Raglan, by those drunk in charge of a lawnmower and a laptop: ‘we lie battered and broken, the best day you could imagine, sealed with this kiss.’ The best day you could imagine is always future-tethered, subjunctive bound, in the land of might be - and guess what else is out there? As Paris says, that may-be must be, love. Thus with a kiss I die - because Romeo and Juliet were after all children themselves, too young to be asking the question which opens ‘Days Behind’: ‘Have you no letters from the priest?’ Too young to understand the difference between a daytrip and exile.

Like the OG narrator (gives a new meaning to ‘millennials’ as a demographic) in the story that closes out Einstein's Monsters, ‘The Immortals’, the movement is southward. Ocean and harbour have eclipsed river and creek. But I was in Missouri in 1977, and I did walk the banks of the Grand with my daughter, so I need have no fear of the words which conclude the story, and which placed a chill hand on my heart when I first encountered them. Never mind nuclear war, here is something to really worry about:

‘I have a delusion also, sometimes. Sometimes I have this weird idea that I am just a second-rate New Zealand schoolmaster who never did anything or went anywhere and is now painfully and noisily dying of solar radiation along with everybody else. It's strange how palpable it is, this fake past, and how human: I feel I can almost reach out and touch it. There was a woman, and a child. One woman. One child. . . '

Actually, two women and two children. Two in America, two in New Zealand (which the narrator, and, one suspects, Amis, finds ‘pretty dead at the best of times': I concur). One of my lasting memories of this school teaching lark is of some student in Nelson in the late nineties handing me back the ancient copy of Death of a Salesman I had furnished them with at the start of the year with some modifications to its cover, so it now said ‘Eat a Lesbian’. All the houses, all the dogs, all the colleagues, friends, drummers: all gone. Just the current spoodle, Pebble, with whom I walked on the beach today looking out at the island, 500 metres offshore, that I have never set foot on and never will. It would be an excellent spot for a lighthouse, if that is still a thing. But there is water underground, at the bottom of the ocean, and in the rivers: the Waikato, the Grand, the Willamette, the Ouse. The eels are slipping and sliding their way from the tributaries into the swift, dark current, plastic bags skim the surface then catch a gust to snag on an overhanging limb; listen, you can just make out the rumble and roar of the band across the water from downtown. Look, see her gathering rocks to fill her pockets at the water’s edge.

credits

released April 11, 2019

Andrew Spittle - Guitar, vocals
Sally Lonie - Bass, vocals
Finn - Drums
All songs written by Andrew Spittle except Battlescarred written by Andrew Spittle and Lucy Spittle
Recorded and Produced by Thomas Bell

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Charcoal Burners Dunedin, New Zealand

With your skeleton crew in the cockpit pornographic zombie flight attendants serving cyanide in first class and I'm someone in economy's sole baggage I'm the body they're bringing home and heads will roll in the bowling alleys of the town when the news gets out might as well just overshoot the airport set her down in ten million parts take as many of the rebels with us - Relate (Colours) ... more

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