For the longest time, I thought the line "horror grips us as we watch you die" in the song "Wooden Ships" was "hold on princess as we watch you die."

It's really rather strange, because I've got extremely good hearing otherwise. I can hear like a frickin' safecracker sometimes. But my silly old brain tends to fudge up great song lines.

I only got the line when I watched the Woodstock DVD with the captions on. (A peculiar habit of mine--I can hear fine and actually only glance up at the TV between paragraphs, because I write stories with the television as background noise. I've got no clue WHY I've got the captions on all the time. It's a mystery that baffles my parents as well.)

The Woodstock film, while it brings me inexplicable and indescribable joy, is also one of few things that can make me cry. I was raised by men; perhaps they instilled in me the "crying = emotion = weakness" mentality? I don't know. I try to force myself to avoid crying at all costs, or showing any sadness at all. But certain things can make me cry.

The Coda part of Woodstock--where all the names of the dead roll past. Those are my heroes. My heroes are mostly dead--several of them before I was even BORN. It's rather depressing. And the choice of the hauntingly pretty "Cost of Freedom" song makes it all the more depressing. I always feel like I should have been born sometime around 1940-1945. I belong in the Woodstock Generation and the Woodstock Nation. Hippies! Yippies! Radicals! Abbie Hoffman! John Lennon! Keith Moon! Janis Joplin! The Dead! They've sadly all but vanished, and I'm left a stranger in a strange land these days.

The #1 Most Shocking Moment on the VH1 countdown of The 101 Most Shocking Moments of Rock 'n Roll. John Lennon dying. John, before every other mortal being, is my hero. I've often confessed that, if able, I would travel back in time and save his life--even if it cost my own. He's my hero; I can't help but feel that, if he were still here, perhaps my generation would have turned out a little differently. Maybe there would still be some measure of hope from the past to look to.

And sometimes, just sometimes, the little memorials that the people on my Livejournal communities leave for our heroes, make me wail and sob like a little kid.

It's probably rather strange, this attachment that I have to my heroes and heroines. I didn't cry a tear when Grandma Silsi died, nor Grandpa Tom. Though I did tear up when my dog Buddy pretty much died in my lap on the way to the emergency veterinarian office.

I can't really explain the attachment and connection I feel to these voices and visions of the past. They're long gone in body. Dust on the wind, y'know? But I think they're still here, hanging around--encouraging us to move forward and shoot for the Dream one more time. Sometimes it's like John or Abbie is right at my shoulder, nudging me, telling me not to give up. Of course, communication with long-dead strangers is pretty freakin' absurd, even for me.

But I know they're still here.

We can't touch them anymore.

But they'll never vanish. They're a part of our collective spirit now, our muses.

Nevertheless, I still wish I'd had the chance to meet them in the time in which we all belonged.

But maybe I've got a higher purpose for being here and now instead of there and then. Maybe that's what Musa is telling me; that I'm here to pick up where John and Abbie and George and Jerry and Janis left off. Maybe I'm here to help restore hope to the hopeless generation.

Who knows?

Maybe it'll work this time around.

Always look on the bright side of life...~ *whistles*