You can take the player out of Changeling...

[roseembolism]

[Bad username or site: James Nicholl @ livejournal.com] recently did a poll on which is more depressing: "When She Loved Me", from Toy Story 2, or "Puff the Magic Dragon". It wasn't until I was halfway through that I realized what I had, so I figured I'd repost it.

Puff the Magic Dragon, of course. I mean, "When she Loved Me" may seriously screw you up- it has it all over PtMD for the emotions and intensity. When the singer gets that little catch in her voice, it brings the tears on. But with "Puff", that's not just the end of a relationship, it's the end of the era. Once the ganja is gone, the party's over. It's all just over: Jacky goes and finds some new drugs.

I mean, Jackie Paper right this moment is working late on an anti-youtube suit. It's been twenty-five years since his last Dead concert; he's working on his second house, his third wife, and his first stroke. Paper's too busy to really think about it, but he's catching his breath more when he goes up the stairs, and the secretaries- god they're so young- are no longer giggling at his flirting. Some of them even avoid him now. It's almost like they don't find him sexy any more.

He hasn't talked to his wife in days, and his daughter, the older one from the first marriage, just rolls her eyes when he tries to give her advice, and goes back to listening to that hip-hop crap. Disrespectful spoiled kids, all of that generation. Thank god she turns eighteen next month. She can just TRY to get college money from him. And his younger son is worse. Just last weekend when he had custody, Paper couldn't get any work done because the kid just kept babbling about dragons and pirates and kings. The brat is probably already on meth or something....

Dedicated to all Autumn People, everywhere.

Comments

[ghilledhu.livejournal.com]

Actually, if you think about it, both songs are about the same thing from two different perspectives. "When She Loved Me" could just as easily have been sung by Puff -- just change around a few pronouns and specifics.

Either way, this post hit me pretty hard. I've been a huge Changeling fan since the game first appeared (it's the only game where I was near-obsessive about collecting the books, even if I didn't immediately need them), and I'm terrified of slipping into Autumn entirely. It's hard to keep from thinking, "Yes, but the bills won't pay themselves, food won't magically appear on the table, and we don't have enchanted, self-cleaning dishes or laundry." How to find that balance between life of the spirit and the needs of the banal world? Maybe that, in the end, was always what the game was about.

[haamel.livejournal.com]

Egad, that "cynical" tag comes down the mountain like a ton of lead with this post. ...In a lot of ways, it's really emblematic about the failure of the Baby Boomers, those children of the "Greatest Generation" born into homes of uprightness and proven ability to save the world for democracy. As children, they saw the optimism erode before their very eyes, as optimism disintegrated and the Iron Curtain divided the world into camps of mutually-assured destruction. In a sense, the Vietnam War was perfectly timed, stealing away the young adulthood of multitudes whose worst fears were ripe to be confirmed.

The civil rights era, and the rise of sex/drugs/rock&roll, must have been one hell of a party, but it came with one hell of a hangover. Frankly, I'm grateful to be born of the "out-of-phase" generation, perhaps a saner, sober-er minority. I can only hope that the children of the Boomers are able to avoid the same malaise as their parents...

[deirdremoon.livejournal.com]

I still believe in fairies, and I believe my fairies are packin'.