I've always admired fools, disparaged and outcast for seeing beyond what the crowd wants them to see; like turtles, daring to stick their heads out of their protective shells. I always thought 'twas noble to see the sun going down and knowing the world was really revolving around it (at least from Occam's perspective).

I once had a friend tell me people like to be ahead of their time, but it does them no good. It is important to be on-time, or nobody will understand. Maybe a handful of people, me among them, did not regard this guy as a fool, for this and many heartfelt insights he tried to share.

I love 'Foolish Love' for the minor key, the chords, the knockout backup instrumentation, the lyrics, the imagery, and the memories. I didn't even think of suffering in those words, except for the part about, "remember how we cried out loud, heard angry voices shout." That was hard, but I supposed there was going to be friction in just about any close relationship. I thought Justin was singing about a beautiful and glorious relationship, running through the summer fields. That was before the last few tick seasons, of course.

Anyway, I have loved this song ever since it played in the background of what I think was a record store. I was probably about 5. There was a guy who stood in the doorway and had a certain attitude. In retrospect, I think he was stoked on cocaine, but I make no pretense to be a noble fool, it's just a blind ambition.

One need not be a Maharishi to be a fool; one needs only to say what he thinks the crowd expects.

I did not know that about Mike & Ray.

"Fool on the Hill," "Michelle," "Eleanor Rigby," and "Penny Lane" were all great songs in my opinion. (Those songs came out in the days of AM radio, so the lyrics don't count in the analysis.) The piccolo trumpet (I've always referred to it as a clarion call, but never thought much about it until now.) on the latter of course, was recalled with "Foolish Love."

A great thing about art is its ability to evoke different stories in different people.

I hesitate to analyze anything by Justin, but --

In my mind, foolish love is a love that other people don't understand. Maybe their parents yelled at them and told them their love was only foolish. They ran through the summer fields. The lady gracefully fell into Justin's arms, and it was beautiful and glorious, like riding on a wave (what we all feel during our 2-second photo ops with Justin). Something happened to separate them physically, but he loves her as he loved her then, and he never let her go; that is, he's still emotionally attached.

I get confused when he sings about looking behind and seeing the road of life turning to loved ones. That much makes sense that they aren't together, but they were. Looking back, they get closer together. But he says salvation is in sight as he sees what was in the past. I sort of associate salvation with a permanent state of bliss. One does not talk about being saved in the way back when. Then again, the album is 'Strange Times,' so maybe the song needed some anachronism and he changed a word in a trite phrase - like "take you down to heaven below." Maybe the first thought was, "... as we look ahead ..." It would be even messier if he said, "And now as we look behind, to see the road unwind, turning to the ones we love," because it would rhyme and straighten out when it was curving. Right?

Well, that's what I hear in the song. I cannot say which mythological characters (back to Aristotle) he is imitating.

One more thing on the fool on the hill as I try desperately to avoid work: Whenever a surveyor asks if I think the country is headed in the right direction ... I mean if we were headed west, that would be tectonically cataclysmic, no?

I never analyzed it until I tried to answer questions here. I'm simple and I like to just like things because I like them. Does a strong Em chord at the beginning of a song cause the little organs that release dopamine to oscillate such that output is increased, or does it constrict or otherwise deform the reuptake receptors?

I think I wrote here before about the struggle I had when all about me convinced me we were only meat machines. Tesla suggested it, and the little girl I was babysitting at the time was so good at imitation and not doing anything original. Creativity, I postulated, was merely the output of crossed circuits in the chaos resulting from too many inputs to track. I prayed in anguish for some evidence of meaning in life.

My parents came to town to visit. They had me staying at their motel for whatever reason. One night, I had a dream and I could hear voices and stuff. I was teaching at the community college at the time, and between jobs, I passed some roadkill. In the classrooms, the students had asked me to help them with a problem their physics teacher had given them. I had the work all over the board, and I got stuck. Back then, my big, fat ego was too enormous to deal with getting stuck - plus, I was nauseated by the roadkill. And so, I passed out. As I lied on the floor with my feet up, my dream was being played out in the real world. It was the "sign" I needed that there was maybe a plan or something more to life than input/output.

I do enjoy analysis, though. It's something to do as I stand around waiting, as I do most of my life. This morning, again, I watched the wave pattern on the river as The EVO! cooled her paws and lapped. I recalled how it was easier to analyze water in polar coordinates instead of Cartesian coordinates, and put that together with the former observation that waves at the macroscopic level are pulses derived from thresholds. Water must accumulate to the point it can rise over a stone, and when it goes, it takes a slug with it, requiring a moment of time to fill back to the threshold before the next packet flows.

I also tried to reverse-engineer Asiana's curry - requesting a window seat and staring intently at each dot of spice.

Music and poetry, however, don't really lend themselves to interpretation in my mind. I either like them or I don't. If an emotion is triggered, regardless of what the words say or what was intended, that's good. The same goes with paintings. They're either beautiful or not. I have no room in my little brain to entertain disturbing art. I'm also laughably symbol-impaired. I have to be trained; viz., this motif conjures humor. It's like one time when I was out of the country and sitting in church. The girl who was my translator, rather than going word-for-word at one point, just said, "It's a joke. Laugh."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHHL6IEtkcE

Unable to find a love song about essay-writing, I find this one totally sane:

I must look up lyrics before I post. I had one with a good chorus, but the rest was - Whoops!