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Previous torch entries: one, two, three, four.
Things are getting fairly trippy, so this one is timed fairly well.
The fifth song on Tom Waits' The Heart of Saturday Night is a strange, manic spoken word bop called "Diamonds on My Windshield." The words that follow the title spoken in the song is the refrain "like tears from heaven," which gives the song its popular interpretation as a metaphorized account of driving down the highway while high on LSD. Given Waits' prolific drug use -- mostly heroin and booze, albeit -- this is at least a little believable.
But the song is a wonderful kind of poetry even without the lurid interpretation. It's a song about going home, as "The eights go east and the fives go north / the merging nexus back and forth," as a "Wisconsin hiker with a cue ball head / wishing he was home in his Wisconsin bed. / Fifteen feet of of snow in the east / and colder than a welldigger's ass." So it's cold outside, overheated in the car, dazzling on the windshield, and rapidly losing coherence as you get closer to home: "One more block / the engine talks / and whispers 'Home at last.'"
As the surreality of the season boils down to comebacks, youth, and inexplicable surges of competence among the weeds of terrible play, just remember that, on the long trips, it's always the strangest right before you get home. Good thing Roy's back to show us the way.