Nothing gold can stay, or so some say, and the idea of permanence no longer seems to be part of the current world’s situation. Nothing seems stable, nothing feels permanent, nothing can be relied upon for more than a brief moment – and perhaps this is the lesson I’ve needed to learn. To be honest, I thought I’d learned it during and after COVID. My idea of anything being set in stone was destroyed way back then, and it’s never fully, or even partly, recovered. It’s hard to count on things when the whole world shifted beneath our feet and threw us to the ground; we got back up, those of us who survived, but I’ve never trusted my feet, or the ground, since.
Digging for gold in my neighborhood
Where all the old buildings stood
And they keep digging it down and down
So that their cars can live underground
The swinging of a wrecking ball
Through these lath and plaster walls
Is letting all the shadows free
The ones I wish still followed me
I remember a winter’s night
We kissed beneath the street lamp light
Outside our bar near the record store
That have been condos for a year and more
Now that our haunts have taken flight
And been replaced with construction sites
Oh, how I feel like a stranger here
Searching for something that’s disappeared
This song leans into the golden moment as transitory, mourning the passing of time, and the evolution of neighborhoods and physical locations. As buildings are torn down and roads revamped, so too do people crumble and rebuild themselves, often right before our eyes – people being the mercurial and impossible-to-fully-understand wild cards that are more fickle and capricious than any evolving environment. If you can’t count on the stability of the land beneath us, how could we ever count on a creature as variable and moody as a human being?
Digging for gold in my neighborhood
For what they say is the greater good
But all I see is a long goodbye
A requiem for a skyline
It seems I never stopped losing you
As every dive becomes something new
And all our ghosts get swept away
It didn’t use to be this way
Somehow, I still manage to love them – in the general sense of humanity. Despite popular belief, I’ve maintained a generosity of spirit that is hidden behind my own somewhat self-obsessed guises, and it has always felt right to love rather than waste or ruin my time doing anything else. If it means screaming into a void, and loving those who might never love me back or even be aware that I exist, I’ll continue undaunted. The hope of a gold rush payout is ever on my horizon; it sparkles in the distance, glinting like flecks of precious metal in the cold rush of a stream. Calling to me, time after time, asking that I don’t give up, threatening hope and heartbreak – and I know I will always answer. It’s how I was made, and no matter how much the world or the people around me may change, I’m not ever going to stop.
I’ve ascribed these monuments
A false sense of permanence
I’ve placed faith in geography
To hold you in my memory
I’m sifting through these wreckage piles
Through the rubble of bricks and wires
Looking for something I’ll never find
Looking for something I’ll never find
