For It Is a Human Number

You like Iron Maiden? Yeah, me too. I loved the guitar solos, the way Steve Harris plays the bass without a pick, the songs inspired by movies they'd seen, poems they'd read, dreams they'd had. One of their best songs is a musical retelling of Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. It's twenty minutes long, and there's no chorus. They wrote a song about 'Quest for Fire'. It starts, hilariously enough, thusly:

"In a time when dinosaurs walked the Earth
When the land was swamp and caves were home
In an age, when prized posession was fire
To search for landscapes they would roam..."

Boy, you can drive down the freeway belting that out, and there's no way to not be cheered by it. It's so goofy, yet so earnest. I loved Maiden. I forget, sometimes for long stretches, years usually. And then I go to fry up some bacon and it all comes back to me. "Six, six-six, the number of the beeeeeeast..."

I don't have a strong Christian background, and I don't think I'm particularly superstitious, but I'm probably kidding myself on at least one of those counts, because when I saw the sticker on the package, I felt like I needed to fry the bacon immediately and get the wrapper out of my house. No matter what the potential human cost.

I was going to come home tonight and pay some bills, then give myself the rest of the night off for knitting and relaxing. Now, slightly oiled and smelling as if I've taken a dry sauna in a smokehouse, I'm not feeling it. Plus, I have burnt the backs of my hands again. You expected a better outcome? At least I've taken care of the hell-meat. I'm going to go make a bacon sandwich and track down that CD.

More knitting content tomorrow.