"King Of Spain"

I never knew I was a lover,
Just cause I steal the things you hide,
Just cause I focus while we're dancing,
Just cause I offered you a ride.

Still I am not from Barcelona,
I am not even from Madrid.
I am a native of the North Pole
And that can mess up any kid.

Well if you could reinvent my name,
Well if you could redirect my day,
I wanna be the King of Spain.

And I will settle in Pamplona
And I'll provoke the bulls with words
And then I'll send a man to meet them all
But he's fake, so I have heard.

And all the senoritas sighing,
Will be the fountain of my lies.
But while we're floating in siestas
You search for bottles and for knives.

Well if you could reinvent my name,
Well if you could redirect my day,
I wanna be the King of Spain.

And I wear my boots of Spanish leather
Oh while I'm tightening my crown.
I'll disappear in some flamenco
Perhaps I'll reach the other side.

Why are you stabbing my illusion?
Just cause I stole some eagle's wings
Because you named me as your lover
Well, I thought I could be anything.

Well if you could reinvent my name,
Well if you could redirect my day,
I wanna be the King of Spain.

"The Dreamer"

I'm just a dreamer but I'm hanging on
Though I am nothing big to offer
I watch the birds, how they dive in then gone
It's like nothing in this world's ever still

And I'm just a shadow of your thoughts in me
But sun is setting, shadows growing
A long cast figure will turn into night
It's like nothing in this world ever sleeps

Oh sometimes the blues is just a passing bird
And why can't that always be
Tossing aside from your birches crown
Just enough dark to see
How you're the light over me

And by your side, girl, where the acres grow
Into the strong and stunning meadow
A cowboy stumbling in the finest field
And nothing good out there won't be old

Oh sometimes the blues is just a passing bird
And why can't that always be
Tossing aside from your birches crown
Just enough dark to see
How you're the light over me

Sometimes the blues is just a passing bird
And why can't that always be
Tossing aside from your birches crown
Just enough dark to see
How you're the light over me

- The Tallest Man on Earth

"Those previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young woman who she'd known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them. "I regret nothing," she told her reflection in the ladies' room mirror, and believed it." That day, she attended a series of meetings, and in the late afternoon another car delivered her to a hotel. She still had an hour or two to kill until it was time to see Arthur again."

- Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

"I met someone who was the right kind of wife. Her husband played trumpet in a ska outfit whose contrabass player sometimes improvised to Stephen's minimal drive-by or whatever it was called this week. When I met her she had a kid on her shoulders and a baby on the ground by here feet, and she was talking gaily about Indian with a vendor of Indian junk at the flea market. The vendor was impressed, and I, too, was impressed. She was young the way an actual person is young. Not like weary, defeated Stephen and me. She confirmed my suppositions about her sterling qualities as a wife by inviting me for coffee and serving a cake she had baked herself using yest. I never did understand yeast.

Like me, she had moved to Berlin to be with her husband. The key difference was the kids. I envied her with a pang. An educated woman with little kids (I didn't imagine her having acquired them by any other means than hot sex) is a model of the feminist, as well as feminine virtue. Even her struggle to get strangers to take the kids off her hands was a feminist cause. Her work, bringing up the model citizens of tomorrow, is something society feels it out to value and is constantly proposing as potentially eligible for pension benefits, unlike my work, which neither involved actual labor nor was anything but an end in itself, on good days, and otherwise not even that.

The next time we had coffee, she said she had been a Slavic languages major at an international program in Krakow and abandoned her studies when the first baby came. That was about nine months after Hermann's band played Krakow. She barely remembered him, but she looked him up online. She hadn't planned to drop out, but it was absolutely impossible to be an adequate mother and have a life, she said. She didn't resent her children. She said they were every bit as interesting as verbs."

- Nell Zink, the wall creeper