89. 10 Songs about Possibility

All Possibilities - Badly Drawn Boy
The Impossible Dream - Andy Williams
The Universal - Blur
Possibly, Maybe - Bjork
The Possibilities - Micah P Hinson
Something Changed - Pulp
Worlds of Possibility -The Pastels
You Give A Little Love - Bugsy Malone soundtrack
Impossible Germany - Wilco
One Of These Things First - Nick Drake


The song from Bugsy Malone is the one that begins "We could have been anything that we wanted to be ..." in case you were wondering where that fits in.
i don't know why I'm doing this post now, I just suddenly thought I really ought to. I'm getting increasing numbers of pangs of nostalgia, and for me nostalgia in its true sense is directly linked to the extinguishing of the possibilities of the past. Today I was just walking home and i saw a battered old Golf with a sticker on it which said "This car has security etching" and I thought about how long it is since that would have meant anything to anybody, like any bit of new-fangled technology that comes and goes and means nothing.
It's all very well talking about parallel lives, parallel universes, but does anybody think they actually exist? I'd have thought not. For me, it's not about regret, or thinking "ooh, that life would have been better", it's about considering the time when something that no longer exists as a possibility had potential importance. As the lifespan of the human race carries on, how sad it is that the number of things with potential importance, both personally and politically, will become fewer and fewer.
I'm looking at this the wrong way round, aren't I? I should be looking at the idea that anything could happen, it could happen to you, it really really really could happen, impossible is nothing, if you get one shot to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it or would you let it slip, but, what can i say, all that means nothing to me.
If anything is possible (which it isn't really) then equally everything will become impossible.
When almost anything can act as a lump-in-the throat sickener, that is not a good state to be in. I feel myself getting more sentimental, but am still just about resistant to most things that try too hard to manipulate that feeling. What I'm saying is that I still don't go weak at the knees when I hear 'Memory' from Cats. '
But nothing gets to me like 'The Sound of Music' ...
I haven't written a poem, i only have a thought about the saddest thing i ever saw ...

When I watch The Sound of Music and see our childhood in it,
I see those billion potentials erased
and there will not be so many again
and eventually there'll be no possibilities left.

Bummer, eh?

If you ask me nicely, I'll deconstruct that thought for you. But basically, it's lederhosen. Lederhosen set me off.