Monday Music: Assemblage 23 – Decades (v2)

Assemblage 23 – Decades (v2), from the album Meta. Synthpop.

I’ve used Assemblage 23 before, I know, and this particular song doesn’t have relevance to the current story, but it’s one of my favorites from this band and heavily influential on the mood of the War of Memory Cycle. Heck, the series title touches upon the same themes: that we don’t remember what we need to, or know how to attain the perspective that would help us understand the past and shape the future to something we can tolerate.

Anyway, I’m still moving in slow-motion here, having some family obligations to handle while awaiting the cover. I’ve worked up the outline for Book 4 and hope to start fleshing it out within a few days, then might just plunge into the first draft while I’m awaiting the last Book 3 beta reports. So far the feedback has been solid, not much to tweak in the text.

And now, the lyrics:

Time is like a serpent that devours its own tail
The coils grow ever-tighter with each moment it inhales
A foreboding sense of deja vu that cannot be ignored
It’s hard to help but feel we’ve seen and done this all before

History be damned, it’s only progress we embrace
Our eyes closed to the circles that our memories re-trace
Arrogance & avarice distort our field of view
A re-run culture takes your past and sells it back to you

Decades pass and years go by, days dissolve into the ether
Condense like clouds and come raining back down
But we are blind to this debris piling up around our feet
Oblivious, and it’s killing us

Fear and loathing paralyze the populace throughout
Disengage the rhetoric that brought this all about
Overcome and overrun, pretend all this is new
Surely we’ll be hailed as heroes when this all is through

Our memory is short, we throw all caution to the wind
The story’s changed so much we can’t recall how it begins
Foresight is an absent friend we left in distant days
Reflection makes us realize the error of our ways