You Can Go Your Own Way

As he lay in the gully with a broken ankle, the snow gently falling onto his bare head, a Fleetwood Mac song whose lyrics he could never quite understand played on his mind's jukebox. "You can go your own way. You can call it under a long and day." It made no sense, but that's all he could make out through the little speaker in his clock radio back in the 1970s. I should have listened to more Fleetwood Mac, he thought. I never even listened to a full album, never bought one. They had songs composed following unknown strategies. Who was doing what in the songs? He couldn't tell. The drummer looked like a giant, and the band was named after him and the bassist, John. But then he knew more about Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Were they writing rock songs or pop songs? Could the lyrics be understood if one really focused? What were they about? Coming and going? Movements up and down hills? The movement of days? Love staying and love failing? He had heard about all the drug use in California in the 1970s. Those drugs must have been miraculous stuff to permit them to compose such music in the middle of the night in a wooden chalet studio in Sausalito.

A fox approached the man, sniffing him curiously. He tried to talk to the creature. "What do you know about Stevie Nicks? Do you know how Fleetwood Mac went from being a blues band to a rock and pop band?" The fox didn't answer and trotted off in the snow, leaving a trail of little paw prints.

The sun moved across the dome of the sky. A majestic 10-point buck approached the man, looking at him impassively. The man said to the deer, "Do you know how Fleetwood Mac wrote their songs? They don't seem to follow any pattern." The deer gestured upward with his powerful neck and head toward the road. He seemed to be letting the man know that it was time to try to drag himself up out of the gully. The deer traced some shapes in the snow with its hooves. The man interpreted the shapes as the melodies to certain Fleetwood Mac songs. The buck bolted away. And the man began to pull himself up the bank, singing the melodies to certain Fleetwood Mac songs, "Listen to the wind blow/ watch the sunrise /Run in the shadows / damn your love, damn your lies."

                               Scioto Lounge by Terry Allen

                                                               Columbus, Ohio public art