Meine & Sartre

If we'd go again
all the way from the start,
I would try to change
the things that killed our love.

         ("Still Loving You," from Scorpion's 1984 album, Love At First Sting)

If you get the chance for a new beginning, you commit the same things and there is never an escape.

         (Jean-Paul Sartre)


I think what's closer to the truth is, neither Klaus Meine's anguished regret nor Jean-Paul Sartre's deadpanned fatalism leads to any real sense of hope — for hope only leads forward, into the future.

Yes, I was a metalhead and I read Sartre (though I disagree with much of his writings). I was also one of those waving flickering Zippo™ lighters in a darkened National Stadium at the first Metallica concert here; and one of those sweaty numbers moshing when Henry Rollins came to town.

And before that, I regularly blew Lord British, immortal sovereign of all Britannia, to bits — on an 8 MHz machine — to the beat of a certain British pop duo.




Damn, I'm a veritable fossil...