At times I have these startling moments where the past comes up and slaps me in the face in the most loving way possible. A peice of music sweeps me to my past as a hippie-kid...you could never get me out of my bell-bottoms, and I was always game to go on a road trip to Sedona in my tie-dyed shirt, guitar in hand, jumping in the river naked and taking every moment as it came. Jethrow Tull delivered me there this morning. My days rambling in England and not being able to get enough black tea, the smell of a British field wet with rain, "meanwhile back in the year one, when you belonged to no-one, you wouldn't stand a chance son... a million generations removed from expectations, of being who you really want to be." That's good stuff. No wonder I was obsessed with the hippie movement. Songs had some insight to those who were soul-searching but handed over advise in the most heart-brakingly joyous of ways. The music from the 60's and 70's makes me feel good. Sometimes it comes down simply to how you feel when something happens or when music plays. In a time before life got so damn heavy, before you couldn't be friends with someone because they're from a different political party or on the extreme side of Chrisitianity. Or maybe I'm deluding myself. Maybe it was just as heavy back then, but it is now that I read it in a history book that it doesn't seem as blood-thirsty as it is now. "Skating away on the thin ice of a new day." Maybe that is what Ian Anderson was thinking when he wrote that song. Was he sitting there at his breakfast table in the 70's with his morning cup of tea thinking the same thing as I am thinking here today in 2010? Sigh...we must agree Ian from the past and Autumn from the now, the story's still too damn real and in the present tense. Here's to skating away.