i surrender you to the cops.

there is a moment. anyone who's ever been in love knows it. hell, you don't even have to be in love to recognize it. any relationship; friendship, sex, work, casual aquaintence. it's really rather unmistakable. the moment when you resign your efforts in love, and give up. you see the inevitable parting of ways as a small, chugging dot way down the highway, you have no idea if it's big and noisy and painful or if it's sleek and elegant and simple. you aren't positive when it's going to arrive, but make no mistake, it's coming for you. it's not going to turn around and go back the other way, it's just a question of whether it runs over your foot or vaporizes you and turns you into soup.

i remember that exact moment in every relationship i've been it. i remember it well with the little blonde anger pixie. it was a minor fight, and even though she swore she was giving up those lucky strike filters, she stomped down to the porch to smoke. i sat in my room and there it was. the moment spoke to me and it said hey, you may do this for a while longer, but ain't no way yer gettin' married, and sooner or later, yer gonna leave her. and right i was. oh sure, it took two more years, but we finally went our separate directions. i also remember it with ol' damaged goods. she had just been fired from her good job, and wanted to take a job as a cocktail waitress in a seedy, shitty karaoke bar that she frequented and i hated hated hated. that moment was there, only i thought i could skate for a while longer. on christmas day, she called and announced that she was shacking up with a snowboarder lifty, and that she didn't love me anymore, and wouldn't be coming home. we both recognized the moment, but she decided to do something about it.

yeah, i'd really like to go back up that river with you...to find the things we never thought we'd lose. that's the radar brothers right there, and in simple slow songs they talk about the many slow, deliberate ways we stumble through life. the best part of any relationship is the time for when you move through your lives together, without doubt, sure that you will never lose the optimism, the hope, the interest, the commitment. once you have, it's damn near impossible to go back to the way things were. or, as pops likes to say, "you can't put the poop back in the horse"..

the radar brothers plod along at the same pace throughout damn near every song they play, and people who are less endeared by them then myself seem to think they sound like they've been woken up after a twenty minute nap instigated by dozens of bong hits. acoustic guitars, clever songwriting, obtuse lyrics. i live off this stuff. not long ago, a friend sucked all the songs off my ipod into his computer. a couple days later he mentioned he couldn't understand how i could listen to so much music that moves at a glacier's pace.

round and round i go, you twist my heart, you watch the race. how many cars can ride the way, have it twisted for relations sake? so once you've reached that moment in a relationship, it's now just a question of how long you can go without doing something stupid? i'm an uncaring, selfish type of person, so frequently i can go a long time, just treading water, just spinning around. until something better shows up. this, of course, is cruel and stupid, and it's typical of the type of romantic life i've lead. everyone's a victim, so there are no victims at all. we are all guilty.

and that may be the message in the textures and lyrics of the songs of the radar brothers, a sort of helpless, we do what we do because we know no other way sort of feeling. they'd probably sound stupid and unnatural playing fast or angry, or disjointed or funky. for some strange reason, there seems to be a reference to water in every song they play. maybe it's the california coast near where they practice. however, they don't sing of a bright sunny wave, it's more often a song of "underwater culprits" or "an ant floating in milk". maybe it's a pre-natural vision of death, like charlie's (from the excellent and underrated pacific northwest band pond) assertion that his death, though he not knows when it will occur, will be drowning.

the inevitable is a difficult thing to face, and god knows i can ignore and procrastinate and act like i'm above it, but that feeling gnaws in your mind as you try and fall asleep, and worse yet, it changes the way you act towards your beloved. after that ugly moment appeared to me, ol' damaged goods saw right through the smoke screen i launched, my "everything's cool" attitude is and was painfully transparent. assertively, she decided to jump ship and hop on the first smiling hardbody that made himself available. can i blame her?