Prayers are Sometimes Answered

Tonight I'm listening to The Cure's 8th Studio album Disintegration. When I put Side A of the first record on, the sky was blue achromatizing to gunmetal gray. It seemed no more an omen than it was attractive; innocuous on both counts. As "Fascination Street" ended, concluding Side B on record 1, I rose from my seat on the couch to change the record and I noticed out of my living room window that the sky had changed. It had darkened and become premonitory. A storm was on its way.

As the needle dropped on Side C, I stepped out onto the porch for a clove cigarette and a Miller High-Life and I searched the air for the smell that accompanies the moments before a hard rain; soil and electricity, but the scent wasn't there. The storm must still be a ways away, I thought, but as the beginning of "Prayers for Rain" poured from the speakers, the deep gray of the sky gave way to a deeper black, and as Simon Gallup's bass began to boom and writhe on the 8th track on what I can only refer to as one of the most beautiful and brilliant albums I have ever heard, the onyx sky burst open and released a torrential downpour. This was a full-on, no-joke, motherfucker of a rain, one that came on so hard within little more than 30 seconds, and began to flood the earth.

I watch the sky swell and explode in a tumult of water in real time as I listen to "Prayers for Rain". How apropos.

As track 1 on Side C ends and the 2nd track, "Same Deep Water as You", envelops me, so begins the thunder that fills the air outside my door. With the windows open, the natural roar and the authentic reproduction on "Same Deep Water as You" sound like syncopated eruptions; they almost explode in unison. Suddenly I can't help feeling that listening to an album that came out in 1989 somehow conjured the weather that would happen over 2 decades later.

This is ridiculous, of course. As magical a moment as this is, I know in my mind it's nothing more than a perfectly timed and poetic act of nature, but in my heart...well, in my heart I can't help but believe there's some sort of of ethereal, cosmic hand at work here, some divine being with kick-ass taste in music orchestrating this. It's hard to believe there's not some omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent puppet master pulling strings out there in the ether because this moment is too perfect to be accidental.

Since I began listening to The Cure nearly 2 decades ago, I have experienced a series of seemingly random yet oddly similar Cure-related events that, when closely examined, seem fantastic but and coincidental. But when looked at with a wide lens, seem too recurring to be simply random or mere happenstance; a random pattern can only truly be random until it becomes a pattern, then it becomes fact. Time and time again, my real life and the chimerical dream that The Cure have created with their songs have bumped up against each other, overlapped, became one and the same, even if only for a few ticks of the seconds hand...and now this, one of the most empyrean experiences I've had in a very long time. I am in utter awe.

I can't be 100% positive, but I'm pretty sure God wants me to love The Cure.