That Special Something is about ideals and compromises, aspirations, good-faith efforts, and the specter of futility. There's ample grief, but, with apologies to Robert Frost, there's also ample grievance, for it is in grievance that the gods allow more latitude for humor. What sort of humor? If you took a Vanitas/Memento Mori painter, converted such into a poet, made it so that the perspective shifted to include more flora and more animals, more waterways and beer, more cracked corn and more longing for the father, more references to weaponry and xenia, more fretting since, collectively, we're so much closer to the end, you'd have the sort of gallows humor that prevails here. Yet there's poignancy. There's beauty. There is joy. It's like the death's head on the cover, a reminder of the obvious, of the impending simplification. In the meantime, we are free to take a smoke, to be surrounded by as many flowers as we can, to grin as though we really don't have anything to lose.
