Dana Point Vapor Trails

While I was doing yoga at Sea Terrace Park in Dana Point last week (just twice last week, but 5 times the week before) in the afternoon around 1pm, I noticed a powerful odor of desperation mixed with sweat & perfume.  A woman in her 50s, dressed in inappropriately tight clothes like she was trying to be in her 20s (or maybe that fit her in her 20s?), walked down the sidewalk some 30 feet away from where I was doing yoga, then she crossed 1/2 the distance into the grass, and laid down on the grass upwind of me, between my mat and the ocean.  A strong perfume odor assaulted my nostrils.  She was more than 75 feet away from me, but the perfume scent was so pungent, I could almost taste it.  A massive vapor trail, I was enveloped in its wake.

As I finished up my practice, and then headed over to Strand Beach to run the stairs multiple times, I thought about the word "Vapor Trail" and how it was one of many of the double / triple / quadruple entendres that Rush has chosen for their many albums (link here).  The more I thought about it, the more it drilled into my consciousness, especially as I parkoured rapidly from Strand Beach's funicular stairs to the Head Lands zig-zag along the breakwater rocks beside the sidewalk.


Rush - to hurry; a feeling of exhilaration; moving quickly
Fly By Night - temporary, transient, not to be relied upon; owls also fly by night
Caress of Steel - steel is cold so it cannot really warmly "caress", but when forged or smelted it can radiate brilliant heat and light in which one can bathe (as I have in China, Romania, Italy, Canada, Austria, France, Taiwan, Germany, and the US) which is sort of a 'caress'
2112 - concept album, doesn't count
Farewell to Kings - goodbye monarchs, but also, control from within that which was previously externally guided... or, Much More Simply, a quote from Charles Anthon's "Classical Dictionary" from 1872 where he quoted Saint Gregory's words from 381 A.D.*
Hemisphere - of the brain, of the buttocks, of the globe; 1/2 of a sphere
Permanent Waves - tidal forces; hair permanents; standing oscillatory patterns
Moving Pictures - cinema; dramatic images; actual movers who move framed pictures
Signals - green/yellow/red; stop & go; start and stop; radio or television signals
Grace Under Pressure - creativity boiling beneath a cap; a contained muse; performing well despite immense scrutiny
Power Windows - of a car; Windows platforms (1985) were just beginning to appear in PCs; portals to powerful offices
Hold Your Fire - juggling fire; not discharging your weapon; with-holding crucial information until later; choosing your battle
A Show of Hands - puppetry; clapping; using hands to make music; mimes; voting by raising your hand
Presto - magical conjuring word; viola!; Presenting; of a quick tempo
Roll The Bones - throwing dice, rolling over in your grave, old people moving
Counterparts - time piece internal parts; complimentary or opposite parts; a spouse; a colleague in an alternate location
Test for Echo - a sound test; a sonar test; a radar signature
Vapor Trails - what a star leaves in it's wake as it orbits around a galaxy; what comes out of an e-cigarette (which was not yet invented, when the album came out); the wake of a noxious gaseous release from between the legs; the plume of off-gassing perfume from a person in the park who has applied far too much
Snakes & Arrows - though I Saw this concert in Phoenix, it was not one of my favorites
Clockwork Angels - I neither have this album nor have seen this concert… the whole Ayn Rand praising by Peart (from 2112, brought to my attention last year) has tremendously decreased my Rush enthusiasm.

I am pretty sure DDF will say that my mentioning of the doused perfumed vapor trail was not very nice, but, it did occupy my Friday afternoon thought patterns, and getting the remnant scent out of my sinuses and mind took even longer.

[Note:  finding the Anthon quote took some google detective work, with a -Rush, -Album, -Game, -Rowley, -Video boolean qualifiers]

* He bids "farewell to kings and their palaces, and to the courtiers and secants of kings; faithful, I trust, to your master, but for the most part faithless towards God, farewell to the sovereign city, the friend of Christ, but yet open to correction and repentance; farewell to the Eastern and Western world, for whose sake I have striven and for whose sake I am now alighted."  S.Gregorii Nazianzeni, Opera, Oral. 32, delivered in June, A.D. 381 by Saint Gregory.  Charles Anthon - Classical Dictionary, New York, Harper, 1872.