What Could Have Been

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When I was a kid Joanna Newsom would have been the ideal girl for me. If we had been in school together I would have always tried to get the seat next to hers in biology class so we could laugh and giggle at anatomy diagrams, or I would stand behind her in the lunch queue to smell her golden locks, or even give up my space in the lunch queue so she could get the best choice of chicken breast. I would have tried to look deep and thoughtful by frowning a lot and growing a fuzz moustache and scratching ironic cries for help in to my desk. She would no doubt have spurned my somewhat creepy and stalker-like advances with just as much indifference as she would have spurned my chivalrous actions as she would have been, on the evidence of Ys, far too deep a thinker for my teenage brain, fascinated rather than amused by anatomy, and ironic and funny without having to pretend.

She might have let me be her boyfriend and then a few years later when she recorded her masterpiece, Ys, I could have had the honour of performing the baritone male vocal accompaniment part on "Only Skin"

However, had Joanna and I met and fallen in love then it could not have been guaranteed that she would have ever recorded such a colossal record as this as, according to Doc Emmit Brown, the space/time continuum would have been disrupted and I may have dragged her down into my sad little life and not allowed her to follow the path of magic and wonder which she must have taken to invent the world in which the stories which comprise Ys take place in.

No, had I ever met and seduced a young Joanna it is highly possible that none of these images would seem even remotely possible; the normality would overpower the magic as it inevitably does, and the world would have lost a precious gem. And for not depriving the world of that, I should be thanked.