It's always the big question, whether we're stuck at a party where you don't know a single people other than the host or whether we're just thinking in larger, more epic terms: What are we doing here? It's right to ask the question and it feels like it's the one that needs to be asked more times than you'd ever like to admit. It goes further and we start to ask about why someone else is here - what role could they possibly be playing in this bigger picture, of which we're always going to feel we're directing. It's our story and these sequences aren't working right. They're incomprehensible. They're leading us to draw conclusions that don't fit with what we thought we'd story-boarded out before any of this action ever began.
Kris Orlowski reminds us that, from the very start, we began adlibbing and if we're not able to deal with that, we're in for some serious heartburn. We'll get trampled and we'll be disappointed - as will many others. We should just be wary of where everything's headed, with a keen eye to some wavy line off in the distance that may or may not be there when we actually reach it, if we ever reach it.
Orlowski sings of those things that we reach for, stretching for with every inch that we've got, only to keep stretching. We turn to the person beside us and see them as a stranger and a lover, all the same. He asks, "I don't know what you mean to me/I don't know why you hang around," and it sounds like a gentle condemnation of just how liquid everything can wind up becoming. When he sings, "Oh, I came in this world without money/Oh I came in this world with the blood on my sleeve/And I wanna know what's worth fighting the emptiness and what we receive," at the outset of "Mountains," he forces us to come face-to-face with the thought that the way things were when we first arrived might be as clear as they're ever going to be.