A Comet Appears

basically, to sum it up, think it's about people, and how they take such effort to make themselves better in whatever way they feel will be effective, but in the end we're all lonely, and need a little love, and it's such a rare thing these days. the lyrics themselves are just basic generalizations about many peoples lives, and the choices they make, and the things they do to get over the loneliness.(i.e. drinking, self-mutilation, plastic surgery, suicide, and most overlooked of all, religion).

much of the second half of the song is(in a nutshell) the futility of life(which coincides with the idea of the first), in that it will inevitably end. basically stating that we spend much of our lives trying to side-step our age, trying to look younger, be younger, but we spend so much time doing it that at some point we realize that in working so hard to stay young, we never really were young, and by then we're older. and death is staring us in the face, even if it's 20-30 years away, we start counting the clock. and as time passes, that clock is all we begin to see.

straight explanations for certain lines go as follows(imo):

"some uber-man I'd make" - very simple, we all want to be legends...but our lives result in nothing more than a blink in time.

"chlorine light on individual sins" - sunlight.

"wily comet" - obvious reference to our lives, and that we aren't leading our lives, our lives are leading us.

"blow on our thumbs and posture" - I'm not positive, but I think this is a reference to our species and making a joke of the FACT of evolution(theory no longer works, people just hold on to it), and the fact whether we make fun of it or not, it's who we are.(our thumbs and posture perticularly stand out between us and other species, as well as a lack of hair and our ability to sweat as a means of cooling, regardless of whether or not it's a result of evolution.)

"there is a numbness"chorus - reference to the thought that as we get older, we begin to feel a seperation from "god"(insert religion here) and begin to doubt such things, mostly because we don't want to die.

"burnt sage" verse - just about collecting your thoughts, preparing to be judged, wondering about the good and bad things you've done, what you could've changed, etc. the first line is just a metaphor for "sage" being old wisdom, and "forest of bygones" simply being things that you've never really gotten over, even though they're infinitesimally unimportant by then.

anyway, sorry to spell out the whole song, and I didn't really read any of the posts before this, so I apologize if somebody has already hit on this or basically proven me wrong(i.e. the songwriter hopped on and simply told what the song was about).