Well I'll preface this saying that there's a lot of personal meaning anyone can draw, with or without a "correct" interpretation of the actual narrative. This is after all an amazing heartfelt and hard-hitting song emotionally. But to my sense of the story, aside from what it means personally, it goes something like this:
Our narrator works a wage job at an airport "in the bags" for Capitol Air. He is financially troubled, has a gambling habit, and finds his father's life choices embarrassing and weak (I read this as joining the military... a cynical view of that being suicide for limited financial security.. though this detail could be off) and what he failed to recognize in his gambling was the great risk he was willing to undertake to strike it rich by any means possible. Add to this a troubled marriage on the verge of divorce and you have a desperate man with a weak sense of risk and enough frustration to take the next big windfall and escape that comes his way, legal or not.
A woman, seeing his position working behind airport security, offers him a lot of money to become a mule--that is, to transport illicit materials. Drugs? Documents? Priceless artifacts? Exotic plant seeds? Who knows? (Probably drugs. I mean come on.) We do know that though this transaction is the formal pretense of their relationship, there may well be a sexual element, and even something beyond mere exploitation. "Bobby, don't look back."
At last, we realize how short lived his scheme was. Among his personal belongings is a bottle of aftershave, filled, of course, with not-even-close-to-aftershave. "I can explain," he pleads in futility to the TSA personnel, as he considers the life cycle of the shadfly. He is running from them; from the truth that like theirs, his was but a day-long last-ditch effort at life, doomed from the start to be tumultuous, risky, chaotic, and ending in certain death (figuratively for our Bobby).
Bobby got a shadfly caught in his hair. Yes he did.
Sex is almost certainly a part of the narrative, but I think it's mostly a part of the shadfly metaphor; of the lust-unto-death drive of their final hours.
Well I'll preface this saying that there's a lot of personal meaning anyone can draw, with or without a "correct" interpretation of the actual narrative. This is after all an amazing heartfelt and hard-hitting song emotionally. But to my sense of the story, aside from what it means personally, it goes something like this:
Our narrator works a wage job at an airport "in the bags" for Capitol Air. He is financially troubled, has a gambling habit, and finds his father's life choices embarrassing and weak (I read this as joining the military... a cynical view of that being suicide for limited financial security.. though this detail could be off) and what he failed to recognize in his gambling was the great risk he was willing to undertake to strike it rich by any means possible. Add to this a troubled marriage on the verge of divorce and you have a desperate man with a weak sense of risk and enough frustration to take the next big windfall and escape that comes his way, legal or not.
A woman, seeing his position working behind airport security, offers him a lot of money to become a mule--that is, to transport illicit materials. Drugs? Documents? Priceless artifacts? Exotic plant seeds? Who knows? (Probably drugs. I mean come on.) We do know that though this transaction is the formal pretense of their relationship, there may well be a sexual element, and even something beyond mere exploitation. "Bobby, don't look back."
At last, we realize how short lived his scheme was. Among his personal belongings is a bottle of aftershave, filled, of course, with not-even-close-to-aftershave. "I can explain," he pleads in futility to the TSA personnel, as he considers the life cycle of the shadfly. He is running from them; from the truth that like theirs, his was but a day-long last-ditch effort at life, doomed from the start to be tumultuous, risky, chaotic, and ending in certain death (figuratively for our Bobby).
Bobby got a shadfly caught in his hair. Yes he did.
Sex is almost certainly a part of the narrative, but I think it's mostly a part of the shadfly metaphor; of the lust-unto-death drive of their final hours.
-bg