Neil Peart Puts the Vaporization of Bad Members of Congress on His Wish List
One month after the Clocwork Angels tour ended Neil has angels on his mind still—as well as devils. The angels are in the Grand Circle parks in Utah—that would be Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, and Zion Canyon national parks, where Neil spent a few days at the end of last month. And the devils would be the lawmakers in Congress—“mean-spririted creeps” he calls them—who orchestrated the three-week federal government shutdown, “all for the principle of denying mercy to the suffering (because it might be ‘their own fault’—hardly a Christian objection).”
For Neil, a big fan of America’s national park system, the shutdown became personal, he says in his latest blog post, called “Angels Landing,” because his planned trip to the national parks in his new Aston Martin almost got scuttled because of the park closures. As it happened, Utah lawmakers used state funds to keep the parks open and Neil got to walk up and down the canyon trails for a few days.
But it was more than just the park closure that got Neil to thinking about angels and devils; it was the lack of feelings in lawmakers for the pain and suffering of others. “Apparently about one in every hundred humans is a sociopath,” he says. “A scary thought. And just such grandiose, cynical, and merciless semi-humans are the ones who would seek power and abuse it.”
Tell us how you really feel, Neil.
And he does: “Those few miserable, damaged egos,” he says of them, “like renegade bikers and surly rednecks, they ought to wear DILLIGAF T-shirts. Their message is the same, ‘Do I Look Like I Give a Fornication?'” For good measure, Neil such such evil people should be “vaporized.”
So much for the devils. The angels are the eerily beautiful rock sculptures that attract visitors from all over the world because they are indeed among some of the most awesome natural wonders on earth. And much of Neil’s blog post is devoted to describing them in detail. 
“Frozen music” is how he describes one mesmerizing canyon, in Zion National Park. “I sensed a kind of ‘hum,’ he says. “Or maybe something more like a steady ‘om,’ a vibrating chant of power and endurance. The words came to me: frozen music. Nothing mystical or psychedelic, just the notion that this was how frozen music would look, especially great symphonies and operas.”
“Zion might be Beethoven,” he goes on, “and perhaps Puccini, grand and impassioned, while Bryce might be Bach, an intricate monument. Somehow Capitol Reef suggested Mahler.” 
Another monumental wonder, although not a natural one, is the car he drove to the canyons, an Aston Martin Vanquish he bought last year but, he says, hasn’t been able to drive until now because of the tour. But on just this one trip he put 1,500 miles on the odometer, and he made it clear the car was as much music to his ears—what he called “wonderful V12 music”—as the rock formations.
Neil included a few photos of the car, but only from the back, so you can’t really see what it looks like. So, I took the liberty of including a stock image of a Vanquish just for a better look. Here’s what one looks like: 
As for music other than the kind that comes from rock sculptures and sports cars, Neil says it’ll be at least a year before Rush even talks about doing anything as a band. “The rock combo,” he says, “was on ‘indefinite hiatus,'” having agreed “not to even talk about work for at least a year. . . . For the first time in over a year, [I] wasn’t counting down the days until [my] next departure. For the first time in ten years, [I] was free of work obligations and schedules.”
Sounds pretty definitive. Hopefully, if they do go back into recording mode after that one-year hiatus, they’ll consider doing so with Terry Brown. I conducted a poll a couple of weeks ago among Rush fans and three-quarters of them say they’d like to see Rush and Terry Brown working together again. (About two percent told me to stuff it for even conducting the poll, but I consider that the price one pays for minding other people’s business. About 1,000 people responded. Access the results.
As always, Neil’s post is a great read. Read “Angels Landing” in its entirety for yourself.
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