"he wants you to know it's a hullabaloo drinking and shouting at satellites" - Blender
I don't know what about that quote struck me as amazing as I read through a cursory review of Waits's discography (that sucked) but it seemed to lurk in the bushes and slap my in the face when I rounded the corner.
I just get the image that all of those characters, the third shift A-list was in one worn in bar, dancing and singing to jug-stomp music, laying on the roof in their down time yelling dreams up to the stars. I'm sure they meant satellite as in the moon, but there is a weird anti-romantic asthetic to distant communication technology. That radio tower that they build out of the way in the stretch of abandoned woods on the side of local highways, blinking silently in the middle of the freezing cold winter nights. It carries all the thinly veilded words of someone aching for the person to which their speaking to return half of the sentiment. It has a way of reminding you of the fast paced, inpersonal speed of everyday life as you sit under a clear sky under a lone tree in the middle of June. It makes you happy you're in such a remote place and can watch the chaos from a distance.
I dream of all the heartache there in the air, traveling great distances full of emotion there on passing invisible waves, and sometimes if I lose myself enough I put my hand up and I try to feel them between my fingers. I catch myself and play it off as me doing something else, but I'm still thinking and I can see a beatup working class man sitting in the bar room halls that are 10 steps from removed from the fast paced sidewalks of the big city. Masked by 3 days of absence from his razor, his thoughts travel to a land 10,000 miles away and a woman he aches to hear echo any sentiment that would even look look in his direction. He wipes his face with pride and looks away, out the window to hide his shame onto the slow moving boats that send long stacks of clouds into the early evening sky.