It's difficult to imagine anyone other than Merle Haggard — the archetypal outlaw, often bearded, a little skeptical around the eyes, a little bit somewhere else — including a song called "If We Make It Through December" on a Christmas record, where it could freely rub up against blank, life-affirming hooey like "Jingle Bells" and "Winter Wonderland".
It was either pick the fill-in-the-blank life or stick with the military's multiple-choice existence.
Never again will Ahmadinejad speak of justice without being undone by the Neda Effect — the image of eyes blanking, life abating and blood blotching across the face of Neda Agha-Soltan.
An instruction manual for aspiring Hasses, these lines suggest that Hass's own story was learned from an instruction manual; of course, it wasn't, but the feeling of having lived a fill-in-the-blanks life is something that many autobiographical poets come to know.
Before he fell, his right eye went blank — flashing life, death, pain, something.
This track, however, was built from Blake's synthy yet occasionally blank-sounding Life Round Here and turned into a complete gem.
At that moment in his life, Blank was in despair.
"I'll have to leave that part of my life blank," he says.
Experiences in brokerage offices on Wall St., people whose money had been swept away, leaving them only blank outlook on life.
That in less than seven minutes, the knot of fear and anxiety unspooling at speed will swallow you whole, rendering your life blank and your existence meaningless?
What Ben doesn't know, he tells us in the curtain line, "would fill a book": he is a blank slate whose life in some way is only now beginning.
