1. The news story bit sounds very much like a description of the Unabomber, though the announcer plainly calls the man "Maps" several times.

2. Rosinante is the name of Don Quixote's horse, though Cervantes obviously never spoke of donuts and chicken tenders.

The percussion is absolutely out of control. I love it. The last audio clip is great.

Personally, it sounds to me as if they are trying to give a general description of all of humanity. And the intense drums in the beginning just make me think of the id in human beings, uncontrollable and obscene.

great. so captivating.

The remark about the donuts and chicken tenders is almost certainly a reference to a diesel car using Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) as fuel - also known as a greasecar and other names. If you're not familiar with the process, I very highly recommend checking it out - doing the simple and inexpensive conversion to use veggie oil fuel can easily mean that you never need to pay for gas again - in fact, many businesses will PAY YOU to take their used veggie oil away.

I have number-color synesthesia. It's sweet.

and your exhaust smells like french fries when you run bio-diesel or WVO

This has some awfully brilliant lines, it's one of a few just absolutely stand-out songs on this album. The bit about the "color he had never seen before" is brilliant, and so's the part about synesthesia. And the distinctiveness of maps's character is remarkable; the sheer variety of unusual attributes and experiences in maps's life compels an instant fascination. I'm really curious where that clip comes from.
If that line's a reference to bio-diesal, I doubt it's a good idea to consider that fact over the fact that, well, his car smells like donuts and chicken fingers, and that that's a "friendly aroma" (ugh, imagine smelling that combination on a full stomach). The strangeness of the olfactory image is the emphasis, not the possibility that it's WVO.
When it comes to meaning, at first I was thrown off by the the first (I never knew what it was until now). Going from there, I think I now have a pretty good understanding of the song and of Maps's character. Since there's another bit there about the sky, I'm going with the idea that it's the planets and not the Classical gods. This song is full of unusual sensory imagery: the line about the planets, the line about the new color, the number-color synesthesia; they are key to all of the verses besides the newscast-style one.
I'm trying to be careful about 'the newscast verse' because I'm not sure we can trust its narrator to know all these things about Maps. It speaks about him from far away -- but it seems to speak from personal experience, what with the "now," interjection. However, the narrator the rest of the time is omniscient. Still, I consider the description of maps in the second verse at least possible, probably at least part-true, and possibly completely true.
As I was saying, the imagery in most verses plays with strange associative connections and the implications of the connections between senses, thoughts, and feelings. Two of these images are more easily identifiable as such (number-color synesthesia is an association and interchangability of sight (color and/or number) and concept (color and/or number), and the sight of Mars feeling like Neptune is an association between sight and (awfully specific) gut feeling. There is another in the idea of a dreamed new color being terrifying makes up one (an association between sight and emotion -- not just any sight, either, but one strange and amazing. and not just any small twinge of fear, to boot, but screaming, waking terror.
It is in these multiplicities of experience and thought processes that Maps elevates, or, at the very least, elevate his perception of himself, above all of his fellow man -- who if all millions were put up in one place to float together, they would probably not get along. But it'd be a sight to see, thinks Maps.
The playful passage of hours on the road by trying to reclaim his "inner child" is not about associative connections, but it does put a cap on Maps's character and the way he looks at things. An "inner child" is a strange thing for the Books to reference; it's a vague term of popular psychology used for lots of things by the general public; it's not like there's really a child version of the self locked away in some corner of the mind -- the goal of reclaiming a literal inner child is ludicrous. People attempt to therapeutically "heal" their inner child while recovering from addiction. While Maps may have a compulsion for "nefarious things," I'm convinced that he's being deliberately ironic, as the song does say, in order to pass the time. This is because his extensive contemplation of matters of the self doesn't seem like the kind to lead him to pursue something impossible like that (the inner child is a concept that other people came up with as a culture, and Maps considers his understanding of things to be superior to most other people's and doesn't value cultural perception). He seems like the kind of person who wouldn't consider such a step, even if possible, necessary in recovering from addiction -- his philosophy, I think, would be to get over addiction with the sheer clarity of thought -- that such consciously added steps unnecessarily complicate things and muddle minds, and already muddle most other people's minds. He would do something like this for kicks, in self-humoring parody of his own contemplativeness and to pass the time -- which would be quixotic, both deliberately and not deliberately, actually, and that's what this line is saying. The line probably doesn't contain one of those associative images, though I originally supposed it must. It is very fleeting and subtle way of polishing the finish on his character. This perhaps leads the listener not to expect the directness of the second part of that verse, which says that because of the way he views his clarity of thought and concept as superior, he is at all times trapped in the "loud" truth that, understandably, no matter how much he wants other people to understand him, they never can. In fact, it's so loud, that nobody can comprehend it. This could explain why he's perceived to resent society and all organizations -- he does mistrust these things and tend not to agree with them, but he knows he can't blame people for not understanding the way he senses, thinks, and feels. He can't blame them for their inability to understand what he wants them to understand. So it's about conscious thought and perception.

Salty Kevin, you got it man...
I've always felt a great connection with this song, and while reading your take on it, I felt like I was alomost reading about myself...Bravo

bugoff, that sample is another reference to synesthesia, if you are interested in synesthesia read The Man Who Tasted Shapes, it is awesome

this song seems, to me, to perfectly articulate the mindset and - more importantly - feelings i've experienced on LSD. while i'm not saying nick wrote this song about LSD, explicitly, it so perfectly captures the experience that i feel it must have had some influence.
most of nick's lines give me this expression, although there's some that i can only fit into my hypothesis very abstractly (which either means i'm interpreting the song wrong, or i'm not thinking about those lines in the right sense.)

for example:
'he felt lost, but he felt pretty intensely good'
this line, especially the way good is emphasized, rings so true. you feel lost; you be come cognizant of so much more. it can be overwhelming: whereas in a 'normal,' 'sober,' mindset, you have a train of thought where you think of something, which branches off automatically into a path (or two) and becomes a train of thought, on LSD i've found that one thought immediately branches off in every direction. it's like dropping food coloring in water. the moment the drop hits the water, it 'explodes' and fills up the water/container. your mind becomes a confusing, yet insightful and profound mess.
meanwhile, physically, you're filled with an extreme body high. on LSD and other hallucinogens - magic mushrooms are the kings of this - it almost feels as if you have a radiating sphere in your belly that radiates an intense 'GOOD' feeling. that's the only way i know how to describe it, and what's more, it's what i used to describe the feeling way before i ever heard of the books.

"and he woke up screaming have dreamed of a color he had never seen before."
this line can be taken either metaphorically or literally. the meaning is similar, either way. you have LSD act as the catalyst to either a different method of interpreting and connecting two colors to make a new color or to see an entirely new spectrum.

"he had no trouble recognizing patterns in the most delicate arrays of tangled lines..." i know that feeling. like i said, LSD can act as the catalyst to an entirely new way of interpreting information. you don't see a mess of jumbled lines anymore. patterns become apparent and obvious.
the second part of that line, 'nefarious things,' doesn't quite fit in with my theory, like the first and second (maps) stanza - which i will revisit later. loosely, you could say the nefarious thing is of course, taking the LSD, but the soundclip leads me to believe nick's not referring to this.

the next verse, however, is good evidence. high doses of LSD cause synesthesia - which is something everyone should experience! the road trip part confabulates my theory, though. sure, people do take LSD on roadtrips, but its a bit of a stretch to assume that Maps is trippin' on his roadtrip...

finally, the last verse is very reminscent of LSD. LSD is a great tool for self introspection, but it's easily to misled yourself into worthless self introspection - this i know from many anecdotes and long chats with close friends. quixotically - not practical. as said before, the inner child is pure psychoanalytical jargon. sure, your experiences get stored in your subconscious mind, but those are only experiences. they're not mindsets. (however, similar experiences tend to group themselves together, but that's a topic for another day. i could write tomes on the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious, but that's a talk for another day. it's fascinating and i'd love to explain it, so if you'd like me to explain this [it does have relevance to the song, it's just a lot more to branch of into] let me know.) so here, maps, fooled by LSD, is doing something that's not practical, even though he thinks otherwise. he's looking for something that doesn't exist.
and the last line: "he was embrangled and enmeshed in something far too loud to comprehend." yadda yadda, read above.

hmm, i'm getting too tired to articulate myself coherently, so i'll end this for now and get on with my analysis later. i'm actually planning to do some hallucinogenic introspection later today, so i'll have to think about this song during.

Your friends are, or are not excited about the percussion matching the speech :]

Steve Reich - Different Trains; derives all melody from speech. Very nice music.

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