If I sleep I might dream...

You could start out drinking in a trucker bar on West Anaheim Street in Long Beach, end up closing a bar in Bakersfield and still find yourself driving back into downtown LA with an hour to spare before dawn...

What to do with your time?


About this version: I'd been meaning to drag my laptop and a mic over to my buddy Kurt's house for a long time and something like this version of this song would have been a good candidate for a bongo part by the intuitive and adaptive percussionist.

My own sub-beach party overdub on the recording below can only hint at what might have been if I'd just got my ass in gear...

Carpe that diem, baby.


Baby, I Just Got the Blues
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Saturday, December 03, 2005
Saturday, June 17, 2006

lyrics
Baby, I Just Got the Blues

I drive around all night
looking for nothing to do
I play guitar til dawn
but every song's about you
if I sleep I might dream
and we all know that dreams don't come true

Ain't nothin wrong with me baby
I just got the blues
Ain't...

walked along the shore
wondering what a smart guy would do
in the Idiot's Guide to Love
I must be listed in the back under "fool"
sure once I had some answers
now I'd settle for some lies that sound true

Ain't nothin wrong with me baby
I just got the blues
Ain't...

It's easy for you sugar but then
everything's easy for you
You know what you want
and you know how to make it come true
But, it's hard for me, doll, to
bid all that we had adieu

Ain't nothin wrong with me baby
I just got the blues
Ain't nothin wrong with me baby
I just got the blues

(C)1998 TK Major



(C)2007, TK Major

Man in the Bottle

I suppose you ought to know you're in trouble when you realize you consider your daily dive into the soothing depths of the bottle to be somehow heroic.

But the truth is that I was not just a willful and enthusiastic drunk, I didn't just romanticize drunken nescience -- I exulted it as somehow emblematic of man's struggle with his own weaker nature.

In those days -- and for a long time after -- I viewed my drinking as a badge of honor, like a wounded survivor proud of his crutch.

So, where you might see the protagonist of this song as, oh, say, for arguments sake, a pathetic loser, when I was writing it, I saw the guy as a tragic hero, battered and wounded, yet rising (through the haze of a thousand hangovers stretched end to end) to face the sysiphean ordeal of daily life...

He could give up.

But, somehow, he reaches deep inside himself to find that last bit of courage, reaches for his medicine, and goes on to face another day.

Blue Recollection
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Saturday, November 05, 2005
Friday, April 07, 2006

lyrics
Blue Recollection

Now the last thing I remember
You were walking out the door
My hand reached for the bottle
then there ain't no more

you're just a blue recollection
that ain't nothin' new
I been having trouble forgetting
to remember that I don't still love you


I wake up at nite
but it ain't because of you
I'm just listening to the plaster crack
and the clock tick in the next guy's room

you're just a blue recollection
that ain't nothin' new
I been having trouble forgetting
to remember that I don't still love you

Now the last thing I remember
You were walking out the door
My hand reached for the bottle
then there ain't no more...

(C)1987, 2007, TK Major

Goin' Home (for Ben)

Damn.

My pals have been shuffling off this mortal coil faster than I can recover my equilibrium, here.

I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised, Ben had been in the hospital a month or two ago with congestive heart failure. Still, though there's not much about congestive heart failure that sounds like a walk in the park, it seemed like things were coming back together.

It looked like he'd even be going back to the work he loved: animation. He'd talked to Nickelodeon and it looked like they would be hiring him for a new project.

But it wasn't to be.

Still, thing were looking up. He slipped into unconsciousness at his home and passed away not long after.

Damn.

Damn, damn, damn.

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Monday, March 6, 2006
Thursday, November 10, 2005

Goin' Home

Wake up baby
turn your light down low...
I want ta see your pretty face
one more time before I go

They're coming for me in the morning
coming to take me home...
When you see that light in the sky
that's when you know I'm going home

[bridge]

When you see that light in the sky
that's when you know I'm going home...
Don't try to call me baby
cause they ain't got no telephone

(C)1991, TK Major