Raise a glass to the bosses!

Raise a glass to the bosses!

Toiling away in their chrome steel towers, a secretary on the lap and a Cubano going out in the ashtray, they pull the levers that make you and me dance.

A hundred years or a little more ago there was open warfare between the bosses and the workers... the workers had the numbers -- after all were the ones doing the work -- but the bosses kept the money, or most of it. And they pumped a fair bit of it back into protecting the system they had worked to perfect, hiring private armies to beat back the roiling masses outside their towers. When voices and placards were met with fists, and fists were met with clubs, and clubs were met with guns, guns were met with bombs... there was war in the streets and in the factories.

It wasn't good for anyone.

There's self interest and then there's enlightened self interest. But there wasn't a whole lot of that, then. It took years, decades to turn a hard-fought and uneasy impasse into a period of relative productivity, peace, and even prosperity for... more, if not all.

The Good Book (pick your favorite) seems to suggest that greed is the root of evil.

And that's always made a lot of sense to me.

People who think their needs are so important that they are justified in taking from you... people who become trapped in a self-built prison of compulsive aquisition, as though they were saving up for the afterlife... we know what they do to society.

But what do they do to themselves? The malignancy of their greed eats them from the inside out, even as the wealth piles up around them...

And the Company Says
download [ 2.9 mb] 192 kbps
play [broadband]
AYoS radio [broadband]
more stream & DL options

previous versions
Tuesday, January 10, 2006

lyrics
And the Company Says

You walk into town
and you look all around
and it doesn't take long
to see that something is wrong
very wrong

the people stand around
with their eyes on the ground
it doesn't take long
to see that something is wrong

and the company says
it's a company town
now, if you don't like that
don't ya hang around

and the Company says
it's a company town
if you don't like that
sell a penny on the pound
give 'way

One man stands
says I don't run
but the goons come around
with their clubs and guns

and they knock him down
and they kick him around
and they drag his body
to the edge of town

and the company says
he's better off dead
than fightin' with us

and the company says
it's a company town
if you don't like that
we'll put you in the ground

and the Company says
it's a company town
now, if you don't like that
don't ya hang around

and the Company says
it's a company town
if you don't like that
sell a penny on the pound
give 'way

and the company says
he's better off dead
than fightin' with us

and the company says
it's a company town
if you don't like that
we'll put you in the ground

(C)1986, 2007, TK Major

We picked up our places in the game that went before...

How did I live so long?

Ah, well, the one thing we can be sure of is that it once and for all disproves any positive correlation between virtue and longevity. Not that I'm that old. But I'm definitely well past the good die young age band. More in survivor territory, I'd say.

Anyhow, gettin' old. It's hell, yadda yadda.

They talk about wasting youth on the young -- but, really, I don't think I could take what I went through when I was young, now.

Or put myself, through, more than anything. But it had to be gone through, apparently: driven by a highly personal vision of my dharma, I plunged on.

At any rate, nowadays I have philosophy on my side -- and plenty glad I do. Getting old is hell...

I Was Just a Kid
download [ 2.9 mb] 192 kbps
play [broadband]
AYoS radio [broadband]
more stream & DL options

previous versions
Saturday, December 09, 2006

lyrics
I Was Just a Kid

I was just a kid who'd
memorized some lines
I never dreamed
I would hurt you
you said we couldn't run
from the pain that would come
now you wear that pain
and it suits you

we picked up our places
in the game that went before
the path lay in lies
to be burned through
if I could run back home
I would lay me back down
and suckle at the breast of virtue

(C) 1972, 2007, TK Major

Lollipops, moonbeams, and monkey demons

There's an ugly, yellow, artificial twilight -- it reminds me of just past dusk on the smoggiest of bad old LA days -- a nasty, twighlight that overtakes you when you turn incandescent houselights controlled by a dimmer way, way down. A room can take on the aspect of a yellowed newspaper clipping... but the result isn't nostalgic -- but more an oppressive, claustrophobia-inspiring flatness... it's as though the air was somehow sucked out of the room.

As the light gets dimmer and yellower, the eye can play tricks... shadows move -- but it's not the shadowy dance of flickering candles... no, the shadows move fitfully, restlessly... waiting until your attention is focused somewhere else and they are safely at the edge of your vision.


In the song below, the monkey demons and the reference to the old blues line, "I've been down so long, it looks like up to me," come from the first (and sole) novel from lost writer-musician Richard Fariña, married to Joan Baez's sister Mimi and killed in a motorcycle crash in 1966, after leaving the signing party for the novel on a borrowed bike.


Dimmer
download [ 2.9 mb] 192 kbps
play [broadband]
AYoS radio [broadband]
more stream & DL options

previous versions
Friday, November 25, 2005
Friday, March 31, 2006

lyrics
Dimmer

Wake up baby, turn your
dimmer lights down low
When it gets yellow like this it hurts my
eyes -- but it eases my soul

Come here baby pay those
monkeys in the shadows no mind
Those monkeys are my demons -- they been
waitin' for me such a long time

I been down -- but it
never looked like up to me
I been down but I guess
down isn't what it used to be

(C)2007, TK Major