Tag Archives: faith

I reach for the dream I was dreaming last night…

Big, Nasty World: Bird's Eye ViewWhat can you say?

It is a big, nasty world and through most of its history, a lot of folks have thought things were getting nastier all the time.

Whether we’re straying ever farther from the Garden — or we’re simply a pessimistic race drawn to the dark view — I’ll leave to the philosophers, moralists, and poets.

Me, I like to, you know, accentuate the positive.

Sure, things look pretty dark right now… the coastal cities will be flooded within the lifetime of the kids in our schools. The oceans will be depleted of significant food stocks even sooner. Probably most animal species alive today will be extinct in a 100 years. But not the cock roaches. The cock roaches will survive.

So, you know, we can look forward to that.

Some kind of continuity.

I know I’m looking at translating my AYoS blog into cockroach and burning special archive-quality compact discs which I’ll scatter in land fills for the cockroach anthropologists to find.

I can just see the hard-drinking, self-styled adventurer cockroach who’ll make the discovery of the first AYoS disc, which he’ll excitedly write a series of academic papers about…

This I believe.

Or maybe not. Still… could happen. Prove it couldn’t.

Anyhow, bottom line… we ain’t here forever. Be alive now.

Big, Nasty World

Internet Archive page for this recording
October 8. 2006 version
March 10, 2006 version

Big, Nasty World

I wake up each morning
and I reach for my bible
I reach for my razor
and I reach for my gun

I reach for the dream
I was dreaming last night
but every single morning
that dream is gone

’cause it’s a
big nasty world
a terrible place
It’s hard to stay alive
and it’s hard to keep the faith

its a rotten world
a grim shabby place
but out of the endless depths of time
you’re here today

I’m tired of living
and I’m tired of dying too
I’m tired of tomorrow
and all the shhh that I’ve been thru
I’m tired of forever
and I’m tired of yesterday
I’m tired of never
and the man the child became

’cause it’s a big nasty world…

I used to love ya baby
and you know that’s true
I used to love God
and you know that too
I used to love myself
It was the hardest of all
I loved the whole GD world
but that was before the Fall

’cause it’s a
big nasty world
terrible mean place
It’s hard to stay alive
and it’s hard to keep the faith

its a rotten world
a grim shabby place
but out of the endless depths of time
honey, you’re here today

(C)1992, 2006, TK Major

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What Promises Mean Today

I know what promises mean today.

Now this is an oldie. I believe it was written in 1974.

I was in love at the time (we only kissed, I swear) with this ‘third generation witch’ from Iceland. I don’t know if she had preternormal powers — but I will say that she had the most electric vibes of anyone I think I’ve ever been around. Kissing her was like what I imagine it must be like to grab a Van de Graf generator… you almost expected to see little lightning flashes snaking across your intertwined bodies.

Anyhow, she was a singer and guitar player with a lovely voice and a nice finger picking style and I was a woefully undisciplined beginning musician desperate to escape the “poetry scene.” She and her roommate, another folksinger, were the first people to compliment me on my songwriting in a believable way. (My old friends were just amazed that I finally sort of learned to tune a guitar… it was a long time coming.)

The first song they really warmed up to, In the Course of Events, is yet to come in the AYoS lineup (not that there’s any rhyme, reason, or more than a 2 minute plan in the AYoS process) but I wrote this one soon after and, while they were a bit less enthusiastic about Promises, they felt it built on what I’d accomplished with Course of Events.

Anyhow…

One more thing, we’re going to try something new and put the chords up along with the lyrics. (Actually, it’s the lazy way out, since they were already there.) I’d like to encourage anyone so inclined to feel free to cover my songs, so maybe I should make it a little easier. That said… when I do my songs, I seldom get the chords the same way twice… so they should more properly be considered a general guide rather than a detailed, accurate roadmap.

I Know What Promises Mean Today

G D C C
I know what promises mean today
G F C C
I don’t care I believe in you anyway
D F
Don’t care what anyone says
C Em
I’ll believe in you unitil I’m dead
G
At the rate things are going
F C
That cuold be any day
G F C
I don’t care I believe in you anyway

You say you’re my lover
my sister my brother my friend
I’m surprised you don’t claim be
my mother my father
and the priest they said they’ll send
at the end

Am Em
And I still don’t care what anyone says
Am Em
I’ll be loving you ’til Im put in my grave
G F
but at the rate things are going
C C
that could be any day
G F C C
I don’t care I believe in you, anyway

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Big, Nasty World

Get Down BabyWhen I was a kid, I was so hungry for life I just couldn’t imagine how people would want to escape samsara, the illusory world of seemingly endless life and death that Vedic religions believe traps us all — at least unless or until we can achieve ultimate union with God by transcending the desires and fears that bind us to this life. (Or that’s my twenty-five cent write-up, anyhow.)

But after I’d kicked around a few more decades I started understanding how someone could become world weary — even in the heart of what many folks here in the temporal world might consider a demi-paradise. It isn’t so hard for me, now, to imagine how someone in, say, the slums of Calcutta, might long for union with the source of everything — particularly if it got him out of the slums of Calcutta.

Anyway, now I appreciate the stoic nobility of those who “soldier on” in the face of everyday challenge to their sense of purpose — no matter how temporal — how ephemeral — that purpose might be.

That said, the melodrama in this song cracks me the heck up.

It was a challenging time for me when I wrote it and it would have been more so had I known what would unfold in the years to come. All the same, the melodrama cracks me up and that’s why I think I really like this song. It was like I was trying to perfect my “street walk” to get through the very tough neighborhood of what us over the hill types like to think of as the downhill slide.

BIG NASTY WORLD

wake up each morning
and I reach for my bible
I reach for my razor
and I reach for my gun

I reach for the dream
I was dreaming last night
but each single morning
that dream is gone

’cause it’s a
big nasty world
terrible mean place
It’s hard to stay alive
and it’s hard to keep the faith

its a rotten world
a grim shabby place
but out of the endless depths of time
you’re here today



I’m tired of living
and I’m tired of dying too
I’m tired of tomorrow
and all the shhh that I’ve been thru
I’m tired of forever
and I’m tired of yesterday
I’m tired of never
and the man the child became

’cause it’s a big nasty world…

I used to love ya baby
and you know that’s true
I used to love God
and you know that too
I used to love myself
It was the hardest of all
I loved the whole GD world
but that was before the Fall

’cause it’s a
big nasty world
terrible mean place
It’s hard to stay alive
and it’s hard to keep the faith

its a rotten world
a grim shabby place
but out of the endless depths of time
honey, you’re here today

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