Tag Archives: microcosm

Not Enough of Nothin’

Not Enough of Nothin'

New song alert!

Paradigms shift.

Just as Californians get used to walking on constantly shifting tectonic plates, scientists — the savvy ones, anyhow — become accustomed to revising not only the fine points of their understanding but, from time to time, throwing out the old way of looking at things and adopting an entirely new perspective.

It doesn’t happen overnight, mind you. The gatekeepers of scientific knowledge are cautious and the Scientific Method — the practices and precepts which have evolved over centuries that attempt to keep the accepted understanding grounded in verifiable observation, with conclusions that are derived from and verified by repeatable, carefully measured testing and experimentation — the Scientific Method is designed to err on the side of caution.
It’s a discipline and a dynamic which helps assure that science will tend to give us the best answers available at any given time, balancing untethered imagination and unfettered thinking with careful observation bounded by logic and an adherence to accepted procedure and principle.

Unfortunately, just as there are those who confuse scientific caution with rigidity or even fear of the unknown, there are those whose tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty is so diminished that they must continually attempt to shoehorn their experience into the rigid confines of binary classification.

These are the people for whom there is no gray area… no in-between… no nuance or gradation –little tolerance for complexity or ambiguity. Something either is one way or it is the other.

These are, of course, the people who are drawn to the extremes, clustering like so many iron filings around the poles of a magnet, slaves to their attraction to the absolute and the unambiguous.

This approach is, of course, a highly unscientific one, seemingly destined to keep true believers and absolutists at the fringes of knowledge and reasoned thought — yet the adherents to this type of intellectual monomania often claim that their beliefs are obvious and inescapable and that only those who are either crazy or willfully, perversely disingenuous could argue against them. Ask them to justify a position and, after some sputtering, they often stammer or blurt out, “Well, it should be obvious to any intelligent person…”

These folks enshrine personal predilection — even superstition — as principle. They attempt to institutionalize idiosyncratic belief as universal a priori.

If you’re one of ’em — this song’s for you…


lyrics

Not Enough of Nothin’

[Yes… I really did mis-sing the very first line of the song. The correct lyrics are below.]

Not enough of nothing
and nothing more to say
my heads filled up with everything
that we didn’t do today

Not really nowhere
not that it feels that way
not really never
but certainly not today

Everything that must be will be
and everything that won’t be won’t
If you think you want to tell me the ending
do me a favor — don’t

not enough of maybe
too much yes and no
not enough of in between
not enough I don’t know

Too much is certain
too much is bound to be wrong
too many times you’ve bought your own lies
you’d think you’d realize by now

(C)2008, TK Major

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Ain’t nothin’ cosmic…

I Can See Myself in My Guitar
Everything is everything.

That seems to be how the Big Picture develops.

Like a self-replicating fractal, it just seems like everything repeats in patterns. Everything reflects everything else. The stuff of the universe forms and reforms itself into seemingly infinite variety… yet underneath it all, it’s all the same noumenal field… endless, timeless.

Internet Archive page for this recording

February 02, 2006
October 01, 2005

I Can See Myself in My Guitar

I can see myself in my guitar
I can see myself in my guitar
It’s getting kind of old but it’s shiney
I can see myself in my guitar

I can see myself in my car
I don’t care what anyone says we’ll go far
I can see myself in my car
out in the country, we’ll go far, we’ll go far

I can see my self in everything
ain’t nothing cosmic, it’s just there
I can see myself in you
and you know I see you everywhere

(C)1973, TK Major

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I Can See Myself in My Guitar [v.2]

I Can See Myself in My Guita

The guitar in the perhaps familiar graphic to the left is not the guitar I was writing about when I wrote that song. A photo of that guitar graced the previous AYoS version of Guitar and was the subject of that day’s blog entry.

This guitar to the left is not just the AYoS logo, it’s actually pretty much the AYoS guitar, providing all but a few of the guitar parts on the songs so far. (The others I’ve used were my $75 12 string and my $50 3/4 size guitar.) It was sitting on a stand in my living room when I shot this. I glamorized it a bit in my photoeditor. There aren’t really fluffy clouds in my front room. As a rule.

The car in the second verse of this song was my first car, a Karmann Ghia that started out yellow (a great color for curtains in the breakfast nook, maybe) but got painted a cool smokey metallic grey when I plugged half a week’s wages into an impossibly cheap (yet still not cheapest) paint job.

At the time I wrote this, the grey paint was still shiny — a few moments within a narrow sliver of time when I actually almost felt cool in my Ghia. (But, actually, after the paint oxidized in that first, single season, it had a kind of naturalness to it that ultimately felt pretty comfortable.) I loved that car but I put it through hell. I sold it for a few hundred bucks just at the dawn of that peculiar era when Ghias actually did gain a certain sort of geek hipster cool. I guess.

Anyhow, I did love that car. We went everywhere together.

I Can See Myself in My Guitar

I can see myself in my guitar
I can see myself in my guitar
It’s getting kind of old but it’s shiney
I can see myself in my guitar

I can see myself in my car
I don’t care what anyone says we’ll go far
I can see myself in my car
out in the country, we’ll go far, we’ll go far

I can see my self in everything
ain’t nothing cosmic, it’s just there
I can see myself in you
and you know I see you everywhere

(C)1973, TK Major

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