Monthly Archives: November 2005

Bankruptcy Court No. 9

Money, honey.

A sensible person doesn’t need all that much.

But sensible people sometimes — depsite their innate sensibility — get tangled up with people who aren’t sensible. Or anything close to it. People who refuse to acknowledge cold hard reality. People who invent their own reality and try to drag you in behind them. And when the reality you tried to share with them becomes an untenable fantasy, they leave you holding the big, stinky bag.

[BTW, you’ll notice me as songwriter being hoist on the petard of my compulsion to work contemporary technology into my lyrics. Floppy disks for those of you who began computing in this century were those… ]

Bankruptcy Court No. 9

my baby left me
left me sad and cryin…
she said I’m takin the plastic
leaving all these bills behind

I got a hearing Monday down in
bankruptcy Court Number 9…
My baby won’t be there with me
an neither wil my credit ine

Oh baby those checks you wrote
to the dress and jewelry stores
You hung so much bad paper
they won’t take my (dough) cash no more

Telecredit’s got a file on you
takes a thousand floppy disks
TRW blew a main frame
just counting your bad checks

You drove me to the poorhouse
and shoved me thru the door
but first ya picked my pocket
to make sure they was no more

Gospel of Greed

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Gospel of Greed
Matthew 19:24

I shoulda been a preacher.

I’ve got it in me.

Not the good kind of preacher, who is always there to help or talk his parishioners through life’s troubles. Who gives and gives and never thinks of himself.

Not hardly.

No. Of course, I mean the bad kind of preacher.

Not necessarily Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter… but something on that continuum. The sinner-preacher. Seducing the spinsters and lonely housewives and cheating the men in land deals. Maybe run for office, too… makes a certain kind of sense.

And that brings us smack face to face with this song…

produced version [soundclick]

Gospel of Greed

It’s the gospel of greed
they call it the age of me
but it isn’t just I
Honey, it’s them and thee

Now it’s natural to want to
take care of yourself
but when you take too much
you steal from someone else

and if you think they’re gonna take it lying down
you must be some kinda politician or TV-preacher clown
riding around in your Mercedes Benz
givin money to hookers and screwing your friends

(You’re singing)
I don’t care if the Eskimos freeze
long as they don’t sneeze on me
I don’t care if the starving survive
long as they don’t try to make a feast of a slice of my pie

Beta Girls Go

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Beta Girls Go
counting the holes in the ceiling tile
analyze the sex, index and file
measure the angle of the afternoon sun
measure the darkness when it’s done

This was my attempt to suggest the outline of the story of two driven, silicon valley programmers at the end of an office entanglement.

Geeks may be geeks — but even in that emotional netherworld, there are still unbreachable gulfs between men and women. As I imagine them, the woman has just broken off the relationship and the man is confused because she’s the one who is hurt and angry…

… just like the last girl,

Beta Girls Go

“version creep” is all she said
as she stared at her feet on the edge of the bed
“data drift” as she stood in the door
“we just don’t vector anymore.”

counting the holes in the ceiling tile
analyze the sex, index and file
measure the angle of the afternoon sun
measure the darkness when it’s done

beta girls come and beta girls go
leave not a mark upon his soul
beta girls beta girls beta girls beta girls go

pools of light and soul-black night
17 at first daylight
silent complex cleaning crew
wait to shave until they’re through

she gets to work just by noon
takes her laptop to the old break room
he trys not to look when he has to walk by
but as he closes the door he hears her cry

beta girls come and beta girls go
leave not a mark upon his soul
beta girls beta girls beta girls beta girls go

World of Lies

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World of Lies

Written in the summer of 1983… I was looking for something to shore up the romantic end of my song portfolio, which, after the punk years, was looking a little threadbare.

But what came out was this song that laces cynicism with romanticism (me, I think the two go hand in hand — unlike love and cynicism, say) but manages, I like to think, to still suggest an honest, soul deep yearning. Or not.

It may seem strange, 22 years after its writing, that I’ve never gotten a proper, produced recording of this song onto tape or disk — but I have often included it in live sets. I keep thinking I’ll look up in the middle of performing it in some coffee house or dive and lock eyes with my next soul-mate, I guess.

This version gets the chords and words right but I’m still looking to the future to capture the song’s true essence. You should pardon the expression.