I was hoping for the kind of gritty neo-realism that informed some of the best songs of bands like Eric Burdon & the Animals… but what I ended up with was a couple of local insider references and a sadly obvious yet actually unintentional central pun. (Yeah, yeah, there are no accidents, I hear you. Nonetheless, I was oblivious, even when the first verse began with “junkies” and ended with “final score”…)
Somewhere, a long way away, he heard the alarm on his cell phone ring.
On the TV, someone was talking about Guy Lombardo. He reached out from the couch to stab the TV remote. Someone was talking about how, over the next day or two, western civilization as we knew it would be grinding to a near-standstill, despite the cheerfully over-confident predictions of the technocrats. He stabbed again, got up, started making a mug of espresso on the little Krups machine.
It was now about 10 minutes to zero, Y2K…
With a steaming mug of dark, dark joe held under his nose, he led himself back to the office and plunked down at his computer. He browsed the news on the web, checked in with a couple of his favorite BBs, where a handful of stay-at-homes were wishing each other a “happy millennium.”
He waited. In the other room he heard the live coverage cutting to Ghiradelli Square in San Francisco.
The hands finally ticked straight up… 3 hours after the flip into the new year, New York time.
For an hour or so he poked around the applications he had out in the field. No sign of impending Western Civilization collapse in his little corner of the world.
He padded out to the living room, where the TV still blathered on. A live shot of revelers drifting away from Times Square.
He went to bed and dreamt fitfully of moon colonies, robot housekeepers, and flying cars.
Some people say its the end of the world
I say “C’mon all you boys and grab a girl”
Some people tell you it’s the end of time
I say “all the more reason to get off the dime”
It’s been a long long journey hope you liked the trip c’mon everybody do the Triple Zip Flip
Maybe there’ll be famine, maybe flood
for sure there’ll be suffering and rivers of blood
but that’s just one more year like all the rest
another year older and closer to death
It’s been a long long journey…
The mighty shall tremble
the wicked shall fall
about the same time the good folks
learn how not to crawl
judgement will come
judgement is due
let’s just hope they don’t
judge — me and you
It’s been a long long journey…
its just like the prophet said long ago
first there is Knowledge then the neighborhood goes
one little taste it all gets way out of hand
write a few lines of code make a world out of sand
they say Information just wants to be free so far it’s been trapped inside of you and me but I hear that Info has got a new plan go live in cyberspace and make a monkey out of man
It’s been a long long journey hope you liked the trip c’mon everybody do the Triple Zip Flip
He didn’t know why he was waiting. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. But he was sure he had to.
One night, after a thousand nights of empty dreams, he dreamt of a girl with dark, glittering eyes and long brown hair who stood very close to him in the darkness of a rooftop, an unknown city’s shadows spreading away in the night.
She stood close, saying nothing and he could feel her breathing as though she were pressed against him.
Half a moon looked through clouds whose fingers glowed and spread across the bleary stars. On the rooftop, in the shadows, nothing moved but the girl and she barely moved.
Just that…
He couldn’t remember anything more from the dream.
Night after night he thought about that dream, hoping, maybe, to find his way back to it.
A thousand more nights of waiting for a dream that might never come again…
I don’t think I’ve ever posted a link to anyone else’s music here before, I don’t think, but I just caught this vid and all I can say is wow…
I never saw Pentangle, myself, but I’ve seen all the members of it at various times over the years — typically playing either solo or in various combinations with each other.
I love this video…
The quality of this video is high enough that you should be able to watch it fairly comfortably in full screen mode — but you’ll have to actually click through the vid to go to the You Tube site to do so. For once I don’t mind losing visitors to YT…
