baby I’ve been alone for such a long time
this loneliness tearin’ me apart
I got pain in my head and a fire in my loins
and a whole lot of empty in my heart
If you had a thought in your pretty little head Then maybe we could talk today we’re alive tomorrow we’re dead so I think right now we’d better rock
I look in your eyes and I wonder what
is going on in your mind
Are you really where you are
or where you’ll be tomorrow night?
your leg touches mine beneath the table
I feel your hand slide up my thigh
I feel kinda dizzy I feel kinda high
I feel like I’m gonna die
If you had a thought in your pretty little head Then maybe we could talk today we’re alive tomorrow we’re dead so I think right now we’d better rock
In the first 224 or so years of the United States, we ran up an awe-inspiring 5,807,463,412,200.06 (5.8 trillion dollars) of debt. Debt, that like all debt, incurs interest payments — that is a continuing burden to the nation and its taxpayers and businesses.
But since 9/28/2001, the President and the Congress have managed to spend and borrow their way into a 44% increase in the national debt in just six years for a total debt of $8,351,722,841,145.07. (8.35 trillion dollars)
So this song of trailer trash economics is sent out to the President and all his men…
You’d think it goes without saying to not hurl yourself off PA towers at at concerts yet I’ve seen folks do it, just like I saw a couple guys try to drop out of an old fashioned movie theatre balcony into a row of metal framed theatre chairs. Those guys were both carried away in stretchers and one of them already had a sheet all the way over him.
People do stupid stuff.
When I was at the Grand Canyon I saw a handful of people sunning themselves on an outcropping that was a good, long, running jump. And the drop below it was, oh, I dunno… 600 feet? To make the jump back to terra firma, they had to get all the way back against the canyon edge of the outcropping, run a few yards across it and leap as far as they could to get across.
I watched one of them make the jump and my own heart almost jumped into my throat just watching.
It was so colossally foolhardy.
Anyhow. All that’s by way of introduction to this song, which posits that too may stage dives will eventually put you in the rubber room, where you’ll be doing…
today’s acoustic version:
full version:
RUBBER ROOM ROCK
I used to twist and do the jerk
they don’t let me do that no more
now all I do is do the worm
in my straight jacket down on the floor
but I still rock I still rock I do the Rubber Room Rock Oh yea I rock I still rock I do the Rubber Room Rock
Used to slam and bang my head
ten thousand stage dives or more
dove forty feet from a PA tower
and went three feet into the floor
But I still rock
yeah I rock . . .
None of my friends are no fun no more
they just sit in the dayroom and stare at the floor
they come back from the lab with rings round their eyes
therapy’s so expensive — they lobotomize
But they still rock oh yeah we rock we do the Rubber Room Rock Oh sure we rock unh hunh we rock we do the Rubber Room Rock
He woke up in a motel in Yuma looking at a cockroach.
He couldn’t remember exactly how he got there but he was pretty sure he didn’t have a truck, anymore. He fumbled on the bedstand under the imperious gaze of the cockroach, finally gripping his keys. Sure enough, the key to the Chevy was gone.
It all started when he didn’t come home from the bar one Friday night to the little garage apartment he’d shared with her since high school.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love her or think she loved him. He knew she did. He’d never doubted it until the moment he realized it was only that love that was holding her to him — that a sensible woman would have dumped his dark, driven, compulsively drunk ass long before.
That realization broke him like a twig.
He was drinking alone at the bar and thinking. And it just hit him and he knew what he had to do. He had to leave.
She would find someone new, someone who would be better for her. And he’d be free to go to hell, which is basically what he felt like he had to do.
It was a win-lose situation, but as long as she was doing most of the winning and he was doing most of the losing, it seemed right.
