Category Archives: acoustic

I’ve seen all your tomorrows… [The Final Score v.2]

The Final Score

He used to live in a funky old high rise on the edge of downtown. He could look out his bedroom window and see the gleaming hotel towers rising far above his 7th floor window. If you squinted between a couple of buildings you could see a flash of ocean through his bathroom window.

Things were a lot better then. He had a good job, money for booze and drugs, a good, usually reliable dealer just a few doors down.

But after his girl dumped him, he let his orbit get a little wobbly.

One weekend, the weekend didn’t stop.

He’d just been paid. He hooked up with a new girl down at the Red Room and it turned out she had a bigger hunger than he did… for everything.

He meant to call in sick Monday morning but he was dead out. On Tuesday he called but he already knew what he’d hear. Pick up your check and clean out your locker.

By Wednesday afternoon, he was out of cash and the girl was as gone as the dope.

He managed to squeak by for another few weeks, selling his stereo and his motorcycle, his leather jacket. He made the rounds looking for work but he could have picked a better time… there was nothing. And when he finally got a nibble, the first thing they did was check his refs…

Eventually he came home to find a padlock on the door. He rousted the manager — it was one in the morning — who came to the door with a gun in his hand.

“Oh. I should have known,” he said, not lowering the little automatic by more than a few degrees. “You’re outta here. Your shit’s stacked up in a corner of the garage, by the laundry room.”

“You can’t just put me out! What about…”

“F—ing sue me,” he said and closed the door.

Now, a couple years later, he had a spot under a thick growth of shrubs near the loop that cut out around the convention center and auditorium. When he stepped out of his hidey hole — cautiously, since they were always looking for people camping in the bushes near the beach — he could see his old apartment window, catching a glint of sunlight and shining it like a blinding message straight into his brain.

previous AYoS version (January 20)

The Final Score

From the junkies in the Cooper Arms
to the whores of this old shore
I’ve seen the winners
I’ve seen the losers
and I’ve seen the Final Score….

I’ve seen all your tomorrows
and then a couple more
Ive seen the future, I’ve seen the past
I don’t wanna see no more

I’ve seen the fear across their faces
I’ve heard their anguished cries
I’ve felt the void explode within
after the dream dies

I know what’s gonna happen
yet I’ll never know what for
but I’ll bet the game begins again
after the Final Score

Every alien, every angel… [Going Home v.2]

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Going Home

Every alien, every angel, every crown prince in disguise, every escapee, every condemned man on the lose — or, for that matter, every soon-to-be-ascended avatar — must go through that moment of realization, a moment when he knows just what he’s leaving behind when he’s called home. (In my songs, often as not, it’s a moment of realization that comes in a rundown, roadside motel.)

previous AYoS version (November 10)

GOING HOME

Wake up baby
turn your light down low…
I want ta see your pretty face
one more time before I go

They’re coming for me in the morning
coming to take me home…
When you see that light in the sky
that’s when you know I’m going home

[bridge]

When you see that light in the sky
that’s when you know I’m going home…
Don’t try to call me baby
cause they ain’t got no telephone

(C)1991, TK Major

I don’t know what’s become of me[Someone Was Watching v.2]

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Someone Was Watching

I like to get out in front of trends. This first-person but happily not autobiographical song about the confusion and sense of displacement and loss of self some Alzheimer disease victims experience was written when I was about 42.

I live in my head, pretty much — or maybe on the internet.

A disease of the mind — I mean, beyond what already besets me, of course — scares the daylights out of me.

I saw my grandfather succumb to the disease — before it had aquired its current name — and it was, as I would have told you then, really f—– up. He was an extraordinarily smart man for over 80 years and then it all fell apart. He disguised the symptoms as long as he could — which is maybe why, when it hit us what was going on, it was so surprising. In retrospect, I know the disease had been chipping away at the foundation of his life for some years.

Throughout his retirement he had worked hard to keep his mind active, taking up new hobbies and enthusiasms, keeping up with advances in his professional field, chemistry, even taking Spanish language lessons because he said, when he lived in Pennsylvania’s “Dutch country” he spoke German, and when he moved to California around around 1919 with his wife and two young children, he decided he should learn to speak Spanish. I remember the day, perhaps around 5 years before he died, when he said something like, I think senility is taking over my brain faster than I can learn new things. In past years, I used to learn a few new words of Spanish every week. Now, even though I take classes, I can feel my vocabulary shrinking, slipping away…

And there was a far away look in his eyes.

But it’s not always like that. As I wrote when I posted an earlier version of this song, I became reaquainted a few years ago with a gentleman from my old neighborhood when I was a little kid. He was always an easygoing guy when I knew him and he was aproaching his disease with the same equanimity.

Maybe it was because he didn’t fight it, I don’t know.

But I think I know that, all too likely, I’ll be like my grandfather, dragged screaming and fighting into the final dark tunnel.