No, too on the nose for a few days before Christmas, I thought.
I looked on. Plenty of pointed, timely headlines. That was the problem. I was looking for something that was both timely and timeless. Like good ad copy.
I kept coming back to to the dragon headline, finally deciding to use the first three words for the title of the guitar improvisation I’d just recorded.
That worked pretty well for me… it was timely, a reference to the virgin Komodo dragon, as well as a reference to the season… but, more importantly, for the rest of the year it worked as something a tough D.A. might say to a witness to get him to talk on the stand.
It is a big, nasty world and through most of its history, a lot of folks have thought things were getting nastier all the time.
Whether we’re straying ever farther from the Garden — or we’re simply a pessimistic race drawn to the dark view — I’ll leave to the philosophers, moralists, and poets.
Me, I like to, you know, accentuate the positive.
Sure, things look pretty dark right now… the coastal cities will be flooded within the lifetime of the kids in our schools. The oceans will be depleted of significant food stocks even sooner. Probably most animal species alive today will be extinct in a 100 years. But not the cock roaches. The cock roaches will survive.
So, you know, we can look forward to that.
Some kind of continuity.
I know I’m looking at translating my AYoS blog into cockroach and burning special archive-quality compact discs which I’ll scatter in land fills for the cockroach anthropologists to find.
I can just see the hard-drinking, self-styled adventurer cockroach who’ll make the discovery of the first AYoS disc, which he’ll excitedly write a series of academic papers about…
This I believe.
Or maybe not. Still… could happen. Prove it couldn’t.
Anyhow, bottom line… we ain’t here forever. Be alive now.
I wake up each morning
and I reach for my bible
I reach for my razor
and I reach for my gun
I reach for the dream
I was dreaming last night
but every single morning
that dream is gone
’cause it’s a big nasty world a terrible place It’s hard to stay alive and it’s hard to keep the faith
its a rotten world a grim shabby place but out of the endless depths of time
you’re here today
I’m tired of living
and I’m tired of dying too
I’m tired of tomorrow
and all the shhh that I’ve been thru
I’m tired of forever
and I’m tired of yesterday
I’m tired of never
and the man the child became
’cause it’s a big nasty world…
I used to love ya baby
and you know that’s true
I used to love God
and you know that too
I used to love myself
It was the hardest of all
I loved the whole GD world
but that was before the Fall
’cause it’s a big nasty world terrible mean place It’s hard to stay alive and it’s hard to keep the faith
its a rotten world a grim shabby place but out of the endless depths of time honey, you’re here today
I mean…as a minor failed poet, I know a little something about putting my work out in front of folks and nothing makes you feel more empty and tired than having someone yawn at you.
What? This old world again, with its shifting sands, its deep green forests and roiling seas? How boring. I wonder if there’s anything new on YouTube?
Anyhow, boredom. I have a lot of sins but I’m happy to say that since wasting my suburban youth thinking I was bored, I’ve been trying hard to not commit that one again.
As I said before — no doubt when talking about this song (don’t make me look — my antipathy to apathy notwithstanding, I view sloth as virtue not vice)…
What can you say?
