When I was a kid, I was so hungry for life I just couldn’t imagine how people would want to escape samsara, the illusory world of seemingly endless life and death that Vedic religions believe traps us all — at least unless or until we can achieve ultimate union with God by transcending the desires and fears that bind us to this life. (Or that’s my twenty-five cent write-up, anyhow.)

But after I’d kicked around a few more decades I started understanding how someone could become world weary — even in the heart of what many folks here in the temporal world might consider a demi-paradise. It isn’t so hard for me, now, to imagine how someone in, say, the slums of Calcutta, might long for union with the source of everything — particularly if it got him out of the slums of Calcutta.

Anyway, now I appreciate the stoic nobility of those who “soldier on” in the face of everyday challenge to their sense of purpose — no matter how temporal — how ephemeral — that purpose might be.

That said, the melodrama in this song cracks me the heck up.

It was a challenging time for me when I wrote it and it would have been more so had I known what would unfold in the years to come. All the same, the melodrama cracks me up and that’s why I think I really like this song. It was like I was trying to perfect my “street walk” to get through the very tough neighborhood of what us over the hill types like to think of as the downhill slide.

BIG NASTY WORLD

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 each single morning
that dream is gone

’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
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