Big Nasty World | A Year of Songs

Big, Nasty World: Bird's Eye View What can you say?

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.

Big, Nasty World

Internet Archive page for this recording
October 8. 2006 version
March 10, 2006 version

Big, Nasty World

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

Big Nasty World

We might have been drinking in the kitchen of room 7 at the old Hussongs Motel on the beach north of Ensenada. It was stormy outside and waves crashed on the rocky beach. Inside, there was a warmth fueled by liquor.

Empty tequila bottles littered the table and it was at that point of the evening that the conversation turns to the rareified…

Someone asked me if I liked any religious music. I said sure. Everything from Bach to gospel to Sufi trance music.

He wondered what drew me to some of the music I did like.

And I said, Well, I like songs of struggle more than songs of praise — but sometimes songs of praise are paradoxically transcendant.

At which point my friend passed out and I finished off the bottle.

The song below is about the struggle to maintain faith in a troubled world. It puts that struggle in frank lyrics. (Lyrics I couldn’t quite get out correctly this time around.)

October 8 version

BIG NASTY WORLD