court | A Year of Songs

13th Bar Blues

Okay… we’re in a groove. Sin, dissolution, degradation. We’re starting the year off right.

I try to present the lighter side of drunken depravity here, though, with a jauntily sloppy blues. (I realize the description of an AYoS song as “sloppy” is an exercise in redundancy — but I couldn’t figure any other way to get ‘jaunty’ in there.)

Me, I was a happy drunk. And a very, very lucky one. Of course, when I was coming up, there was a lot more tolerance of drunks. It scared me a bit, even then — or it should have. I’d snuck under the radar so much and had so many lucky breaks that I could feel it in my gut that I didn’t have any more coming. For awhile I drank at home. But for someone used to being out and carousing 6 nights out of 7, my dull groove of beer and television just provoked more drinking. One night about 11:25, watching a Cheers rerun and opening my twelfth beer that day, I bottomed out. I wasn’t particularly drunk. I was just tired. Tired of drinking. (And tired of Cheers reruns. My gosh.)

Thirteenth Bar Blues

It was the thirteenth day
of the thirteenth month
The clock on the wall
struck 13 o’clock
It was the thirteenth bar
on the thirteenth block
I had me twelve beers
and ordered one more for luck

13th bar blues…

Thirteen nightsticks
and thirteen cops
thirteen minutes
of gettin’ beat up
13 bones broke
in 13 ways
the judge said
Son, I’ll give you 13 hundred Dollars
or 13 days…

13th bar blues…

Sept 1, 1991
(C) 1991 TK MAJOR

Bankruptcy Court No. 9

Money, honey.

A sensible person doesn’t need all that much.

But sensible people sometimes — depsite their innate sensibility — get tangled up with people who aren’t sensible. Or anything close to it. People who refuse to acknowledge cold hard reality. People who invent their own reality and try to drag you in behind them. And when the reality you tried to share with them becomes an untenable fantasy, they leave you holding the big, stinky bag.

[BTW, you’ll notice me as songwriter being hoist on the petard of my compulsion to work contemporary technology into my lyrics. Floppy disks for those of you who began computing in this century were those… ]