It’s easy to lose your perspective in this world. It’s easy to start thinking you’re… you know… somebody.
Even though, in the end, you will certainly be nobody.
But, with the household staff buzzing around you like so many worker bees making things nice for the queen, it’s easy to forget that inside that Greek-columned mausoleum, inside that marble crypt… you’ll be just as dead as the nameless drunk in potter’s field.
You must think you’re oh so very
terribly important
with your car, your house, your maid,
your butler and your porters.
But seen from the stars you’re the same as all of us are. And it might seem a queer notion but we’re all just spit in the ocean.
Hop upon a plane
run around the world
Tokyo, Paris, Rome, Berlin
and they’re all full of your kind of girl.
You can have all the ones you want you can play with people’s lives. You can have all the rope you want but soon enough they expect that noose to be tied.
Seen from above just another slightly balding head a little bit of dandruff on the shoulders but you’ll be dead soon enough, anyway.
Hiding in your villa
on the Dalmatian Coast.
Your blue ribbon Afghan hound at your feet
the one that you prize the most.
But your baby’s got the rabies
and he’s gonna bite your foot.
ain’t there an end to the indignities
through which a human being
must be put.
Seen from the stars Just another chunk of rock in space. little ones crawling about on it but they’ll be gone soon enough, anyway.
You must think you’re oh so very
terribly important
with your car, your house, your maid,
your butler and your porters.
But seen from the stars you’re the same as all of us are. And it must seem a queer notion but we’re all just spit in the ocean.
I told my self Life has no meaning I told myself I should stop dreaming I told myself I should stop being such a fool
Three songs about three different kinds of fools… [and let me hasten to point out that while All Fool’s day caught me off guard today with the startling news that Apple was leaving the home computer market, I must still have been subconsciously thinking ahead: yesterday’s song — which went up quite late last night — and is kind of interesting if I do say so myself — had the line: “…in the Idiot’s Guide to Love I must be listed in the back under ‘Fool’…”
Sitting all alone
by my telephone
Waited all day
but that’s okay
I could wait all night
and that would be all right
for a woman like you
I would wait all my life
Sometimes I pull myself together
and I go downtown
I’m all dressed up
and I wander around
and I feel like a fool
I can’t stop thinking of you
When you’re all alone
this city’s so cruel
I walk along the river
until the stars come out
I sit by myself alone in the dark
and I wonder
Oh yes I wonder
I’m just like a child
but I am no fool
I know it’s over
(C)1980, TK Major (C)2007, TK Major
I told my self
Life has no meaning
I told myself
I should stop dreaming
I told myself
I should stop being such a fool
I told myself
love’s just a lie
I told myself
I should get wise
I told myself
being kind is just being cruel
Lookin in my heart was like lookin’ in a well and if there was a bottom you couldn’t really tell as dark as midnight all the way down to hell one day I looked in and then I just fell
Then I looked in my soul
and I saw that it was empty
and I said to myself
just like the rest of them
and i said out loud
from here on
it’s all ’bout number one
But I added that up
and I factored in forever
I subtracted my dreams then
divided that by never
When I saw the bottom line
I sat down — I knew that
I was done
Lookin in my heart…
Back then I told my self
Life has no meaning
And I told myself
I should stop dreaming
Then I told myself
I should stop being such a fool
But then I thought to myself
what’s it all for?
and I thought to myself
must be something more
and I realized all at once
there’s more than one kind of fool
When I think of rich people I’ve known, I always forget about Howard Hughes.
Well, I didn’t know him, personally, but an ex-GF’s mom had been a very good friend of Hughes’ second wife, the actress, Jean Peters. Peters threw a party at Hughes’ estate for my GF’s little sister on the occasion of her baptism or confirmation or… something or other.
At one point, my ex-GF said, Hughes himself came out of an upstairs study, stood by a balustrade for a moment, looking down on scores of little girls in frilly dresses, shook his head, and went back into his study.
Yeah… that was my first brush with the super rich.
It didn’t really change my life.
But my intimate connection with Hughes didn’t really end there. Later, I would become friends with the daughter of Hughes’ most famous biographer, whose unpublished manuscript was stolen and became the basis for an infamous hoax, a Hughes “autobiography” that turned out to be eerily close to reality because it was based on years of my friend’s father’s reporting. (He went on to have a bestseller of his own but that’s another story.)
I go on at length really only to show that I have no clue how the super wealthy live their lives or how they think.
Hughes was a driven man, clearly, he made a fortune in aircraft and then, perhaps drawn in by his dalliances with starlets and actresses, became a movie exec and producer.
He was, in the thinking of the time, about as rich as God’s older brother but the end of his life was shrouded in mystery as a group of former CIA and other intelligence officers insinuated themselves as his “handlers” — allowing or encouraging doctors to keep Hughes, himself, loaded on deadening painkillers, barbiturates, and powerful opiates and hypnotics.
Hughes reportedly stopped cutting his hair and fingernails, and an incipient obsessive compulsive disorder began manifesting itself, perhaps aggravated or even caused by the powerful drug cocktails that kept him in a semi-stupor while his supposed assistants ran his empire in ways that often seemed contrary to his own interests but which, perhaps not surprisingly, seemed to benefit both the handlers and their associates in the US intel and covert action communities.
Eventually, Hughes died, misunderstood, unkempt, apparently even malnourished… he was, in essence, broken and alone.
[produced dub version on Soundclick | requires Flash]
You must think you’re oh so very
terribly important
with your car, your house, your maid,
your butler and your porters.
But seen from the stars you’re the same as all of us are. And it might seem a queer notion but we’re all just spit in the ocean.
Hop upon a plane
run around the world
Tokyo, Paris, Rome, Berlin
and they’re all full of your kind of girl.
You can have all the ones you want you can play with people’s lives. You can have all the rope you want but soon enough they expect that noose to be tied.
Seen from above just another slightly balding head a little bit of dandruff on the shoulders but you’ll be dead soon enough, anyway.
Hiding in your villa
on the Dalmatian Coast.
Your blue ribbon Afghan hound at your feet
the one that you prize the most.
But your baby’s got the rabies
and he’s gonna bite your foot.
ain’t there an end to the indignities
through which a human being
must be put.
Seen from the stars Just another chunk of rock in space. little ones crawling about on it but they’ll be gone soon enough, anyway.
You must think you’re oh so very
terribly important
with your car, your house, your maid,
your butler and your porters.
But seen from the stars you’re the same as all of us are. And it must seem a queer notion but we’re all just spit in the ocean.
