But it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of one little person don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
Someday you’ll understand that.
Not now.
That’s what I told my cat when I sat her down to finally spill those very same beans on the global warming situation.
Sweetheart, I told her, the world has always been ending… the gravity pulling us toward the edge of the abyss is sometimes the only thing keeping us moving forward… but I know you’re worried about the polar bears. And I am too.
It may be too late for them and it’s always too late for us…
But we’ve got each other.
And we’ll always have that…in the cosmic sense, anyhow.
It’s just one trainwreck after another
it’s just one disaster followin’ the t’other
It’s a wonder I can get back on my feet
to fall again
Some catastrophe
Some calamity
more adversity
more insanity
it’s the way it goes in the world
of mice and men
Cataclysm and devastation
tragedy and desolation
yet I know it’s the way it goes
my friend
double debacles and treble trouble*
cauldron of misfortune set to boil and bubble
I’ve seen the future it’s
more of the same to the end
Waterloo was just a hiccup
Little Big Horn just all a big mixup
When everything is ashes
maybe we can all be friends
Suns explode and worlds collide
all us little specks along for the ride
the fabric of time and space
someday willl mend
Cataclysm and devastation…
Suns explode and worlds collide
all us little specks along for the ride
in the end it all — comes down to the end
2007-10-28 (C)2007, TK Major
*It came to my attention after writing this song that I, for my whole life, had been using the number three pronunciation of debacle. After that realization, every time I heard someone using the number one, soft a [ah] (or the never-heard-’round-these-parts second-preferred short a), it bugged me. Not least because if I changed my pronunciation, it would through the rhythm of the song off. I finally hit on changing the lyric and doubling up the cadence to the line above — double debacles and treble trouble — from the orginal debacles and double trouble.
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
When I came up with the phrase, “in my daddy’s rented Cadillac” — I knew the Caddy would have to come to a violent end, hopefully along with the presumably rich and spoiled young protagonist.
Without doubt, the more interesting part of this story — who this young wastrel is/was, what he did to warrant (what increasingly seemed like it would have to be) a fiery demise, who he’d be thinking about in those final moments, who he’d leave behind — all of that got left out of this song.
All that’s left is a kind of man and the road saga of a compulsive drive on a spooky night culminating in… the end of the song.
When I left the high school dance
in my daddy’s rented Cadillac
I didn’t know what trouble was
I didn’t know there was no way back
The moon was a hole in the night sky
heaven knows who was looking in
The night was a hole in my life
and I didn’t know I was falling in
I made it past dead man’s curve
and the cliff at the top of the hill
I glided deftly through the hairpin turns
past the old graveyard that’s not quite full
I drove up that twisted mountain road
straight up into the night
Now I was totally all alone
drving through a hole in my life
My heart was pounding but my hands were dry
The engine was throbbing and the gears whined
My mind was racing at the speed of light
and my knuckles on the wheels glowed ghostly white
My life was the road and the road was my life
as it twisted and turned into the night
The road was the world and the world was night
as I rounded the bend and drove straight into the light
My eyes were shadows in the back of my brain
My mind was unravelling and my soul was in flames
The car was gone I was cut loose in space
Dogs from heaven laughed in my face
I was spinning I was falling I was going down
fallilng through a world without light or sound
I was watching from a hill from far away
when the Caddy hit the gas truck —
great balls of flame!
I had lived in my midurban neighborhood for two years when I wrote this song and I would live there for 13 more. Not quite two years after I wrote this, the ’92 riots would claim buildings within 100 yards of my house — I could see flames between the buildings as I hung on my back fence, a fire axe in one hand.
I fell in love with my house — and I lived there longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere, 15 years. But my relationship with the neighborhood was more complex. I made a lot of friends of all races and cultures and all economic strata from canners in the alley (a very tough alley, I’m afraid) to a middle aged gay couple in a (truly) fabulous two story Spanish style house with a beautiful tiled atrium fountain and a white grand piano (not a baby but a full grand) that actually looked good in the room. (OK, I understand your skepticism. It sounds pretty Liberace but it was really very cool looking. Honest. Oh, skip it.)
More typical was the Philipino World War II veteran. He’d been a guerilla, fighting with a machete — and later a gun — against the Japanese occupation, joining up with US marines to help route the Japanese. In return, after the war, he was made personal chef for an admiral and allowed to apply for citizenship. He bought a house in my neighborhood in the late ’40s or early ’50s and they had lived there since.
After their home was invaded by thugs with guns and he — at the age of 82 — got a nasty pistol whipping when he tried to stand up to them, his wife made him agree to move, but the property values were then in a long slump (aggravated by the riots a few year prior). And they liked people in the neighborhood. (The thugs were not from our neighborhood, of course.)
In the city, stuff happens.
I hadn’t been in my charming little Spanish style duplex bungalow more than six or eight weeks when a guy tried to crash through my kitchen window. While I was home. Entertaining friends. Less than ten feet away.
I ran out to the kitchen, thinking I’d tip the fellow off that he’d picked an inopportune time to do a little B&E on the new guy’s house, perhaps saving us all the embarrassment of a surprise front-to-front confrontation.
Dropping my jaw as far as I could to deepen my voice I said, “Hey! I’m calling the police, right now.”
Window glass and splintered wood was flying every direction and it was impossible for me to see more than two big bleeding arms in a flurry of flying mini-blinds.
It didn’t stop. “I’m calling the f—— cops, right now!”
My heart skipped a whole beat, I know, when this gravelly voice finally replied:
“Yeah, call the f—— cops.”
I pushed my friends (among them a former army tank commander and a woman (his wife) who would later become a police officer, herself) into the back of the house. Behind me the breaking glass stopped and I did not want to wait to find out if that meant he was now inside or if he had given up. I would later find that was because there was virtually no glass left in the window frame. But the guy was so big, he couldn’t get through the window, anyway, although it appeared he tried. But I didn’t find that out until later.
I called the police and with my friends locked in a back bedroom, I let myself out a bedroom window and stealthily came around the back of the house to the front corner where my pretty little breakfast nook more or less was. It appeared the guy was gone. I let myself in.
The police came 25 minutes later and couldn’t be bothered to file a police report. When I protested that I would probably need a police report to file with my insurance claim, they said, over their shoulder, “It’s under your deductible, forget about it.” (Fortunately the donut eaters who clogged the force in those days were all put out to pasture or fired after their stunning nonperformance during my town’s unwilling participation in the so-called LA riots. We have a younger, more multi-ethnic and considerably more modern force, now. They actually do some policing and manage to treat citizens with respect, usually. It shows it can be done.)
Anyhow, all that aside, though this song is, to some extent, about the city, it’s worth pointing out that trouble can come knocking anywhere, anytime. I’ve seen a lot of trouble int he city. It’s plenty real. But I also have seen trouble in the country — and sometimes, it can be even scarier.
Or just plain weird.
I knew a family with a house on a small, very unglamorous lake. Their property extended a fair distance to the water’s edge. On two separate occasions (as I recall it… next time, it might be three separate occasions) they had skydivers “go in” on their property, due to malfunctioning parachutes. One can imagine the skydivers’ thinking in those last few seconds, perhaps guiding themselves toward the murky waters of the lake and then wondering in the last moments if that was really such a good idea after all. Now that’s what I call trouble.
You can find the first AYoS version of Troublehere.
THERE’S ALWAYS TROUBLE 9/7/90
There’s always trouble in a fool’s paradise
There’s always trouble but the fool don’t realize
Trouble comes knocking just when trouble wants
trouble knock down your front door and take everything you got
There’s always trouble but the fool don’t realize there’s always trouble in a fool’s paradise
There’s always suffering, plenty to go around
but give it to some other guy, on some other side of town
I don’t know my neighbors, buy they seem nice enuff
and if some guys come and blow them away makes it hard to maintain my bluff
There’s always trouble but the fool don’t realize there’s always trouble in a fool’s paradise
Trouble stay out of my backyard
I pretend it don’t exist
sure enough I feel real bad
for that poor fool the trouble hits
but it really aint none of my affair I fold the paper away
cause I sure enough know I don’t wanta read bout
the trouble (clearly) headed thisa way (comin any day)
There’s always trouble but the fool don’t realize there’s always trouble in a fool’s paradise
Theres always turmoil in the heart of Babylon
but you go where the gold is and the rest just tag along
theres always losers in the race to stay alive
theres always casualties but sometimes the strong survive
There’s always trouble but the fool don’t realize there’s always trouble in a fool’s paradise
What can you say?
