I am working on a new song. It is dark, dark, dark.
For some reason I don't write happy songs anymore. Not that I really did, I've written maybe three songs in my entire life that qualify as "happy", but at least they were songs about life and lost loves and broken dreams. The best way I can describe what I've written over these past few years is... apocalyptic? Too many visions of small bodies and blood running down streets as the world runs down and everything comes to an end. It's hard to motivate myself to write them down, much less record them.
I would say I'm depressed, except it's not that, exactly. Observant, perhaps. I am witnessing a race between technology and species extinction, and unfortunately a majority of the human race seems more inclined toward the latter than toward the former When the oil runs out, people are going to start dying of starvation by the billions -- without fertilizers and farm equipment, we can raise food for maybe a billion people. And when that happens...
-- Badtux the Gloomy Penguin
Badtux, have you ever read Joe Bageant? He's a self-described "redneck socialist" who wrote a book called "Deer-Hunting with Jesus" and has a lot of the same viewpoints about Americans racing headlong toward species extinction as you do. His writing is sarcastic, prophetic and funny as hell. It might fit with your current mood. That, or make you want to throw yourself in front of a CalTrans train and tie up traffic on the 101.
ReplyDeletebest line in a TV show of late (Mad Men):
ReplyDeleteMan - "You are profoundly sad"
Woman - "My tribe is Scandanavian."
I feel your musings.
Jill (the Finn)
I used to label myself a "pessimist."
ReplyDeleteNow I think it's just "candid realism."
You are a realist. The earth has only a certain carrying capacity. Twiddle the figure as one may, we are approaching that. Then, the species die-off comes.
ReplyDeleteWe are so ethnocentric as to imagine the die-off of a goodly number of our rapacious, polluting fellows would be a bad thing. However, if the earth and her other creatures could talk, they might think otherwise.
Badtux, 'tis easy to feel gloomy with all the wackiness in the world.
ReplyDeleteHey, I just watched the When Cats Attack videos and, I've gotta say, that was freaking hilarious!
See ? You helped someone today.
Feel better soon, mkay ?
MMMMM. I get it. We can dream that it might not be so bad eh?
ReplyDeleteasince the death vas invented nobody's life is certain. everybody will die... statistically: anybody who ate plece here your preferred food .......... will die!
ReplyDeleteJust got home from the V.A. hospital
ReplyDeleteI got my balls here in this jar
I look up on the mantle
She took the keys to my new car
Oh, I ask you
Just how lonesome can one man be?
from the many times started, never finished "ultimate blues song."
MB,
ReplyDeleteYou have forgotten the dog (or other pet)!
Bukko, I've read Joe Bageant's stuff for many years.
ReplyDeleteCG: "Candid realism." I like.
Lisa: The problem is that people don't die lightly. They take the ecosphere with them. Look at Haiti. When there's no oil to heat homes, people use wood until there's not a twig or shrub anywhere around, then the soil erodes away, and the only mammals left are man and rats and the Haitians are doing their best to eat all the rats. They've stripped their half of that island bare to the bone, not a thing alive on it anymore except increasingly desperate people and rats being kept alive only by food brought in from outside, and only barely at that. I expect to hear reports of cannibalism from Haiti any time now. Haiti is the future of this planet, and it's ugly.
MB: You remember when "fusion" was the thing, where you'd take two genres, like, say, heavy metal and rap, and "fuse" them together? Well, I once wrote a country rap song. It went like this:
boom boom boom thuckathucka
Muh hound dawg died
boom boom boom thuckathucka
Muh pickup truck got rust
boom boom boom thuckathucka
Muh wife's havin' sex with a hoover salesman
boom boom boom thuckathucka
when she moved far far away
etc. You know, the full litany of country themes, complete with the nine hundred hungry children and a crop in the field and so on, except in rap music format circa early 90's. Call it the ultimate country-western-rap song. Or maybe the *only* country-western-rap song :-).
- Badtux the Depressive Penguin
Badtux, never fear! With our mighty, superdog space program, humans will be leaving this god-forsaken hellhole for a distant galaxy. We will leave behind all the problems we've created and go do them somewhere else! We will abandon that which we trashed and go trash other places---just like urban sprawl!!!
ReplyDelete:o)
Knowing that you are a big fan of Emmylou, when I saw her last month she was discussing her love for sad, sad songs.
ReplyDeleteI'm fascinated with the country-rap song, in a "watching a train wreck" way. David Allan Coe would be proud, sort-of.