10/22/2006

Hello my name is Bobby Lightfoot and I am a ROCKAHOLIC.

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN TH' DREAM IS OVER? Huh? CAn you TELL me? When the curtain opens and that little fella pops out and drops th' strings? Woah! what do you do?

Do you realize it can become a mental illness? Man, no matter how low I go I still smell th' fetid breath of The Man. I feel it on my neck, unctuous and smelling faintly of corinthian pleather. Oh, I've got th' hellhounds on my trail.

Oh, wait- that's way too dramatic. At this stage of th' game I'd welcome a hellhound or two, dawg. That would mean I Rate, dawg. You know what I've got on my trail, friends?

Heckhounds. Heckhounds on my polesmokin' trail. That's right, man. Second-string hauntings fo' a second-stringer like m'self. Got th' angst of Cobain without the hair. Got th' self-abuse dossiere of Morrison without th' Parisian Tub Spa Treatment. Woah. And I'm still running, running, running. Everyone I know is fucking powerless, man. And everyone who I thought was powerful was just marketed that way. And every time I finally get out of me head I come on back and the remote's just where I left it and th' cat fucked a hole in the couch. Can you blame her? Him?

And here's this- how are a guy supposed to write scathingly on th' little rituals and dramas of modern life and humanity when it's become quite clear that it's all beyond meaningless? And not only that but the whole of humanity being a bigass cancer is fucking with my inspiration. It's like ANYTHING THAT IS WRITTEN ABOUT HUMANS SHOULD AUTOMATICALLY BE PUBLISHED IN A MEDICAL JOURNAL BECAUSE IT'S ALL JUST ONCOLOGY, MAN. At this point.

See, how can people who get to be as insightful as Mark Twain and Bertrand Russell and Lau Tsu and fuckin' Bjork get to that point without realizing along the way how fucking useless we are? I mean, dude- if you're fuckin' driving from Truckee to Sacramento you have to go through fuckin Akron, right? COULD I MAKE THAT SHIT UP?

We're all oncology at this point. One big fucking metastasis. Happened in the late '80's. See, we had a handle on it but we fucked up really badly. See, I think it might have been when th' Scorpions got really huge. I think that might have been it. I, for one, took to bed for many a day and didn't summer in th' Hamptoons that year. No, not for a fortnight. Instead, if memory serves, I seem to recall a large barn door and my head colliding over and over as the sun rose and set in time lapse boom, boom.

The very grass wept in those days.

How do you get all smart and enlightened and still have an iota of hope? Have I not fully transponded the mezone layer? What do I have to take? And how many? and will they show up in th' drug test when I have to go get my voter registation?

I'm just tryin' to gram the one eyed snake, man. Just like any other Seeker, man.

(aside: I think it's already in motion but hey, let's all do our best to get this phrase into the English language, shall we? I don't really know how we're supposed to use "gram the one-eyed snake"; maybe it'll just be a little wink like "teh". Maybe it means something specific. I'll leave it to greater minds).

AND FURTHERMORE, HOW MANY POLESMOKING TIMES DO I HAVE TO POP LOCK 'N' ROLL MY WAY ACROSS THE STAGE OF EXISTENCE UNTIL I GET TOOK TO THE FUCKING BRIDGE? AND WHEN, IN THAT FAR-OFF DAY WHEN AT LAST I ROCK OFF TH' PLANET, IS IT GOING TO BE THE WAY I WANT IT?

The way I want it. It would be like this but every gig would pay a THOUSAND DOLLARS. Oh, ho ho. I'd be like a king. And people wouldn't be such insufferable cunts. The ENTIRE religion thing would be WAY, WAY OFF THE TABLE , MAN. You be like, "so, what do you think about religion?" and people would be like "uhhh...".

Baby Jesus would just be one of those kid-stuck-in-a-well stories from like 1972.

But it'll never be like that. And now it's Sunday night and it's too fucking late to do anything about it. I tried, tried, tried. I sang "Can't Turn You Loose" until I thought my uvula would shoot out my fuckin' ass. And my right hand pounded out blues ostinatos and my left flew about like a large, crazy white bird as I tried to find the answer in the words of th' poets Holland Dozier Holland and Smokey Of Robinson?

It's the fuckedest when you know how you're going to die. When and how. And when I crossed that Nubian double agent in th' Carpathians little did I know that the old gypsy would pounce from behind th' curtain and TELL ME MY FATE. It was raw punishment indeed. The when and how.

And it's so boring. That's the ultimate punishment. And th' sun won't even wink out for a second or anything. And yes, she showed me Central Park in her crystal ball and I don't seem to remember there being any shrine up or any crowds gathered in th' rain. Oh, it really steams me. And it makes me wonder, too. Really makes me wonder. You knew that was coming.

From behind the cartiligenous strands of memory. Across the fibrous deserts of time. Whispering past you like a weak dry autumn squall that whispers you're mine, you're mine. I own you like a woman owns a man. With the same kisses and the same little intimacies and the same empty, stuttering, junk-sick, predictable buildup.

It's That Time calling you. That time in the past before you knew. Before the little riot in Hooverville where you lost your parents. Before the cossacks swept down that horrible summer of 1854 and changed your world forever. Before you were dragged out of th' jungle on the Ivory Coast and sold in Tobago. Before you were burned at the stake that time in Wales. Before you was a whore in Assyria and an Emperor of China and a fat little girl living at 188740 Glendale Road in Hawthorne CA?

And now this is it and you even have the god damn thing with the gypsy lady. And it's motherfuckin' sunday night in the autumn of the year. There you go.

6 Comments:

Blogger Bobby Lightfoot said...

Stop spankin' it and look at how wrecked our boys are in the picture.

12:15 AM  
Blogger Kevin Wolf said...

I wish I had the answers, man. I've tried some of the answers, like, say "1776." That's always worth a shot. "a population density of 1,000 per square mile" was another. "East Germany."

None of the answers fit, though.

"llkxuuxs"

7:27 AM  
Blogger The Viscount LaCarte said...

What you need, my friend, is a gimmick.


Jeez, Bobby, I'm sorry for that one.

You make fine music man, and Soulfinger entertains people. Think about what else you could be doing. For 15 or 20 or 10 an hour? Or whatever is you manage to eke out of your talent. At least you're good at it.

7:37 AM  
Blogger Boldly Serving Up Wheat Grass said...

You know, I'm sitting here at work, being paid by someone to do whatever it is I'm supposed to do -- and, sure, they don't care if I surf around a little. But then I come upon a post like that, and it makes me want to add my own two cents (or twenty, really), which I know I could easily blow off a whole hour doing if I wanted to do it right -- only, in the meantime, people keep coming in and dumping more shit on my desk. Review this contract, write that letter, find me the Ferguson file. (For Christ fucking sakes. Who CARES about the Ferguson file??!!)

Anyway, there's an answer to it all, I think. The fact that you wrote it all down (and quite eloquently) is the first tip off. In other words: If you really didn't give a shit about it all or thought it was all completely hopeless, you probably wouldn't have bothered to express it in the first place. (Of course, I'm completely "talking out my ass.")

Like Twain, at least you see the humor in it all. When that passes, I think you've got a real problem. And, hey, without the Scorpions success back when, Tenacious D wouldn't be so entertaining today.

11:54 AM  
Blogger Ben said...

You just about summed up my world view there. But see, I find it liberating. On good days, at least. I had a gig last night and the only people who came were about ten friends, but I played my best and had a good time and hopefully they had a good time too, and it's only depressing when I fantasize about being Arthur Rimbaud, or Paul McCartney. And what's more liberating than the inevitability of death? That's what proves that it doesn't matter whether you rock out for ten people or ten thousand, as long as you rock out.

For very brief moments I can almost make myself believe what I just wrote.

3:12 PM  
Blogger Neddie said...

What? Sorry, I was too busy grammin' the one-eyed snake.

Now offpz, please.

5:24 PM  

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