Worrying about worrying. Now that will keep you up. Turn your hair gray. Trying not to worry- that's worse. I'm no good at drinking any more. Maybe I never was. I've gotten what I wanted, what I needed, from drugs.
Now it's me and the dog and the rock'n'roll.
This is what I've always secretly longed for.
"What?" you ask, "Sitting around in your underwear ending sentences with prepositions?"
Yeah, you do it because you have to do it. If you're lucky your Col. Parker will eventually find you. Your Henry Higgins, Your Brian Epstein. If you're really lucky, really lucky, he won't. You'll do it all your life because you have to do it.
Let me be blasphemous here for a minute. Picasso was a brilliant young painter. He was probably a genius. He broke new ground along with a few of his contemporaries for awhile. Then he got rich. Famous. Not surprisingly he wanted to get laid. Then he spent years as a hack, putting both eyes on the same side of the nose because he could. He was Picasso. At the end he painted erotica. He was an artist again for a bit.
Elvis changed the world. The planet had never seen or heard anything like that. Never. Then he worked Vegas. He went to Hollywood. Along came the white suits and the scarves. Voila! The first Elvis impersonator. His name was Elvis.
Oh, I could go on. I won't. Yeah, I wish somebody, somewhere would mail me a hundred bucks for a song or two. Don't hold your breath.
The normalizing has begun. Why do I feel like the gangplank has just been pulled up and while gazing at the hole in the hull, I notice the captain stagger by. Drunk. Belligerent. I begin to notice a look of panic on the face of most of the other passengers. I hear fear in their voices.
The crew, most of whom I heard calling for mutiny just moments ago, are now busy jockeying for a seat at his table for dinner tonight. There's no way this bucket will float til dinner!
This is just one of those weird dreams, right? Doesn't even feel real.
Maybe we'll come back in style. America, I mean. The U.S. It almost certainly won't happen in my lifetime. When I was a kid it all looked to me as though we had peaked, maybe with the Big One, WW II. Audie Murphy. "To Hell And Back."
We should have quit the war game, gone out a winner. It all reminds me of a fighter who just can't stop. You always end up greeting gamblers at the casino, mumbling, shuffling and nodding. Dignity gone.
Even as Chinese and Russian kids were taught to hate and fear the Americans, they still wanted our Coke. They longed for our Levis. Oh, how they loved our rock'n'roll.
Maybe I'll whine a bit about Viet Nam. That wasn't the first war we lost but it showed that we should have quit earlier.
How do I address the middle aged, rich guys who hop around, overstuffed in leather, rhyming like sixth graders to recorded music and a turntable while holding their crotches in a move copied from a dead pop star from thirty years ago, without sounding merely old and crotchety? It makes it worse for me that nobody in the hep SNL audience has the nerve to yell out, "Hey! You have no talent. This isn't edgy. This is stupid. The emperor has no clothes."
Things change. I know that. I hope Little Richard doesn't see any of this.
Television newscasts seem almost biblical. Flooding. Fire. Drought. Never ending war. Oh, I'm not blaming the media. They have their own problems.
Technology exists to make our lives spectacular. We have resources to feed and house the population. Instead we choose to put into office as president a symbol of royalty who brings his own gold throne to the job and not much else.
This era is going to make a fine Masterpiece Theater series someday.
Life changes. Everything changes. Turns out orange really is the new black. The elite have to maintain some type of militia to protect them from the hungry. Some rules never change.
Maybe your big memories of Sunday night are from '56 and Elvis changing your life on Ed Sullivan. More of you probably sit around at the reunion and brag about your family watching the Beatles at 8:00 Eastern Time. Yeah, I know. Your dad didn't like them.
Me? I never got over Ed congratulating Fidel live as he sat on the front of a tank rolling into Havana. Fidel, that is. Ed was onstage in Manhattan. He flew down to interview Castro and mentioned that he was bringing the kind of democracy to Cuba that we needed.
So Fidel's gone. He was my favorite revolutionary. Oh sure, I was crushed when he morphed into a stereotypical dictator. No more than I was disappointed when Elvis dyed his hair black and gained seventy pounds.
Be careful with your heroes. We're all fragile and they are, too. Hurt people hurt and we've all been hurt.
Which ones do they kill? They kill the Kennedys, Dr. King, John Lennon. They kill the ones who threaten war with a message of peace. You don't have to be a Christian to know the story of the Prince of Peace.
