Stories use me. Yeah, they probably get frustrated with my attention span, or really, my lack of attention span. There's a real world and there's perception. I've lost track, somehow, of whether this is the dream or the reality.
Kindness is the key and love is the answer. Everything else is filler.
Yeah, I grew up with them. I don't have anything against them but I was never gonna be one of them. Oh, I suppose I could have joined the right clubs and worn the right clothes and combed my hair properly. My single mom scraped by and did without to make sure that I had everything. We lived in the right part of town, in the right school district because she wanted me to have every opportunity. You know- to be somebody.
Honestly, I had no idea that I was ever rebelling against anything. I just knew that I wanted to be Little Richard in a Jimmy Stewart world.
Well, sir, I seem to have wound up Ronny Elliott in a Donald Trump world. There's an ocean between me and Old Glory and true love in the future as far as the eye can see.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
Hodee-hodee-ho! Happy holidays to all of you. I wish you all the peace and blessings in the world. I hope you're all as excited about this season as I am.
Maybe this is as good a time as any to tell you about my life on the right side of the ocean and the wrong side of the road. Let me start by saying that my existence is about as perfect as it could be. We live in a tiny village in a tiny town in the south of England.
Dorset has the finest weather in the UK. That's a lot like saying that Morvan was the best singer in Milli Vanilli. When I heard that it was frequently windy, I thought that maybe I could fly the occasional kite. Turns out that windy in England is like pudding or chips or egg nog. Familiar word, entirely different meaning. Let me just say that within an hour of assembling a wooden storage shed in the back garden, we watched out the back door as it sailed across the property. Those scenes on cable TV where the valiant weatherman stands, battered by winds and rain, in a hurricane scene in Florida- that's just waiting for the bus to Weymouth on a Tuesday morning here. Wind means WIND.
To say that life is quiet here doesn't do it justice. We usually walk into town. If we have to drive- well, if Kate has to drive, I'm not crazy- parking is free. Of course, there's nothing in town. Mostly a few charity shops. Thrift shops to most of you. There are a few cafes, the watch strap shop, the vape shop and the wool shop. We like to play a game to see if we can ever find it open. There's the local pub, the Punch Bowl. Main feature is the patch of astro-turf in front. There are cat mummies in the local museum. If company comes, there's the lighthouse and the hole.
Oh, we have plenty to do. Amos and Andy dvds. Rocks and broken glass that we pick up at the beach. We usually manage more than three meals on any given day, too. We spend a lot of our free time lavishing praise on Vera and I'm pretty sure she likes it.
You want to know how perfect Kate is for me? This morning she came down in a gold and silver sequinned dress.
"I bought this for a pound at a charity shop a long time ago. I get it out and wear it once a year at Christmas and I wonder, 'Why do I ever wear anything else?' "
Why, indeed!
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
Maybe it's time to get all the toys out of the chest. If I'm gonna use up all the love that I came with from the factory, I had better shake a leg. Speaking of shaking a leg, I won't miss any opportunity to dance, from here on out. Of course I don't much care for dancing, not with people in the room. Luckily, Kate doesn't either. Still, there's no reason not to dust off my old tap dancin' moves when a hot one comes on.
Who was it who said, "Don't leave any empty tape?"
Oh, yeah.
I hope to leave shoes so well-worn that no charity shop will take them.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
Funny, isn't it- none of the beats admitted to being beat. By the end, Kerouac couldn't keep quiet about his distaste for hippies. If the club has a name, maybe you might think twice about joining up.
Always told myself that I wasn't bothered about being picked last for the team. Here I am, still talking about it. Do I mind never having fit in? I'm probably not the one to ask.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
As I sit here and worry about the babies in Gaza, it's hard to consider that the world is a better place than the one that I came into. If you're not careful, they'll make you cynical.
Most of my friends agree that the planet would be better run by dogs. There are plenty of sweet, kind folks around. Not many of them serve in politics. I'll leave it to you to decide whether religious leaders deserve salaries with all those zeroes. Don't get me started on the art treasures in the Vatican and evangelical activity in American affairs of state.
It has taken me all these years to understand that rock'n'roll, like all popular culture, served as a distraction to a world of trouble. Somewhere along the line, some trouble-making kid took Chuck Berry's relatively harmless "Too Much Monkey Business" and sang about bad working conditions and income inequality and insisted that he wasn't going to work on Maggie's gol-darned farm.
Well, you still had professional sports and television to keep the public in that daze. With sex as the secret sauce, tastemakers around the world worked tirelessly to keep our noses to the grindstone. Once the internet paired with cell phones, the fix was in.
Cheaters still win. War is bigger than ever. Any notion of world peace seems quaint, naive.
Somehow I remain hopeful. I don't miss a moment. It's all about love. You do what you can. All you need is love. Maybe this stuff will catch on. It's come in and out of fashion during my time here.
Over here searching for proof of my existence and all I can find is lustful thoughts and memories of loneliness. What on earth causes folks to behave the way they do? When will the last soldier lay down his weapon? Certainly nobody wants to be the first.
The way I see it, my mind in the perpetual gutter has kept it off war.
Nobody has accused me of being a great thinker, but I don't believe I've done much harm. Maybe I should have had loftier goals, grander ambition.
Give us peace on earth and end this dreadful, dreadful war.
