Are you seeking enlightenment
Are you seeking yourself?
What kind of idiot are you?
I’ll go first.
Once, when I was a kid and we moved into a house with a gas stove, I found a spool of copper wire and put one end of the wire in the flame of the stove top and wrapped the other end around the base of a light bulb, hoping the flame would make the bulb turn on.
A little bit after this, and this was the 80s, my friends and I thought to test the new-fangled circuit breakers that electrical outlets started having as a safety measure.1
We joined hands, three or four of us, and the kid at one end stuck a paper clip into the outlet while the kid at the other end held onto the the metal faucet through a moist washcloth.
We all stood there getting z-z-z-zapped for a few seconds before collapsing and triggering the breaker.
Can you imagine finding four dead kids in your bathroom?
Thankfully no one died.
Idiots.
But I am still mesmerized by electricty.
I think rock and roll is as much a celebration of electricity as it is of vibrations.
I came up with this equation the other night while waiting for the edible to kick in, or maybe it had already:
E≥B+B+B2
Never mind the fleshy bits (fb).
Without electricity, the equation falls apart.
Time is a sense, not a concept.
Numbers are a concept.
Math is beautiful, though less conventionally attractive than music.
Sometimes numbers lie.
Lying is bad.
Music can make you cry.
Emotion is somewhere between Magnets vs. Digits.
I don’t know what any of this means, but I do know that I made a demo for this “Sitting in the Dark” song back in 1997 and I added it to the “Mixed Up Files” project over at Bandcamp today, and I hope you will give it a listen, raunched-out LO-FI ditty that it is:
I also made a lyric video for it which one could watch in the youtube player below:
This song treats the fact that humans don’t really know for certain that much about how we actually got here, and you’ve just got to embrace that and open your heart to the world around you.
I would like to posit that we are descended from electricity as much as we are descended from apes or what have you.
Okay, enough of this singing-cowboy philosphy, there are drains to unclog and children to pick up from school; I remain your humble servant,
OX&C,
Faux Jean
Here are the lyrics:
Do you want to know
All there is to know?
Are you seeking
enlightenment?
Are you seeking
yourself?
Turn on the light
Let in some
sunshine
Oh pull back
the shades!
And open up
your eyes
Don’t open your heart
and turn away
Open your heart
and stay
Your sitting in
the dark
Looking for some
kind of spark
Get yourself
outside!
And learn to live
your life
Get your heart
your still awake
Turn your heart
and say
Do you want
to know
Everything I know?
Well I just know
one thing
And that’s that
I know nothing
I only know just
one thing
And that’s that
I want to sing
You’re sitting in
the dark
the little reset buttons so you don’t get electrocuted, say.
E≥B+B+B means that Electricity is greater than or equal to blood plus bone plus brain.