Strange Days

HUZZAH TO THE SHOPKEEP!

Hey kids! Jonathon here, back to give you your final dose of jibjab on teh PoV. In this edition, I'll be shedding as much light as possible on my state of mind whilst writing the words, while Aaron will whip up a tasty piece on the music side o' things. I spent a lot of time trying to make this make sense, and in that regard, I feel like things make even less sense than they did before. Thus, I feel a certain sense of accomplishment. Y' follow?


Shall we dance?

So here we are, having finally arrived at our final song in the Philosophy Revealed series, and I feel great. Stretch your legs, take a deep breath, and relish in the fact that you have demonstrated the guts and stamina to endure an intensive and bloody dissection of our latest labor of love.

Strange Days is a lyrical map of moist brain droppings from honorificabilitudinitatibusly yours truly. It's a saturated blotting rag soaked in whiskey and ether with a soupçon of blissful panic and intestinal fortitude thrown in for good measure. I'm going to level with you all and let you in on a little dark secret - an interesting quirk I've come slowly to understand about The Jonathon over the past three decades (and I say interesting like I'd say Goddess Bunny is rather interesting). About 4-6 times a year, my grey matter slips into what I call an acceleration, my name for a slightly altered state of consciousness lying somewhere between a panic attack and an adrenaline torrent, historically resulting in a racing pulse, tense muscles, aimless pacing, compulsive repetitions, ridiculously short fingernails, awkward relationships, thought trails floating in a myriad of white fluff, mental cul-de-sacs, and sweat-stained notebooks filled with lists, gibberish, and scribbledygook. It's nothing like a major meltdown, but it's during these bouts of sideways cerebral sparking that some of my very best (and very worst) ideas are born. I suppose I could eat the mints to get rid of it, but when I'm able to harness this racing gorgeous ghost I truly feel like I'm living as a consecrated being, riding the wave as if on a divine Six Flags log ride at terminal velocity. Thus, this velocity has become my philosophy.

So where does this ride out to the perimeter usually take me?


Photo by Michael Rain.

When you're young, you think all the gaps in your knowledge will eventually get filled. But I find the older I get, the less I know. I used to think that to be in the adoring spotlight, you had to be really smart. But I've since found you may stand more of a chance at being successful if you're really dumb. (You just have to be pretty and surround yourself with people who are smart, and evil.) I've also come around to understand how incredibly steeped the world is in chance and luck, even though we look back in retrospect and try to retro-fit it all into patterns and causal relationships. Time epochs, spheres of influence, and tectonic movements of man and his machines are disjointed, slapped together slapdashedly, and purposeless at best, leaving behind a wake of book burning billionaires and starving toddlers, almost as if reflecting the subconscious daydreams of a detached trust-fund deity stuck in an interminable snooze in the middle of Applied Omniscience 101.

Hence…I embrace the ridiculous. My religion is the Absurd, and I preach it with all the pomp and cockswagger of a Channel 32 televangelist. My spiritual advisors are Magritte and Mitch Hedberg, and if you had the chance to see us perform Strange Days live, then you, my friend, were enlightened, blessed, and otherwise inducted into the Holy Hallowed Halls of Farcical the Musical, proselytized to from atop a stack of subs and crowd barricades.

So.

The lyrics to Strange Days are a collection, of sorts, of the random synapse syntax that occurs during the psychorrhea party mentioned above, culled from the pile of notebooks stained with axle-grease and ass sweat and the used napkins that sit on my desktop until I find time to compile them all into a handy sterile Word document whose file name I usually forget very quickly. Rather than explaining each line (a lesson in utter futility), I thought I'd toss in a few page links to get the ideas across and let the lyrics give their secrets themselves. Be sure to find all the Easter Eggs! (And Happy Easter.)

There's a room inside my finger
Where the ghosts of authors linger
There's a little man who whispers
In a radio transmitter
There's a lady on a spider
With a baby's head beside her
There's a voice inside my earlobe
From a place the sidewalks don't go

These are strange days

There's a man with an umbrella
Who is smoking citronella
And he sees fantastic visions
Of the world outside my prison
There's a fountain full of ashes
And a snake beneath the grasses
And he's asking everybody
What makes them melancholy
(formerly: to a deadly game of bocce)

My language is a patois
Philosophy's in my boudoir
My heads in Constantinople
And my body's in a bubble
I'm a Rosicrucian lackey
In the Ministry of Peculiar Things
I will tell you my secret
But only if you keep it

But enough about me, why don't you tell me about your day?


Yours,
Jonathon Christmas