PAY ATTENTION!

(song lyrics)

Hey! You in the middle of the road
I’m coming right at you
Ain’t nothing I can do
Ain’t a lot of room to pass here and you’re blocking the way
I don’t mean to be rude but I’ve gotta get through at least sometime today

So hey pay attention
You ain’t the only one alive
In this world of so many people sometimes you’ve got to compromise
I don’t care if it’s a Zen thing that’s got you staring at your shoes
The space you’re in was made for moving in
and if you don’t you could be singing the blues

(well, I’m not going to hit em but you know somebody’s bound to)

What! You’ve got a woman on the side
your wife and your children
are something that you hide
But now she’s blown your cover and you’re losing your cool
I don’t mean to sound preachy but maybe this’ll teach ya a thing you didn’t learn in school

So hey pay attention
You don’t exist in a void
The things you do affect not only you stop acting like a little boy
I don’t care if you’re a rich man or a PHD.
How you deal with others will reveal
your place in society

(well, naturally, I suppose we better assume that)

So, you got it all figured out
The world is your oyster
Pearls of wisdom you tout
But is it really a good thing to be following you
I mean no disrespect or say you’re incorrect but I think I know what I’m gonna do

I’m just gonna pay attention
and do the best that I can
Respect the worth of mother earth and try and be an honest man
I’ll try not to be an asshole when I’m speaking my mind
It may sound cliché but tomorrow is a new day and I don’t wanna stay behind

Yes I’m gonna pay attention
to the things around me
Sit on the fence of common sense and question all authority
I’m not trying to go for sainthood or reach nirvana’s high
It may sound cliché but tomorrow is a new day and I don’t wanna live a lie

Yes I’m gonna pay attention
and do the best that I can
Respect the worth of mother earth and try and be an honest man
I’ll try not to be an asshole when I’m speaking my mind
It may sound cliché but tomorrow is a new day and I don’t wanna stay behind

I Digress

(background narrative)

Change… change, everybody is talking about change, the times sure are a changin’ as well they should. But from what to what? Could be good but what does it mean? Isn’t change the only constant in the universe? Isn’t change inevitable? Unstoppable? And if this ever changing world is the natural order of things, doesn’t a call for change just as easily mean a call for things to stay the same? From the status quo being constant change… to a different, unnatural state of… stagnation? Stability? Sustainability? Of course sustainability does suggest a need for some sort of corrective action but then… I digress. Did it make a difference?

Makes me think of that story by Dostoyevsky about a man who was really glad he knew all kinds of seventeenth century French poetry because to lie down and recite it over and over again was the only way he had found to distract his mind from the fact that the earth was continuously rotating beneath his feet… or was that Kafka? I don’t think so. After all… Tolstoy converted to unchanging, dogmatic Christianity from the rationalism of his turbulent youth and didn’t Solzhenitsyn call Daniel Ellsberg a traitor? And what is this fascination I suddenly seem to have with nineteenth and twentieth century Russian novelists anyway? Of course Kafka was German and Alger Hiss did turn out to be a traitor but then… I digress. Now I’m just sounding pedantic.

When I was in high school I read a short story by Isaac Asimov about how the ultimate computer that existed only in hyperspace was set to answer the only question in the universe left unanswered… can entropy be reversed? The computer finally did answer the question some immeasurable time after the last star had lost its last bit of energy and promptly announced “Let there be light” and started the whole thing over again… of course entropy is also known as disambiguation which is most commonly related to thermodynamics and defined as a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work but then… again… I guess… I digress.