That game of life is hard to play / I’m gonna lose it anyway / The losing card I’ll someday lay / So this is all I have to say / Suicide is painless / It brings on many changes / And I can take or leave it if I please — Suicide Is Painless (theme for movie M*A*S*H), written by Johnny Mandel, 1970
As tempting as it is, we just cannot go around saying “100% of us believe…” or “everybody feels…” We know that’s ridiculous; there are 7.8 billion people on this planet as of this writing, and most of us couldn’t agree on where to go for lunch.
So I will not state “100% are stir-crazy and would gnaw our right arms off to leave the house and go to…” whatever. However, I would not be the least bit surprised if 99% of us felt that way. Maybe we can get together and T-P the houses of that other 1%.
No. Wait. Is there still a toilet paper shortage? I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been permitted to enter any building other than my own for… jeez, about 10 weeks now. I did drive around the neighborhood last week, just to give my car some reassurance, and I was surprised at how little had changed. But I was more surprised at how few cars were on the road, how empty the parking lots were, and how easy it would be to park at the train station.
I’m also surprised at how clean the air seems. This figures — with fewer people driving, we have less ground dinosaur bits clogging our atmosphere. This latter fact frightens the crap out of the oil and gas industry, which has been hell-bent on choking us to death in the name of dividend checks and nine figure annual employment packages. Some of these greed-driven killers are down to their last 50 million bucks.
I have little doubt that this is one of the chief reasons we are being pushed over the brink of insanity with constant reminders of how wonderful it will be to get out of the house and go to restaurants, sports events, family reunions, and, I dunno, maybe orgies. Don’t forget your condoms; you wouldn’t want to catch a disease, would you? Continue reading “Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind #089: Suicide Is Painless”
Back in the hallowed days of nascent hippiedom, our popular culture evolved as young people began to develop a more political worldview. For better and for worse, these sentiments touched upon all aspects of the arts, and the world of science fiction was just sitting there in the center of the target. A lot of great stuff came out of that, material that continues impacting upon society to this day.
Of course, such labels never truly work. Using music as my reference point, can you cleanly define the differences between the various forms of American roots music — blues, country, folk, bluegrass, jazz, rock and roll? Really? Then where does Ray Charles fall into that mix? Similarly, there are many labels on the foreheads of the sundry strands of science fiction: fantasy, horror, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, horror, blah blah blah. I know. It’s only rock and roll to me.