The Outlaw Hour

This hour, this 2:30 AM, feels like the outlaw hour, however many years I spend wide awake and listening to songs until I can’t stay awake one minute. I have cause to remember Elton John’s line: “It’s four o’clock in the morning, dammit, LISTEN TO ME PLEEEEZE!”

In high school it burned me to the skull to see the sun come up, and it burned deeper to hear the thud of the newspaper delivery person pitching Tampa Tribunes onto the driveways. I remember thinking, will they remember to skip 808? 808, across the street, didn’t subscribe to the Tampa Tribune, but I know for fact that they got copies anyway. Bastards. Those bastards at 808.

I suspect extremes. Absolutes. A favorite ice-breaker of mine: “You are completely late.” A less used variant: “You are completely pregnant.” These illustrate the weakness of absolutes, and make people laugh uncomfortably. And the near absolutes: “Immensely” so. Some abstract non-material thing is “Huge.”

Things are not huge. Nothing is immense.

If I was spiritual I would now comfort and sooth: There is no panic, no sudden confusion, no shock. All things are expected.

There is room for nuance. Completely crazy? Totally fucked? You decide.

Fascinating.

Now it’s 3:22. Listening to Beethoven. Nothing is more modern than Beethoven. That is safe to say, not knowing the work of every composer living or dead. When did you last listen to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony? Opus 111? The Grosse Fuga? Listen to Beethoven, compare it to anything that came after, and you’ll hear that everything since Beethoven has been done before. No revolutions. Revolutions are only marketing. Some revolutions plague history books. Most revolutions languish in their own house.

How goes your revolution?

Now it’s 3:43.

Now it’s 4:00.

Now it’s 4:08.

Now it’s 4:21.