I JUST WASN’T MADE FOR THESE TIMES

Perhaps it’s facing mortality for the first time, or morbid curiosity brought on by various vagaries happening around you all at the same time, but one gets to the point of thinking that time’s running out, and there’s nothing more to do as you’ve been The Wolf Of Wall Street and sung with Warren Zevon on “The Werewolves Of London” and are now just set adrift on a journey to nowhere that might lead you somewhere. Might.

You’re in search of the holy grail, but you’re not Monty Python, and even if you were to find it, you have no idea what it is or who it is and what the damn hell to do with it.

And so like a U2 song, you realise you still haven’t found what you’re looking for, or that you once did, and for reasons known only to the devil in your head from one too many ego trips with Peter Pan looking for the fountain of youth, you managed to make that relationship self-destruct just to look back at the mess created and say, “Yeah, mama, I fucked that one up all by myself”.

You call what once was your family, but nobody’s ever home, and all you get is a voice message, and no return calls as they’ve moved on, closed the door on half-answered questions and are now Sinatra’s strangers in the night drowning in those days of wine and roses.

You listen to the songs that were achingly beautiful like “Without You”, written by Peter Ham and Tom Evans of Badfinger, and realise why they both decided to make an early exit as this life wasn’t for them.

Music becomes that hymn book you never brought to assembly at school as you never believed in pulpits and hosannas, but believed far more in the honesty of Dylan and Lennon.

Yes, HELP me please, if you can, but where were you when I needed you most?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlzrNKN3rZI

This is a fucked up world- more so than ever- and where priorities in life have become secondary, where creativity is coming up with a new con, and where we live in a false world of fair-weathered friends.

Everybody’s talking, but I don’t hear a word they’re saying, only the echoes of my mind.

We come into this world alone and we leave alone and in-between you meet so many and know so few.

Why we bother trying so damn hard to make sense of it all, why we are constantly apologising, why we are made to be racked with guilt, is beyond comprehension.

Lennon referred to all this in his song, Mind Games.

Meanwhile, on that epic, yet still underrated work of art that Brian Wilson called, “Pet Sounds”, was a ballad called, “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times”.

It was a song written in 1966, which made me cry then, and makes me cry now, as, when the futility of life stares you in the face, it’s time to pay the piper, find where you really belong, and let the music of life play on- and the way only you wish to hear it.

Hans Ebert