A Hard Headed Woman

I'm sitting here listening to Cat Stevens and thinking about Darcy. Yesterday was the one year anniversary of her death. The songs make me cry.

I'm looking for a hard headed woman

One who will take me for myself,

And if I find my hard headed woman,

I will need nobody else, no, no.

I'm looking for a hard headed woman,

One who will make me do my best,

And if I find my hard headed woman

I know the rest of my life will be blessed -- yes, yes, yes.

Here are the lyrics to I Think I See The Light :

I used to trust nobody, trusting even less their words,

until I found somebody, there was no one I preferred,

my heart was made of stone, my eyes saw only misty grey,

Until you came into my life girl, I saw everyone that way.

Until I found the one I needed at my side,

I think I would have been a sad man all my life.

I used to walk alone, every step seemed the same.

This world was not my home, so there was nothing much to gain.

Look up and see the clouds, look down and see the cold floor.

Until you came into my life girl, I saw nothing, nothing more.

Until I found the one I needed at my side,

I think I would have been a sad man all my life.

What happens when you've already found your hard headed woman and she died?

How Did This Happen?

I'm sitting here listening to Cat Stevens songs and thinking about my youth, we had such ideals back then, we wanted so much and dreamed so far. World peace, love, brothers and sisters to all. It's with tears in my eyes that I look at what we've become as America totters on the brink of fascism and we are responsible for the death of close to 1,000,000 people in Iraq. We railed and protested against our parents and their generation for being hypocrites, but looking back now they were practically saints compared to what this generation has become. The worst our parents did was fail to live up to the ideals of what America should be, what the boomer generation has done is throw those ideals to the ground and stomp on them as if they were evil.

I'm now old and tired, as old as my mom was when Cat recorded these songs, 3 years older than my dad ever made it to. Oddly enough there is still fire in my belly, rage against the machine. Too bad it's accompanied by nausea. My whole body hurts and I'm tired down to my bones and my beloved Darcy is about to die soon. And Cat Stevens is now a devote Muslim who did not condemn the Ayatolah's death sentence of Salman Rushdie, so much for peace and love.

And on top of that we stand at the brink of world disaster with global warming. It won't lead to the end of mankind but it will lead to world-wide problems like nothing we've ever seen, millions of refugees across the globe, hunger, misery and death for multiple millions of humanity. I fear the future will look at the baby boomer generation and see us as either monsters or insane, maybe both. We all claim Hitler and the Nazis as the worst evil that men can sink to but future generations will put that label on us.

How did this happen? Christians and rich people, the fundamentalists who have tried to ram theocracy down our throats and the neocons who have gladly used them as the means to power. If any good can come from all this it will be if both such groups are reviled and hated for as long as humanity lasts.

YouTube

I wanted to leave a link to a audio file on my last post about Cat Stevens but there doesn't seem to be any way to do that with your own MP3 file. But I did manage to find Cat on YouTube so I'm going to use that. This is my first attempt at doing video on Blogger.

And this is pretty much the theme song for Harold and Maude.

Cat Stevens

Once upon a time in the very distant past I was a big fan of Cat Stevens. Last night I watched a recording of CBS Sunday Morning and they did a piece on him. His recent life doesn't interest me much but they played a lot of his old songs and showed him in concerts from the 70's. It brought back many memories, especially of the movie Harold and Maude, one of my all time favorites and only the second movie I've ever seen more than 3 times (Casablanca being the first). His songs, with their melancholy cheerfulness, were the perfect counterpoint for the dark humor of that movie. I went on iTunes and checked out what they had and played their little snippets of all my favorite Cat songs (there are lots of them).

Makes me wonder how I lost my connection to music. I used to listen to the radio, tuned in to rock n roll at least 12 hours a day. I knew all recent songs and the artists, knew them going back to the Beatles in the early 60's, and I had all of Cat Stevens' albums, probably still do somewhere. At some point in the late 80's I stopped listening and just don't seem to care for music much these days. I don't hate it but I don't seek it out, either. Talk radio has taken over my life - the little bit I listen to radio at all which is usually only in my car.

Despite being a Mac user for many years and having iTunes since it first came out I have yet to actually buy anything from them, though my wife has bought a few songs. But tonight I think I'm going to download a bunch of Cat Stevens songs and remember the days when I was barely 21. Maybe even burn a CD to take them to work. My wife has the iPod, I don't use one and never have. Practically sacrilegious for a long time Mac user.