Through A Glass, Darkly-or-You Can’t Die Without Scars

“How much can you know yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? I don’t wanna die without any scars.” – Fight Club

Bach used to be a composer.  I guess he’s now a decomposer.

I remember listening to the radio . . . you remember the radio, right?  That’s where people take a part of the Internet and send it out using big towers and as many watts (ounce-inches per fortnight in non-commie units) of power as is used in the The Mrs.’ hairdryer so that this faint amount of energy can be picked up by a metal strip and then amplified a zillion times so you can rock out while cruising Main.

Sorry for the digression.  I remember listening to the radio way back in the before time, and hearing a song that sounded pretty good.  The singer mumbled most of it, but the big, brassy chorus of Born in the U.S.A. was pretty strong.

Made me feel good, made me think that in 1985 we were ready to unite as America.  Then I finally made out the lyrics.  Hmmm.  After listening to them, I came to the (correct) conclusion that typical Leftist-Simp Bruce Springsteen was just another Leftist-Simp who made a bunch of money because he had a good chorus and everyone thought he was on America’s side.

I’ll leave you with this, “I’m embarrassed to be an American” – Bruce Springsteen, talking about Trump to Australians in 2016

I have not changed that position.  If you like him, fine.  You’re wrong.  Springsteen is a tool.

Another song like that was All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow.  When I first heard it, all I heard was they chorus, and figured it was some empty-headed pop song.  Meh.  I’ll skip it.

Then I listened to it.  Wow.  Deep.  I was shocked.  I thought it was vapid pop, but here was a song that had some soul, and talked about people drinking beer at noon on Tuesday in a bar because that’s all they have.  The lyrics . . . “And a happy couple enters the bar, dangerously close to one another” is shocking – it jarred me because these people were a contrast to the gloom and despair on display in the bar.

Another one that I just found out about was Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonny Tyler.  What’s it about?  Vampires that want to share more than blood (wink wink).  Honestly, I didn’t really care about this song ever, and still don’t, but like it a bit more now that I know that it’s just a bit weird.

Did she have to book a second ticket on the flight just for the hair?

Don’t even get me started on Squeeze Box by The Who® since when I heard it I was certain that it referred to a particularly musical family and even made the defense of the virtuousness of the song to a friend’s mother with all of the innocence of an entirely ignorant 10 year old who is smarter than he is experienced.

My Friend’s Mom:  “That song . . . is that song about . . . sex?”

Young John Wilder:  “No!  That song is about a family and the mother has a concertina, an instrument played by compressing air and passing it through a series of reeds to make a melody like an accordion.  She plays it and the house is filled with glorious music all night.”

My Friend’s Seventeen Year Old Sister, Butting In:  “No.  The song is totally about sex, Mom.”

Barbie?  If you’re reading this?  Yup, I got that one really wrong.

And don’t get me started on how badly I misunderstood Lola.  I’m ashamed to say that I was over 21 before I got that joke.  In my defense, that wasn’t a thing anywhere around Wilder Mountain, and the only burned-out old tranny I was familiar with was the one in my 1976 green GMC® truck.

Good news!  It just needed a new clutch.  Sometimes young drivers get a awkward and anxious and burn out clutch pads by popping the power too soon to the drive train.

I miss the days when working with a difficult tranny meant it was an automatic transmission.

Life, and experience, changes interpretation of events.  Like a song, an experience may have one meaning when young, but yet another experience when older.  The very experience of living life changes the message we get from those experiences.  All through life “we see through a glass, darkly”, but as we age, we see the world differently.

That is natural.  We age, we learn, we understand.  Our innocence is, especially in 2023, horribly brief.

Cell phones and the Internet bring knowledge to children long before they can really come to grips with what they are seeing.  In my age, a furtive glimpse at a Playboy® was how we gained forbidden knowledge.  In 2023, 10-year-olds know all about Lola and are even taught in class that what once was forbidden is now exalted – there’s even a month for pride, yet not even an afternoon set aside for humility, but I guess if you’re Hunter Biden there’s a 20-minute plea bargain case with the DOJ.

So, I read today Hunter didn’t pay taxes on over six million dollars, and deducted the amount he spent on whores as business expenses.  I wonder if he ever paid Lola?

Change is part of growing up.  I am certainly not the person I was at 18, nor the person I was at 38.  And wisdom has a price – innocence is free, but innocence is also harmless.  As we grow and learn, we learn what is worth passing on, and what is worth fighting for.

I also believe this one weird thing, that this knowledge is not without structure.  When I look back at the hard things, the difficult things, the things that seemed like a catastrophe at the time, all of those things led to better things as I grew up.  I just had to live through them to understand.

My life will probably never go back to the simpler days.  Like a character in a spy movie, I now know too much.  But I can still, on a summer day, roll down the window and listen to a song and sing too loudly as I drive.

But it certainly won’t be Bruce Springsteen.

He’s a tool.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

40 thoughts on “Through A Glass, Darkly-or-You Can’t Die Without Scars”

  1. in a toolbox full of tools, im picking the vice grips to hate on. because reasons

    1. Hmmm. I’d have to pick my bandsaw, because it cuts as straight as a drag queen story hour.

  2. Springsteen is the most unlistenable “artist” I can think of, on par with Edie Brickell & New Bohemians. That he is a leftist tool makes it that much worse.

    1. I’m an awful singer unless it’s monotone Johnny Cash, but I think I could do better than Springstein. I don’t understand the link between Zionist boomers and him. Probably don’t want to.

  3. At the risk of revealing far too much of my inner psyche, my own personal anthem happens to be Joe Cocker’s Feelin’ Alright. And I I fear that our true national has become Rolling Stone’s Gimme Shelter. Merry Clayton’s incredible wail in that song caused her to have a miscarriage and lose the hope that she was nurturing deep inside her. A perfect metaphor for America today.

    https://www.openculture.com/2013/06/mick_jagger_tells_the_story_behind_gimme_shelter.html

    2. Attributing her singing on Gimme Shelter as the cause of Clayton’s subsequent miscarriage is classic post hoc, ergo propter hoc codswallop.
      The source for that is Clayton’s own imagination, and that bastion of medical accuracy, the L.A. Times Calendar section (a music column in the entertainment pages), from 17 years after the fact. Anyone with a more reliable source for the assertion should cite the actual medical records stating the cause, or kindly put the stethoscope down.
      One might as plausibly cite the Vietnam War, Nixon’s election as president, or Ohio State beating USC in the Rose Bowl as the cause of her miscarriage.

      Sh*t happens.

  4. John, I confess that even now I continue to learn things about lyrics and songs that I listened to growing up that completely change my view of them – for example, that “Teenage Wasteland” is not actually called “Teenage Wasteland” and the origin of the song, which was very different than what I thought.

    As wiser heads than I have said, life is lived forwards but only understood looking backwards. Which, honestly, is where history gives us a leg up on the competition: we can know through history how things are likely to end up in reality, not in the imaginings of those who say “it is different this time”.

  5. When I think of Bruce Springsteen, I’m embarrassed to be an American.

    I also notice all the people that promised to leave if Trump was elected, didn’t.
    It should be legal to call their bluff, and deport them. At least for four years.
    Unless they buy ad space during the Superbowl and the Oscars, and apologize.

    It wouldn’t shut them up, but it would better than the horrible Draq Queen Story Hours on display for the whole country. On both shows.

    Come to think of it, Ricky Gervais should host the Oscars for the next ten years. With Mel Gibson and Clint Eastwood as the presenters.
    Ratings would skyrocket, and the comedy would be epic.

    1. If I were president, they’d be on the first trebuchet out of here. Except Ricky and Mel and Clint.

  6. We have a national anthem, if we need a theme song Stranglehold might be good.
    And as far as looking glass that should be an ACOG.

  7. We have a national anthem, if we need a theme song Starnglehold might be good.

    The glass we should be looking through is an ACOG

    1. I learn something new all the time by going down rabbit holes that start at here John’s site. Regarding ACOGs…

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trijicon_biblical_verses_controversy#:~:text=A%20Trijicon%20ACOG%20TA01%2DNSN,have%20the%20light%20of%20life.%E2%80%9D

      To shift gears, there is unfortunately increasing controversy over our National Anthem and it is sadly increasingly controversial to some Americans…

      https://soapboxie.com/activism/The-Third-Verse-of-The-Star-Spangled-Banner

      …who are pushing their own substitute…

      https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/news/black-national-anthem-nfl-lyrics-history/bmdk4bru40f611kiz41sq1mu2

      Gimme Shelter is never gonna be song sung in unison by people to promote national unity, But remember, “O say can you see…” and “Oh say does that…” are QUESTIONS about a dangerous, uncertain future facing America. Gimme Shelter is a similar callback echo from the hellish year of 1968 and a sobering reminder of just how close to reality the dark side haunting America still is.

  8. I’ve got one for you. Probably not your style, but it’s catchy and some good lyrics to live by.

    Bilgewater by Brown Bird

  9. AS, agreed. Springsteen also makes me embarrassed to be an American. Hey, he’s from NJ. What else would you expect?

    And while we’re on the musical shtick, Steve Earle too. Did you know he’s a Commie? Heard him admit it on stage while on the Outlaw Country Music Cruise in February. His red bandanas (literally) on sale in the Merch Shop had the hammer & sickle on them. So, I change the channel on SiriusXM when his music comes on.

  10. The 2 Live Crew did jack his Born In the USA beat for Banned In the USA from 1990.
    They mock political figures and local prosecutors for trying to shut them down.
    They were some former Army guys who learned to dirty rhyme over beats back when you could sample anything.
    The Rufus & Chaka Khan number one Sweet Thing is about her love for the band guitarist Tony Maiden who went with somebody else.
    In the excellent Jimi Hendrix Experience cover of Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower, I thought it said come and dig my herb instead of plowman dig my earth during younger skater boy days.
    I’ll stay gold like Pony and have the wisdom as well.
    Just finished reading one of the eternal optimists pages and the comments were already calling the writer naïve, maybe that is all he knows.
    People still cling to former USA as a cope I guess and it is prevalent among those who are older.
    A squeeze box? HS sweetheart Honey Chambers had one of those!
    Psyops don’t work if you are already cray-cray or do psyops of your own.

    1. Wrong about their service time. Air Force sissies trying to be bad an sheeit. The Crew ended up with early death and f****d up lives, which proves the existence of God. Maybe if a First Shirt would have matched those pukes into reality we might have been spared the aural pornography that they excreted on humanity.

  11. Sign on a music shop door:
    “Closed
    Bach by 1
    Offenbach by 12”

    Contrariwise, I really liked Springsteen’s (much misunderstood) “Born in the USA”. I’m disappointed that the man himself is a tool. But he also wrote “Blinded by the Light”, among others. I can’t tell you how many musicians/artists/actors in my life have disappointed me by turning out to be tools. That list is long. I have reconciled myself to liking (some of) their work even if I wouldn’t stomp them out if they were on fire.

  12. Enjoyed Bruce in the seventies and eighties, early discs — streets of fire, adam raised a cain, something in the night, promised land and the asbury park stuff too, lost in the flood, fourth of july/sandy.

    He was so popular in the eighties you couldnt get a ticket, not even to a huge outdoor amphitheater gig like Shoreline in the south bay area. They ran a lottery for tickets and I got two (the limit available). Could have sold them for, I dunno, maybe five hundred dollars. For an open-seating amphitheater!

    To know certain things at that young an age requires inspiration. You get that either from above, or from below, there are no third options. As with many former rockers, time revealed whence came Bruce’s talent, insight and inspiration. He’s part of the enemy.

    Bob Dylan also exemplifies this, tho whether he’s an enemy is still to be seen. In his early twenties he wrote about stuff he could not possibly have known without ‘getting hints’. Rolling Stone mag placed Like a Rolling Stone as the number one song of all time, but if RS and its readers knew what that song really meant, they’d be horrified.

    Likewise, the tandem-song to Like a Rolling Stone is It’s All Over Now Baby Blue. Tells the same story, prophecy really: a female — a princess/queen etc. — is flying high with all things under her control. The two songs describe the overturning of her ‘order’ or rule, and her subsequent loss of all power and status, abandoned and bereft . . . on her own, complete unknown, no direction home etc.

    Way back then Bob was writing about stuff that is only happening now, many decades later, a global reversal unfolding. And it ain’t The Great Reset, that’s for sure. Read the lyrics to those songs. You’ll see what I mean. The days of ‘Baby Blue’s’ rulership (female imperative) are ending.

    1. Ray, that’s is pretty deep and I am understanding you. I’ve been on a Dylan kick the last few years and my take has been he was just writing about personal issues (Tangled up in Blue) and dealing with raising a family and keeping the cash flow. Your point is well taken, I will listen in a fresh light considering today’s problems…

      1. Well, Tangled up in Blue IS a personalistic song. So, for example, is Simple Twist of Fate. Aside from Idiot Wind (addressing the U.S.), that album is mostly personalistic tunes.

        Like a Rolling Stone is not personalistic, it is broad prophecy. It’s All Over Now Baby Blue is about the planet (‘baby blue’ get it?) getting too uppity and her male ‘helpers’ who have long shepherded the planet abandoning her. Bob would be one of these. This process is taking place as we speak.

        BTW Scripture confirms that there is a personized aspect to this world, as a single conscious entity. (Revelation 12:6, with specific pronoun ‘her’ in the feminine.) In ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, her ‘lover’ at last tires of her betrayals and leaves her, and all hell literally breaks loose.

        Look out! the saints are coming through
        and it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

        ‘Idiot Wind’ is a similar song, not strictly personalistic but aimed at America as the National Female Entity that it truly is (tsah-rah spirit, Daniel 12:1).

        Let me know if I can be of further assistance in these unusual matters.

Comments are closed.