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| Captain Beefheart - January 17, 1981 |
Ashtray Heart – Captain Beefheart -1980
You used me like an ashtray heart
Case of the punks
Right from the start
I feel like a glass shrimp in a pink panty
With a saccharine chaperone
Make invalids out of supermen
Call in a “shrink”
And pick you up in a girdle
You used me like an ashtray heart
Right from the start
Case of the punks
Another day, another way
Somebody’s had too much to think
Open up another case of the punks
Each pillow is touted like a rock
The mother / father figure
Somebody’s had too much to think
Send your mother home your navel
Case of the punks
New hearts to the dining rooms
Violet heart cake
Dissolve in new cards, boards, throats, underwear
Ashtray heart
You picked me out, brushed me off
Crushed me while I was burning out
Then you picked me out
Like an ashtray heart
Hid behind the curtain
Waited for me to go out
A man on a porcupine fence
Used me for an ashtray heart
Hit me where the lover hangs out
Stood behind the curtain
While they crushed me out
You used me for an ashtray heart
You looked in the window when I went out
You used me like an ashtray heart.
The above lyrics are often in my mind. They were today, more and more. I contemplate my existence in a Kitsilano duplex with the company of brother and sister cats (Niño and Niña) in which I have daily pattern of feeding the cats, paying bills, cleaning the house and figuring what I will eat. Few call me. At the most I can count on my youngest daughter Hilary’s phone call.
I have no sense of purpose, and more so with the idea of my utility to others. Almost laughingly (not quite), I tell my two daughters that I will be more useful when I am dead as they will inherit money.
Having the time to think, I do a lot of it. Most of it is about how I cannot live without the physical presence of my Rosemary. Four years later I am in no better shape. We shared 52 years. I cannot adapt to living alone. The distractions of meeting, not too often, people I know (who are still alive) for coffee is not enough.
Because as a little boy in Buenos Aires I took trains to school or downtown to the movies with either my father or my mother and sometimes with my grandmother the simile of riding a train is there all the time.
I board my train in our neighbourhood barrio of Coghlan. The train is almost full. In the stations down the line people get off. Somehow, without any explanation, when I get to the cavernous downtown station of Retiro, I am the only passenger.
This simile applies to the fact that most of the people that I have known, including family or people I worked with, are all dead.
In bed at night their faces pass by my head in long unstoppable sequences.
Captain Beefheart may have been right, “Somebody’s has had too much too think.”
