WTF?
What the fuck were we thinking?
Rarely opened our mouths to say something ornate
Why did we buy all those Dead Kennedys records
If we were never going to read the liner notes?
The riffs are sweet the lyrics are obsolete
Who knew you could combine thought with music?
For only five bucks I can get fifteen rad tracks
I am no Hannah I cannot compete with that
BUT WE CAN TRY TO DO BETTER
Write something that means something
Benefit everyone
NOTHING
Keep it in a positive headspace
Let the brain train the body to displace
The increased weight upon the shoulders
The shifting collage of colorful disorders
Painted through the mind but what’s to make of it?
There’s nothing left to do but open the box and look at it
The fucked up shit inside my head
That I could ignore but decide instead
To get inside and see what it looks like
Are we collectively conscious?
Are we a collective consciousness?
Molecular phenomenon
Self-organizing electrons
Something that formed from Nothing
A ripple of a wave inside
The residue that’s left behind
The passing of time within our minds
The narrow lens of our own perception
Am I asleep or awake?
What difference would it make?
My mind carries on restlessly
The explanation inside me
Still questioning the answers
Don’t think about it
Go back to sleep
Dump everything inside my head
Into a fire until glowing red
Melt everything to Nothing
Something new from the ashes
Reconstruct until conscious
In the shape of something else
PARTY LINE
A kook and a crook
US playbook
Pledge to a team claiming supremacy
Swallow this shit and deal with it
Pay for it
Trampled by it
You’re dying for it
Is your headstone red or blue
Do you believe what you know to be true
A system built to swallow you
Is your casket red or
Empathy and apathy and entropy and atrophy and empathy and apathy
It’s not enough
Empathy and apathy and entropy and atrophy and empathy and apathy
Our hands in blood
Delusion of a puppet show of judgments being handed from the sky
Sounds kinda crazy when you say it out loud
Exclusion of rationale
No profit no glory no virtue no reason why
No amount of money or power will ever satiate the greed
Disillusion of the labor forced to scrape an income to survive
Sounds kinda crazy when you say it out loud
A creep and a thief
What a relief
The best of the clowns to drag us all down
The land of the free is make believe and nothing belongs to you
A kook and a crook
US playbook
Pledge to a team claiming supremacy
Swallow this shit and deal with it
Pay for it
Trampled by it
You’re dying for it
Built to swallow you
THE BREAKS
I have never felt more ‘live in my life
Is something one might say in their time
But I am alive the same everyday
Be better ‘til the day that I die
Is something that somebody might try
Like how the van leaks
Can’t clean the stains
Hope we make it
Can’t find this place
We need new brakes
No hit the brakes
No!
Or what about the time
We drove a million miles for nothing
We didn’t even see the beach
Everything is fine
I promise everything is really fine
Or how about when I was high
And you came by we talked for hours
I didn’t even speak
We never say anything
No one fucking says a thing
Alive and dead meaninglessly
I have never felt more alive
Until the day that I die
ALLURING AIR
Manufactured beauty
Three friends auditory
Arranging air twenty one years
Tempo fast timbre shrill
No time to slow down and look out
The window
The beat pushes us forward
Until it’s closed
It’s our turn
To do a public service
Until we’re ghosts
It will all slow down one day
Still this friendship remains the same
Just musical brothers in vans
With instruments driving our plans
I will find the strength to say
I love my friends ‘til there’s no way
Just musical brothers in vans
With instruments driving our plans
We’ll continue to create
Art we can appreciate
Poor composition lead to okay composition
This music will heal our thoughts
Alluring air
Shaped with guitars
No reason to ever stop
Except for death
Our definite end
GOOD TIME
Yesterday resemblant of today
Filled the hours is a similar way
Work with people at the job
Work with animals on the farm
Gears are working on me grind and grind and grind and grind and grind
Life’s not bad but something’s clearly missing
Excuse me, myself I’ll be dismissing
To drive the I-5, through national forests
Into sage brush, around the corner, it’s almost time to get that
Music with my friends
So good to see us in the same room again
And having a good time
Wake up driving back again, I gotta make that cash again
Time keeps moving fast again, another year just passed again
Same itch scratch again, my fingers can’t relax again
It’s time to kick some ass again
Showtime with Chris (Pat) and Dave
On the stage working the magic we make
A room full of fists in the air
The energy’s enough to fill my body up with fuck yeah electricity
To spark the life in me
SO CALI AWKWARD
I like hanging out
And seeing all my friends
Put me in a crowd
I’ll get real weird
See me standing in the back
I like going to shows
And hearing all new bands
But try to talk to me
I don’t know what to do with my hands
I’m not trying to be a jerk
My mind keeps calling me an asshole (asshole)
I keep zoning out of what you’re saying
Mindlessly focused on critiquing my image
Feeling more comfortable behind a screen
Talking to people where you can’t be seen
I can spill my guts to them
And get one thousand thumbs
I can spill my guts to them
And know that this is dumb
I can spill my guts to them
And get that dopamine
I can pour my heart out
And repeat this everyday
It doesn’t need to be this way
But that’s the way it is
I like hanging out
And seeing all my friends
Put me in a crowd
And I don’t know what to do with my hands
DOWNFALL COLLECTIVE
Can you imagine being okay with the way things have ever been?
Always a new collective attempt at our own destruction
Fight for the last marshmallow stick in a forest fire
Can you remember the last time you saw a bridge that wasn’t also someone’s home?
For the left behind and down out of luck
While up above, a surplus of vacant second houses
Keep pulling up, but those old bootstraps keep getting stuck
Reckless. Sightless. Careless.
Reckless competition renders us sightless to the reflection of our careless lack of empathy for our hopelessly degrading population
A fanatic cult, money is our god for whom we give our sacrifice each day
Our minds and bodies, our time and talent, we just give it away
Just to survive, yet with our lives we’ll surely pay
We need help, this culture is only motivated by the distraction of wealth
Not by community, not by progress, not by health
Our social fabric, a cheap plastic caste of itself
As we descend to our impending coup de gras, let’s leave the ending
Skip the last page, put the book back on the shelf
Is this system for survival just a symptom of our parasitic self?
GIANT DIPPER
No one’s going to help us
So we’ve got to go out and get it
Go see the world
On our own terms
Lose all the money
That we have earned
Will you please narrate
And sit backwards on that crate?
The world goes on without us
So find a place while there’s time to fit in
Make our own path
There’s no herd to follow
We’re going to ride
Giant Dipper tomorrow
If all goes to plan
We’ll grow wings on the van
It’s been great to know
Everything we’ve accomplished
Was something we did on our own
We’ll pour sweat on stages
To make sense of this earth
See for ourselves what we don’t know
Those stars on a map
Are now our friends’ houses
Thank you for the sleep on your floor
We’ll be stoked when life ends
‘cause we valued friendship
Over the loss of what we own
To use fucking cliché
I would not trade it for the whole fucking world
We look to the past
We hope for a future
No one but ourselves
Can displace our desire
Our time goes so fast
To play slow seems useless
You can’t leave a mark
If you started voiceless
We don’t know when
The ending is coming
We don’t know when
The ending is coming
We don’t know when
The ending is coming
CANCEL CULTURE
Come for the culture stay for the profits
Buy it all up drive everyone out
Khakis and clipboards make condos and towers
And minimum wage can’t pay for the power
They’ll tell you that your work is not enough
You should have worked harder gotta be tough
Khakis and clipboards make condos and towers
And minimum wage can’t pay for the power
They’ll tell you that your work is not enough
You should have worked harder gotta be tough
Eat eat eat consume consume
We really are all doomed
Paying month to month on a sinking ship
In every city we’re watching our memories become a prize
Its appeal its demise
Eat eat eat consume consume
We really are all doomed
Come for the culture stay for the profits
They’ll tell you that your work is not enough
You should have worked harder gotta be tough
Khakis and clipboards make condos and towers
And minimum wage can’t pay for the power
Pay for the power
WAKE UP
Wake up in the morning and I listen to the news
And current affairs, issues, and interviews
With concerned citizens of planet Earth today
So many problems and it’s easy to get confused
Or sink into the blues, or just hit snooze
And not think about it and just check out
But we can’t shut our eyes
Because otherwise we will be
The people that chose not to see
The bed that we are gonna fucking lie in
Time’s running out we gotta smash the machine now
And when it’s broken down, will we know how
To reassemble the parts in a better way?
Or will the gears keep turning out the same old flaws
Where one’s gain is another’s loss, while the planet dies?
Or can we transcend to better means and ends
These flames are getting hotter we need water to put on the fire
Situation critical, things are looking dire
In a burning house we’re gonna fucking die in
TOXIC POSITIVITY
Everybody is selfish
Everyone is stupid
Everybody is greedy
Everyone is impatient
Everybody is entitled
Everyone is lazy
Everybody is arrogant
Everybody is the main fucking character
Shiny and round
Hide from the sound
I am the sun
All by myself
My little bubble
Nothing to prove
Long as you lose
Better than you
All by myself
My little bubble
Don’t look at me
Don’t talk to me
Can’t you see
I’m somebody who thinks that
I’m super important
Everyone is a liar
Everyone is a coward
Everybody is a dipshit
Everyone is annoying
Everybody is a phony
Everyone is a sellout
Everybody is a two face
Everybody smells bad
Shiny and round
Hide from the sound
I am the sun
All by myself
My little bubble
Don’t look at me
Don’t talk to me
Can’t you see I’m
Uhh
WELCOME MAT
People desperate to escape the wars
Waging right where once was their front door
Yesterday they lived their lives in peace
Today bullets and bombs seem not to seize
Normal lives with normal families
Working normal jobs to feed the kids
Watch their towns burning to the ground
Blinded by the sight, deaf by the sound
Gotta get out, escape fate
Gotta get out before it gets too late
Gotta go now, you gotta get out fast
Not the first bomb, not the last
Not the first bomb, not the last
There’s a place they could go they were told
Where the streets are paved in gold
Equal opportunities for all just beyond that wall
Bring your tired, bring your poor
Your huddled masses to the golden door
Life, liberty, pursuit of so much more
It’s all awaiting your arrival
And so they brought their tired, they brought their poor
To a land they’d never been before
And while broken down and sore
The guards took their fucking children
Systematic severance
Mass incarceration for the cause
No sentence, no crime, just doing time
Xenophobic patriotic white-national alt-right supremacy
Leaders of this great society, maintain modern aristocracy
Keep the gears of power grinding what’s left of anyone’s hopes and dreams
Elevate the wealthy and smash the poor
This is what the stars and stripes are for
Children ripped from mothers’ arms
What a disgusting fucked up way to treat
Human beings grasping for helping hands
Can’t wake this dystopian dream
Recurring history
New time and place, same as before
Subjugation of the poor
This is what the stars and stripes are for