Hassle
Sitting at a bar with few people and primo air conditioning. Hot and stuffy outside, it is cool and calm in here. Music on the set is Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.
I read a Beatles Usenet group once where someone asked for explanation of the lyrics of this song. He wanted to know what the Beatles meant by “The girl with colitis goes by.” A polite response told the questioner that the real lyrics were “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes,” not anything about colitis.
I can not hear this song without thinking that a girl with colitis strolls through the drug haze.
Similar story about a Steve Miller Band song. “Little story ’bout Billy Bob and Jackie Sue/Two young lovers with nothing better to do…”
I forget the exact lines but I always (correctly) knew the line to come was “Swear they ran into a great big hassle.”
Driving around Tampa with a friend one day he oversang that line. He bellowed “SWEAR THEY RAN INTO A GREAT BIG ASSSHOLE” and held his hands in an open hole position.
I laughed at the notion of two young lovers hurtling headlong into a giant asshole. More significant is the fact that I can only hear ASSHOLE in that song, not hassle. And beyond that, I think of hassle as asshole, or as running headlong into a giant asshole.
“Man, what a hassle.” See I can’t just say that without imagining that the situation is spiraling into the blackness of a giant ….
OK, this is going on too long.
I just tried to describe the greatness of Bach to a girl here at the bar. That did not get too far. She played the flute in grade school and thinks she played “some Bach stuff” back then.
Every day I get a little bit further into the Well-Tempered Clavier. I almost said I get further through it but you never get “through” the stuff. It gets deeper. I swear I am finding something, reaching into something. I am not certain what that something is, but at times I feel like I could ball it up and throw a wad of it against the wall.
