cosmicevan wrote:Take it...to the limit...
...take it...
...to the limit...
....take it...
...to the limit...one more time...
I actually had a formative psychic ego-death experience in which a specific song by The Eagles played a divisive and decisive role.
It was one of those situations where The Gates of Heaven and The Gates of Hell swing wide and you realize that the
hinges have been pivoting on the same pin all along. A feather, a thought, a gear...swiveling (as Frank Black screamed
on Mr. Grieves—"Do you have another pinion?") from pin to pinion. A matter of opinion. You see...? Wheels inside of wheels...
Grinding, all the time, exceedingly fine. And you find your mind is in one wheel as it travels along a bigger one inside a
bigger one and since you are on the wheel you don't notice the centripetal force most the time but now on this particular trip
around the wheel the petals bloom and rot in timelapse shivers and the gears teethe and seethe and bite and chew.
You see? The concatenation of life and death. Cyclic, but now sick and slick and for profit and that makes a difference.
And then it happened. It was sign and signal. The Eagles song playing like a slap in the face.
The song blared out over the loudspeakers between sets at a concert in a baseball stadium. See the shape? How it spins? The
lights along the rim, inside the inner tube as it spins. Like a wheel? I wasn't exactly "in my right mind" but what my "left mind"
had to do with it was unclear, occupied as it was in efforts at the remainder... what was left?
Dividing and biding time with the big questions. Amidst the flurry, the widening gyre and the center that would not hold, the
lyrics from this one particular Eagles song resonated and taunted and laughed at my pain with an ominous revelatory significance that
was seriously shaking (like a helpless baby) my quickly slipping grip on facticity.
Part of the ominous "cruel joke" of the song-revelation centered on how much in my normal life up until that spinning moment
I had despised the slack, self-centered and self-satisfying glaze of the Me Generation and The Eagles, all of which
was personified for me in that phrase "TAKE IT EASY". I loathed the glib catchiness of The Eagles and their prepacked brand
of "rugged" and "earthy" that seemed to have been purchased directly out of Sears Catalog for Husky Boys.
The Eagles represented the ascendancy in the 1970s of the corporate parasite as it hosted itself in the failed and rotting corpse
of the previous generation's barely held or coherent ideals. The Hippies had "rebelled" against corporate culture and "The Man" and
"the evils of money", but then when their "spiritual path" led them to "self-actualization" they decided that they wanted nice things
and so instantly turned into Yuppies and subsequently found that they could swoop in and TAKE IT and it was EASY. The previous generation,
who had a rage for order had wanted white picket fences and order at all costs because they had lived through World Wars and The Depression.
But then that older generation, prematurely old, burned out and started stepping down from positions of power and the Baby Boomers just
waltzed in to TAKE IT and it was EASY.
The Eagles—to me—personified an apolitical, feel-gooderism stamped with the tics and faux-authenticities cribbed from other, better bands.
They clad those surface-traits in designer denim, the crotches of which had been burnished by the underage ministrations of countless
coked-to-the-gills groupies. They swaddled their tanned limbs in denim that had been used as lint cloths to polish the gold records on which
their cynically saccharine sentiments had been laid with optimal impact. Laid and then laid, cut a groove in the platter as it spun gold.
And then that song—TAKE IT EASY—came blaring out of the loudspeakers and it confirmed the nightmare vision that had been ceaselessly
circling in my head.
Take it easy.
Take it easy.
Don't let the sound of your own wheels
Drive you crazy.
An admission. They had been doing it on purpose. There's more to say, but it would take a long time to spell it out in detail or in a way that
would trace every thread and threat of thought and psychic sinew to its source. Eventually I intend to, but perhaps not here.
