A-Z Challenge: Time

Time.  I'm going to tackle this one from multiple angles.

For starters, I've been short on time lately.  Work is busy.  It's a good kind of busy, though, working for a growing company with a bunch of good people.  But the work / life balance is difficult.  You know how the old formula goes:

(work * (two kids + dog) / (wife - cost of living) = get back to work

The hours at the office limit my personal initiatives.  I'm planning to run a half-marathon, but I'm only getting out and running once a week...a long run on the weekends.  It hurts. 

This A-Z challenge has certainly lived up to its name...but it's a challenge I've needed because I haven't been writing much else lately.  I've been getting up early to make the time to post, but when you miss a weekend day, it's tough to catch up again. 

Time is relative, though.  I have a bit of jetlag today.  I flew to California on Sunday, you see, and got to bed at 10:00 pm California time, which is 1:00 am Ohio time.  Then I woke up at 7:30 am Ohio time, which is 4:45 am California time.  I got caught up on work, had a great meeting, then flew home, a destination I reached at 11:00 pm California time, which is 2:00 am Ohio time.  Then I got to work by 9:00 am Ohio time, whihc is 6:00am California time.  So you get the point.  My internal clock is a bit scrambled.

But if you do it right, you can manipulate and stretch time when you travel.  I've flown to Chicago and arrived before I took off, thanks to a 55-minute flight to a destination 60 minutes behind.

One time I flew home from Germany on my birthday.  October 10th lasted 30 hours that year. It might have been 31 hours, actually, because I touched ground in Chicago to change planes and then flew ahead to Ohio.  You see, Dusseldorf is six hours ahead of Ohio, and I flew back chasing the sun..and winning.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
Racing around, to come up behind you again
The sun is the same, in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death...
-  "Time" by Roger Waters / Pink Floyd

Dark Side of the Moon holds a Guinness World Record for being in the charts longer than any other album in history...591 consecutive weeks (a little over 11 years straight).  It's a masterpiece, best listened to in whole, and rather loud. 

"Time" stands out for it's blend of insightful lyrics, music (how many songs open with a cool drum solo?), and sound effects (thanks to Alan Parsons, who had once recorded every clock in a shop). 

Roger Waters was pushing thirty when he wrote those lyrics.  He had been playing with Pink Floyd for a decade, successful enough to make a living, but not yet a superstar. 

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run.  You missed the starting gun...

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A-Z Challenge: Dogs

I think Pink Floyd’s Animals is a great work of art, even if George Orwell did it first.  My favorite song on the Album is “Dogs,” a 16-minute ballad of a back-stabbing, greedy middle-manager.  Used by the Pigs to keep the Sheep in line, the Dogs will do anything to get ahead.

You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to
So that when they turn their backs on you
You’ll get the chance to put the knife in…  
The guitar solo that follows those lines is punctuated by cymbal crashes, and the cymbals sound like whip-lashes.  I love how Pink Floyd uses sound to help paint a visual picture.  They layer in synthesized dogs barking, the whip…it all reinforces the words and the theme. 
Then there’s the guitar work.  Dogs is about 90% of side A, and it’s essentially all David Gilmour doing sonic magic with his strat.
This was a good period for Pink Floyd.  They were riding high on the success of Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, but still ahead of the tempers that flared up during The Wall.  In fact, it was during the Animals tour that Roger Waters came up with the concept of The Wall.  Roger Waters got sick of people lighting off fireworks and doing everything under the sun other than listen to the music. At a concert in Montreal, one particularly drunk and unruly fan rushed the stage and Roger lost it and spit on him, then cussed out the whole crowd.  After that he started to imagine a wall between him and the audience…

Music Lesson

My wife works on Monday and Wednesday, and I get the kids ready to go to daycare and get on the school bus. A Pink Floyd mix CD played in my car on the way to daycare. I love Pink Floyd, they're my all-time favorite band.

"The Happiest Days of our Lives" was the first song. It starts with the sound of a helicopter, and then a teacher's voice yells, "You! Yes, you! Stand still, laddie!"

"What's this song about?" my elder son asked.

"It's about a boy who didn't go to a nice school," I explained.

"What was wrong with it?"

"Well, a long time ago, teachers could be mean to kids. They made fun of them sometimes, and could even spank them," I said, hoping he would realize how good he has it. No real problem there, or when the song transitioned into "Another Brink in the Wall- Part II," which, if you are a reclusive ingrate and didn't already know this vital piece of music history, is the "We don't need no education" song.

No problem so far. School isn't fun sometimes. Easy to explain, without going into the depths of the dark sarcasm in the classroom. Plus, both kids love the line "If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?" Maybe because I say it every time they don't eat their dinner and then ask for a treat, so now they know where that line comes from.

The next song was Young Lust.

"What's this song called?" The Inquisitor asked, striving to understand. I told him "Young Love" because I really didn't want to get into the differences between love and lust.

"What's it about?" was the inevitable follow up.

It's interesting, because "A rock star looking to gang bang a bunch of hot groupies" is both the correct and the incorrect answer. It's correct, because that's what the song is really about; it's incorrect, because the person asking is in first grade.

So I did what any of you would do. I yelled at the car in front of me, to create a diversion.

"Ohhhh," David Gilmore sang, "I need a dirty woman..."

"What did he say?" was the inevitable follow up.

"Come on, turn!"

I think that next time we're going to listen to Chicka-Chicka Boom-Boom.