Tag: humour

Good Fair World

I wrote and recorded the title track of my album Good Fair World in 2008. This was long before covid, proud boys, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I wrote and recorded the title track of my album Good Fair World in 2008. This was long before covid, proud boys, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

My thinking was, world problems seem simple enough to solve, so why don’t we? Is that naive? We never seem to have enough facts to be sure of anything. This was true then and now that trust in the news and our leadership seems to be a trending problem all over, I feel like this little song is sadly gaining in relevance. But am I being sarcastic or optimistic? Both, obviously.

Good Fair World

Music and Lyrics- Jan Randall

All we need is a good world
Good world’s all we need
All we need is a good world
Good world’s all we need

Read your book on the beach
Drink not too far outa reach
A good world is really all we need.

All we need is a fair world
A fair world’s all we need
All we need is a fair world
Fair world is really all we need

Where night is night
And day is day
Do your work and Collect your pay
A fair fair world is really all we need

So let an inch be an inch
And a pound be a pound
Let Up be up
And Down be down
When you join the game
And ya pay your dues
Let the winners win
Let the losers lose

All we need is a nice world
Nice world’s all we need
All we need is a nice world
Nice world’s all we need

We’ll keep square as square
And round as round
Keep our heads in the air
And our feet on the ground
We’ll never never let the good guys fail
Make all the bad guys go to jail
We could heal the sick
We could feed the poor
Tie dye our shirts
Make love not war

A fair world is really all we need
A nice world is really all we need
A good good fair fair world is really all we need.

The fine line between naive optimism and an endless eternal cloud of doom

The Upside of Boredom

What does a flying banana have to do with boredom?

I think we can all agree, life is short. Other well worn adages resonate equally well: “Time is Precious”, “Live for the Moment” , and so on. Groucho Marx said “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.” Once one of the most recognizable names in comedy, his joke slides into obscurity as easily as he might have predicted when he thought of it. And you might well now think, who is Groucho?

This July I turn 69. That’s five years older than Paul McCartney’s young fantasy of turning 64. I can still remember what it felt like to turn 20 shocked that a decade had sailed by since I was 10. I knew then that our perceptions of how quickly the clock spins around is somehow skewed. Good times seemed to make an hour or even an entire summer melt away. If only I could somehow slow things down I might be able to wring out some extra life out of this mysteriously rigged system. “A Watched Pot Never Boils.” Aha! I had found the key.

This said, it is hard to enjoy “Watching the Paint Dry.” The edge I had discovered quickly fell flat under its own tedious gravity. It’s now been nearly five decades since I discovered my destiny as a musician as a twenty something. Whenever I play the piano, I might as well enter a time tunnel and wake up on the other side in what feels the blink of an eye. It’s the opposite of boring. Always. And I can’t help it, I have to play.

So I admit I have tried cheating time from time to time. I learned that a nap in the middle of the afternoon can make one day feel like two. I’ve tried multi-tasking but I am terrible at it. A minor victory over the perception of time could be the ultimate definition of a losing battle.

Baby Jan 1952

Time itself is not the enemy. We are all united in this plane of existence in a very one sided alliance with the rules of reality as we march towards the unknown. Boredom is a gift that should never be squandered, so let’s just fill it with love and relax, shall we?

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