"What Is This Shit?"
Thanks to this lousy pandemic 2 years has felt like a long time. We're all sitting around for things to get back to normal even though that might not really be on the cards. All the same, 2019 feels like a long way back. There was that lousy election that Scomo won in May that year, weird recriminations about the ALP losing the unlosable election and then there were the Black Summer bushfires.
In late 2019 I was working on a bunch of songs where I was experimenting with modes and hiding the key centre. As usual I was struggling for material for, lyrics so I was writing them off headlines of news articles - when in doubt, 3 act story across 3 verses, chorus to bang home the main sentiment, a bridge to offer commentary, stick in the obligatory guitar solo for kicks - Bob's your song-writing uncle.
Then I had a 2 week bout of some weird bowel infection. Maybe it was salmonella from bad chicken. I don't know. I think I was on the can more or less for 2 straight weeks. It was so bad I couldn't sleep at night because I had to get up and sit on the can and let the brown liquid pour out of my backside. The trickle never seemed to end. The bushfires that went totally out of control were already flooding Sydney with this orange smoke. As I sat late nights/early morning on the toilet with the window open, breathing in the fumes of my own diarrhoea and the smoke from the worst bushfire I had seen, wondering if I was just going to die on the toilet seat... something snapped. I couldn't take it any more.
New Years came and went. The Pandemic was starting up in China with suspicions that it had already snuck into Sydney. And then I saw the images of just what the people of Mallacoota had endured. It was beyond alarming and utterly appalling. People had spent the night in the ocean off the pier looking up at the burning night skies. Ash fell like snowflakes from the angry red skies. Their homes went up in the hellfire. From the treetops they could hear the screams of burning koalas. That account left me devastated. What were my problems with breathing in the smoke fumes and suffering from that 2 week diarrhoea next to their suffering?
So the next thing I knew, I abandoned that project I had been working on, and did these songs about the bushfires and global warming and how colossally, irredeemably, comprehensively, stupide are our political leaders.
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