And so...

"All through the day I me mine..."
George Harrison, I Me Mine, the Let It Be album

"Strange days indeed..."
John Lennon, Milk And Honey, released posthumously

"You never got me down Ray..."
Jake LaMotta to Sugar Ray Robinson in Raging Bull

These are quotes that ring the bell loudly. The bell peels. The banana peel is for slipping on. If you meet the Buddha on the road and his pants pocket is bulging, he may be concealing a banana peel.

You don't need to be a musician to understand how a "monitor" works.You place a monitor speaker in front of you on the stage. Then you can hear the music you are playing and the song you are singing. Hopefully. The mind is a monitor. It will tell you what's what and what is going on inside your brain where your mind resides. These have been strange days. Indeed...

Some of my beast friends are musically inclined. Music, if we are in it, playing it or listening to it for reasonable reasons, will remain by our side pretty faithfully. Truth be told, because music is not human it is able to be your hairless sound wave dog, loyal even as hairless (guileless and gutless) humans seek shelter from you or ask you where you are keeping your head these days.

I am currently collaborating with two musical cohorts who are far away. It is a highly collaborative collaboration. The very beast kind. We will attempt to play music together through cyberspace. It's not exactly the Greenwich Village of my nostalgic fantasies. No meaningful eye contact is available. No fawning groupies or devoted legion of fans.

It appears to be, however, real.

Real is like vegetables. Not my favourite source of nourishment, necessarily, but real may prevent scurvy and rickets. Mentally speaking, I mean. The balance is this: strange days often bring more information than the lazy hazy crazy days of summer (or spring and fall and winter). Easy days go down like oysters. They tend to slide by and rarely produce pearls.

Real can be really bitter. The tongue curls. It may even cleave. It may, as Dylan wrote so wonderfully in The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll, "snarl..." We recoil from real and seek the shelter of reality television. We hide underneath the sugar coat, wanting warmth and sustaining decay. Oh well, the weatherman says spring will arrive sometime this year or next.

I am playing with a new four track recording machine. It fits in the palm of my hand, like my forehead, but it is not slick with sweat. I will send two songs with this missive. I will not flood your inbox, nor your fax machine, neither shall I Facebook or text you, nor will I Instagram you. Under no circumstances will you read that I have emitted a tweet...

The chances are not all that great that I shall even see you in the flesh often.

But I shall think of you, with love ;-)

Your beast friend Johnny Maudlin
The Worst of all Possible Coasts

The songs are I Remember You (I'm Trying To Forget) and Sugar Pond. One is naturally corn fed, the other is for sprinkling on your cereal in your morning memory time...