Second Hand Liner Notes--March, 1991, Montrose, California

I am always telling my wife that a day doesn't seem to have a full
twenty-four hours anymore. I always wish they were longer, or I had a much
faster metabolism, say, like a shrew or a hummingbird, because two or three
o'clock in the morning always comes too soon and I'm still trying to figure
out where the day went.

There are days when you suddenly glance around as if awakened from a stupor
and are struck by the great magnitude of life, the realities of mortality,
the ironies of our time.  I suppose songs written in these circumstances
become a bit of a personal catharsis for the writer.  Friendships and
kinships take on new light and are understood to be
something one should never take for granted.  You cringe at your stupidity.
You cower under the future.  You fear for the world of your children.

There are other days when the intuitive awareness of the great and
wonderful depth of life you felt and harbored as a child, that feeling
brought gushing by a certain, sound or smell or time of day or season, will
come flooding back in again. You relish the past, you pity the present, you
play to the imagination of your children, you try vicariously to
re-experience your own fresh youth.  I must admit these days seem to become
rarer, and worth the effort it takes to remember them somehow.

Most usual are the days you wish you could feel anything.  You wish that
you could care more than you seem to be able to, or could focus on
something beyond the mundane little dance steps involved in the busywork of
subsistence.  At least there is he impulse to ask yourself, "Why?"  There
are reasons to be thankful just having something to keep you busy.  Songs
written by those so inclined to busy themselves in these days tend to
become a simple documentation of feelings in the waxing and waning of our
awareness of events on the planet, both near and far.  But the clock seems
only to remind you that there's more to do and you're behind in
whatever it is you're already supposed to have done.  Your children are
loud.  Things could be better.  Things could be worse.  Luckily a few
things never change.