More developed ideas, conversations, narratives, and philosophies.
It’s a pyramid all right. The 1% at the top over the other 99. Might say they’re supporting the peak. Reality is the pyramid is upside down & underground. Most important & most plentiful, the bottom, supported by ever smaller layers of better-offs, til the one top. In death, they honor the mirror top: offering useless one at the top to keep the gods company.
© 2026, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
Leave a CommentAfter another careful yet throughly enjoyable listen last night, I must again rank the #WhiteAlbum as the #Beatles crowning glory. Unlike their previous album, the costumes were off. Yes, you can hear the band disintegrating, yet they were never off target. The styles they explored and the way the sound filled the special spectrum with every instrument and sound specifically put where you hear it, the way each of the members created, reinvented, and predicted most of their own, and everybody else’s musical direction for the next 20 years, is mind-boggling. There is not a revelation-free moment. This is the Beatles naked. Exposed. Not a product or gimmick or novel social experiment. A real band. That could groove its ass off and then break your heart, only to then blow your mind. They put the polish back on, later, but this is where you saw them backstage. If you haven’t heard this on headphones or studio monitors, try it again.
© 2026, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
Leave a CommentMore out of left field crazy country lyrics: “It never made a profit so I give it out for free. It doesn’t matter either way that’s how it’s gonna be. In any case the fixing it is not all up to me & I ain’t much use to bring along, but what will be will be. The answer’s never where you’re looking, stop looking @ me. I’ll have 2 charge admission & u can’t afford my fee.” I’ll be here all night. I ain’t wearing the hat because you’re supposed to be throwing money in it, right? Living the dream, right? Well, it’s somebody’s dream. I never wanted a guitar-shaped swimming pool or nothing, but maybe a bit of a concrete pond in the back yard and a fence to keep it private would do. Of course, there’s the money to think about. Gives you pause, don’t it? That’s what the hat’s for, remember? It ain’t a tip. It’s for services rendered. As if that was enough to hold up the rest of your life you carved away just learning how to play that last fifteen or so minutes. Yeah, thats the Art of the Midwest as I learned it. Oh, but that’s so Appalachian, ain’t it? JD Vance might think I made it up. LOL.
© 2026, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
Leave a CommentEverybody always says this generation is going to the dogs. Religion is dying, morality is dead, we live in a post truth society, our values and valued institutions are crumbling. Life will surely suck harder for those who follow us. Etc. Well, you reap what you sow, Gen X. All that 80s greed-is-good Gordon Gekko worship is biting us in the ass. We chose Veruca Salt instead of Charlie Bucket long ago. And now you’re surprised that your world sucks? Ask your grandparents what they thought of their kids generation. You’ll hear the same story since the beginning of time. Because nobody really wants change, do they? If you stub or stunt or otherwise kill off the symptoms, the underlying cause still remains. That same selfish rotten core that has what it wants, but doesn’t want what it has.
10 JAN 2026
© 2026, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
Leave a CommentIf you make sufficient contribution, you can choose your brand of execution. In the long run, it’s not a solution, but right here and now it’s not so bad.
If you choose the preferred plan of action, letting those who wish it, satisfaction, you may be more driven to distraction by what you might get than what you have.
If you spin your wheels in such delusion, that may be your whole life’s contribution. Not that there need be any confusion: it’s your recipe, no substitutions. That’s a handicap sometimes. Too bad.
13 DEC 2026
© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
Leave a CommentI love hearing songs I haven’t heard in a while. That’s why I’ll test drive streaming service playlists like “70s Hard Rock” and hope for the best: that it will include essentials like AC/DC, Sabbath, Kiss, UFO, NWOBHM, BOC, etc., along with the usual suspects Zeppelin, Floyd, Bowie, Purple, Who, Stones. But skip Boston, Kansas, Styx, REO, Foreigner (after Double Vision). You can include Van Halen (Roth) and Aerosmith (pre-MTV). Maybe Rush (up to Permanent Waves). Don’t overdo the Cheap Trick or Nugent. LOL. And definitely put in some punk. I may 60 but I’m not dead!
We love classic rock because we remember a time when we were young, employed, had our own car (that ran), a little pocket money, a small bag of something extra, and a whole lot of things we absolutely didn’t need to take care of right this minute. Nothing but time and brain cells to burn. The good old days? I’d rather be here now. Having survived that nonsense. And not really missing it all that much. It wasn’t real either, then. It just took us a lot longer to find that out. Offline. Because online was only a dot then, not a com.
© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
Leave a CommentIt feels like not that many years ago there was an interest, almost a “movement” if you will, to seek out and embrace our “authenticity”, to “get real” with ourselves and our world, and cut through all the game-playing to get back to the essentials of human living.
Am I wrong? Was that just in my head – or maybe just not in the South?
In any case, we seem to be living now in a post-truth, post-authenticity world, where it’s easier to adopt a persona (especially online) rather than be who you really are. Maybe it’s thanks to the Trump years (which ain’t over, are they?).
Maybe it’s “reality” TV. Maybe it’s because when we isolated during Covid a lot of us realized we really didn’t like ourselves all that much. Maybe it’s because of our fascination with Artificial Intelligence (AI) created not from just facts, but from our illusions, misinformation, misperceptions, and flat out lies.
Have we ourselves become deep fakes of human beings? We made corporations people. We make bots our friends. We add filters to our photos to make us younger, better looking, and cooler than we ever actually were. We imagine a world where we don’t actually have to accept responsibility or be accountable.
As Jello Biafra once quipped, the conveniences we demanded are now mandatory.
But life hasn’t gotten any easier, has it? Real life, that is. Every day here and now.
Well maybe it’s not SUPPOSED to be easy. No muscle grows without resistance.
Trees that don’t experience the wind never put down deep roots.
11 OCT 2024
© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
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