It was one of those “glass half-empty” days.

In this case, a too-wee dram of Lagavulin that wasn’t near enough to dull my depression or to spirit me past the day’s dismal dose of unfolding events on the six o’clock news.

COVID-19. The usual suspects all lined up on the firing line: China and Iran front and centre. 

Panicked markets imploding.

Trump, Trump and more Trump, looking increasingly like a shoe-in for re-election.

Ongoing blockades. Pipeline politics. Our deluded and incompetent prime minister only making matters worse.

Our economy paralyzed in righteous protest. Our nation reeling from the ills it has invited, still in denial of Indigenous rights and title, of the gravity and urgency of our global climate crisis, and of its own complicity in the existential crimes of this century.

Our planet willfully cooking itself to death. Our sick world getting sicker. Mostly, from viral fear, hate, anger, and intolerance of all it knows is coming but feels powerless to stop or change—and of those it holds responsible.

Choose your poison. We know who they are, as long as they are not us.

At least, I do. And in my mind, the soundtrack of our times is cynicism. 

Last night it was a new twist on an old Louis Armstrong classic, written by Bob Thiele (as "George Douglas") and George David Weiss.

That’s the great thing about songs: we can play them as we wish in our own heads and rearrange their words and meaning to bend them to our moods.

It’s only the melody that really rules. And our wistful will to let them sing to us as they will, hearing what we want to hear and sometimes filling in the blanks to flip their content on its head.

Opposites attract, it’s true. In rhyming verse no less than in discordant life, they ever dance to the same tunes, "Across the Universe".

Today, another pesky earworm crawled into my brain and rewrote itself.

A poet, I sure ain’t, but by my second dram, better judgment went out the window and I felt obliged to share it. Cheers. 

"What A Wonderful World"

I see trees of green

Oceans of dread

Deserts of apathy

Darkness ahead

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world

I see skies of blue

Seas of despair

Progressive inertia

Awash in hot air

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world

The colours of avarice

Too white to deny

Vacuums of leadership

So much to decry

I see tribes shaking heads

Saying, "What can we do?"

They're all really saying

"Goddamn you"

I see lies cast as truth

Wrongs held as right

“Woke” ordered entropy

Our dark profane light

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world

I hear rich babies cry

I watch their fear grow

They'll never fathom

The pain they'll never know

And I think to myself—fuck

What a wonderful world

Yes, I think to myself

What a wonderful world

Oh yeah