Not What It Used To Be

Not What It Used To Be

Toby Tyner

All Rights Reserved

Sittin' in a lawn chair

Wastin' my time

Sippin' on a cold beer

That was brewed by a friend of mine

Kids in the back yard

Dog in the sunlight

Strummin' this old guitar

Singin' everything is gointa be alright

Our love is not what it used to be

I just don't love you like I used to

Baby you've changed and it's clear to me

Our love is not what it used to be

I see you walkin' by

A book in your hand

I used to see just your eyes

But now it's those and the woes of the years that have gone by

See you how you used to be

But remember in a different way

With everything you've given me

I amazed with you and I just gotta say

Our love...

Love's so much deeper

Love's so much more fun

Your kisses are sweeter

Than they were when we were young and dumb

Thinkin' 'bout someday

Sittin' in a rockin' chair

After you fly away

Consumed with the room and the time that we spent there

I'll cry for a minute

Miss you for a lifetime

Love is for givin'

I'm forever in debt for the love that you made mine

Our love...

Don't hit

There is something satisfyingly corporeal about hitting someone.

Football players know what I am talking about.

It's inherently kinaesthetic. Contact with another person's body gives you a distinct and measurable sense of the position and balance of your own. It's like sex that way. So much of the experience is in the depth of your own existence relative to another's.

I've seen it. I've done it. It's been done to me. I've wanted to do it and haven't.

I'm not talking about the desire to swat your kids, or bop them on the head, which I've also wanted to do, and have done - usually with regret.

I mean a full-on desire to punch someone in the face; to define for them where their world stops and yours begins. It's satisfying and primeval. It is a basic and animalistic assertion of authority.

But we are not animals. It is virtuous to control those animal instincts. Whether because we believe god created us differently, or that we've evolved beyond them, it is a show of civilized behavior (civilised behaviour if you're British) to rise above the violent reactions.

I wish I never felt that way. I wish there was nothing to rise above. I wish there was no anger.

It's a big big world

I don't really know what to do or say about the realization I had this evening. I was redoing the sheets on Lennon's bed, mattress back on the springs he'd dragged it down from, protective covering for accidents, sheets and blankets, etc., and I had a very vivid flash of a man somewhere in this world laying his child down on the hard ground to sleep. It was real, and it happened as the same sun slipped under a connected western horizon, perhaps my horizon.

How did this come to be, that I would take for granted more swaddling than millions of humans ever had? How did it come to be that people should expect so much just for sleeping?

I'm not saying comfort is wrong of itself, but to be comfortable through luck when the unlucky suffer....

There IS enough. There is enough food. There are enough blankets. There are enough mosquito nets. There is enough medicine.

Why are human beings so afraid to care for each other?

Why am I?

Please, for the sake of the future

Let's just all try to use the word "proclivity" a little more often.