Lyrics and Music by Nicholas Toone. ©2024.
I want to start this by asking you to sit down relax close your eyes and think back way back and try to remember a time where you could imagine anything really grand adventures played out maybe riding on horseback or maybe behind the wheel of a fast fast car that your could fly into space and float amongst the milky way when you felt like everything and anything was at your fingertips and you could just reach out and take it
And then your hand gets slapped,
You’re ordered to behave
They say they have the manual that covers cradle to grave
Study it front to back, there’ll be a test
Don’t you know they want to save you…
From the tsk tsk tsk’s and the finger wags
And the embarrassment that comes from being constantly nagged about
Your hopes and dreams, they’re for not
They’ll just serve to fail you
You tell yourself that you’re gonna do it this time you’ve learned your place you’re going to put on a fresh clean shirt and do it right and off you go into the world but along the way it starts to drift it all begins to go just a little bit sideways just a little bit off the grid and you just kinda let it happen you stop forcing it because it feels good dammit it feels right and you realize that you can choose where to place your feet in this one short life
But it’s a tight run ship
And with a crack of the whip
We all bow and pray for glory, yeah, but we ain’t shit
There’s no trophy at the end of this race
Yet we keep on running
With all the left-right-black-white
Sides of the coin
There’s no room for shades of grey
They tell us “Just get in line!”
Forget your hopes and dreams
Don’t you know? They’ll just serve to fail you
And here you are you’ve done your bit but you’re exhausted used up depleted keelhauled dragged under and across the barnacle encrusted hull of the glad-hands after you snapped back to the grid and slowly gave up everything for the promise of something what that something was you can’t remember maybe it was your forty two inch tee vee maybe it was your new phone maybe it was your new car but deep down you know it’s not the car from your first verse there’s no flying to space no stars there’s just the threadbare remnants of a daydream you only find at the bottom of a bottle
… this is not the end
… this is not my end