Fairytale of New York: once my traditional Christmas post

If not the greatest, the most widely documented Christmas single of ALL times!

By The Pogues, with Kirsty MacColl

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won’t see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in at ten to one
I’ve got a feeling
This year’s for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

They’ve got cars big as bars
They’ve got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It’s no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing “Galway Bay”
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

You’re a bum
You’re a punk
You’re an old slutt on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it’s our last

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing “Galway Bay”
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone
I’ve built my dreams around you

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing “Galway Bay”
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day

The Story of “Fairytale of New York”

The title for this one comes from the novel A Fairytale of New York (1973) by Irish-American author James Patrick Donleavy (b., 1926). The novel itself was based on an earlier short story and a play “Fairytales of New York” (1961) that Donleavy also wrote. He was born in New York to Irish parents and relocated to Dublin following World War II. He became active in the Dublin art scene, traveling in the same circle as Brendan Behan (see Auld Triangle), and eventually gained Irish citizenship. His best known work is probably The Ginger Man (1955). Fairytale is still in print from Atlantic Monthly Press (ISBN: 0-87113-264-8). The imagery of the song doesn’t have any strict parallels with the novel, but the overall theme is similar in that both address the elusive nature of the American dream. In the novel, the narrator reveals that his fairytale of New York was the story he told as an orphaned child: “When I was a little boy. Left in a brand new foster home. I went out playing the afternoon around the block got lost, so busy telling all the other kids a fairy tale of New York. That my real father was a tycoon and my mother a princess…”

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won’t see another one
and then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew …

The “Rare Old Mountain Dew” is a traditional Irish drinking song, usually done in a very upbeat style (the Pogues recorded a version of it with the Dubliners and released it on the “Irish Rover” 12-inch single). So the scene in the drunk tank was probably not as morose as either the music in “Fairy Tale” would suggest or as the narrator’s flashback may want to admit. This song is also a good example of Shane using his command of the traditional material to illuminate his own lyrics, in that the song is not only a great drinking tune and appropriate for a drunk tank, but the lyrics in the first stanza reappear under a different guise in Shane’s chorus.

“Galway Bay” is another traditional Irish tune. Lyrics reproduced below. The more “traditional” version is printed below. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem have a version that’s funnier, and probably more in line with the sentiments of the opening verse of “Fairytale,” but one which I have a hard time envisioning the NYPD choir singing (The NYPD choir is the New York Police Department choir).

Galway Bay

If you ever go across the sea to Ireland
Then maybe at the closing of your day
You will sit and watch the moon rise over Claddagh
And see the sun go down on Galway Bay
Just to hear again the ripple of the trout stream
The women in the meadows making hay
And to sit beside a turf fire in the cabin
And watch the barefoot gosoons at their play.

For the breezes blowing over the seas from Ireland
Are perfumed by the heather as it blows
And the women in the uplands diggin’ praties
Speak a language that the strangers do not know
For the strangers came and tried to teach us their way
They scorn’d us just for being what we are
But they might as well go chasing after moonbeams
Or light a penny candle from a star.

And if there is going to be a life hereafter
And somehow I am sure there’s going to be
I well ask my God to let me make my heaven
In that dear land across the Irish sea.

November 12, 2015

Joan of Arc’s Voices and Visions

George Bernard Shaw’s Preface to St Joan

JOAN’S VOICES AND VISIONS

Joan’s voices and visions have played many tricks with her reputation. They have been held to prove that she was mad, that she was a liar and impostor, that she was a sorceress (she was burned for this), and finally that she was a saint. They do not prove any of these things; but the variety of the conclusions reached shew how little our matter-of-fact historians know about other people’s minds, or even about their own. There are people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure. Criminal lunatic asylums are occupied largely by murderers who have obeyed voices. Thus a woman may hear voices telling her that she must cut her husband’s throat and strangle her child as they lie asleep; and she may feel obliged to do what she is told. By a medico-legal superstition it is held in our courts that criminals whose temptations present themselves under these illusions are not responsible for their actions, and must be treated as insane. But the seers of visions and the hearers of revelations are not always criminals. The inspirations and intuitions and unconsciously reasoned conclusions of genius sometimes assume similar illusions. Socrates, Luther, Swedenborg, Blake saw visions and heard voices just as Saint Francis and Saint Joan did. If Newton’s imagination had been of the same vividly dramatic kind he might have seen the ghost of Pythagoras walk into the orchard and explain why the apples were falling. Such an illusion would have invalidated neither the theory of gravitation nor Newton’s general sanity. What is more, the visionary method of making the discovery would not be a whit more miraculous than the normal method. The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the reasonableness of the discovery. If Newton had been informed by Pythagoras that the moon was made of green cheese, then Newton would have been locked up. Gravitation, being a reasoned hypothesis which fitted remarkably well into the Copernican version of the observed physical facts of the universe, established Newton’s reputation for extraordinary intelligence, and would have done so no matter how fantastically he had arrived at it. Yet his theory of gravitation is not so impressive a mental feat as his astounding chronology, which establishes him as the king of mental conjurors, but a Bedlamite king whose authority no one now accepts. On the subject of the eleventh horn of the beast seen by the prophet Daniel he was more fantastic than Joan, because his imagination was not dramatic but mathematical and therefore extraordinarily susceptible to numbers: indeed if all his works were lost except his chronology we should say that he was as mad as a hatter. As it is, who dares diagnose Newton as a madman?

In the same way Joan must be judged a sane woman in spite of her voices because they never gave her any advice that might not have come to her from her mother wit exactly as gravitation came to Newton. We can all see now, especially since the late war threw so many of our women into military life, that Joan’s campaigning could not have been carried on in petticoats. This was not only because she did a man’s work, but because it was morally necessary that sex should be left out of the question as between her and her comrades-in-arms. She gave this reason herself when she was pressed on the subject; and the fact that this entirely reasonable necessity came to her imagination first as an order from God delivered through the mouth of Saint Catherine does not prove that she was mad. The soundness of the order proves that she was unusually sane; but its form proves that her dramatic imagination played tricks with her senses. Her policy was also quite sound: nobody disputes that the relief of Orleans, followed up by the coronation at Rheims of the Dauphin as a counterblow to the suspicions then current of his legitimacy and consequently of his title, were military and political masterstrokes that saved France. They might have been planned by Napoleon or any other illusionproof genius. They came to Joan as an instruction from her Counsel, as she called her visionary saints; but she was none the less an able leader of men for imagining her ideas in this way.

October 8, 2015

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2015, Day2

Started my Saturday with an 8 a.m. moving job, not a brilliant idea considering I have a (very) bad back, had done more walking up & down steep slopes getting in & out of the festival (Hellman Hollow, formerly known as Speedway Meadow, named after the founder of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Billionaire Venture Capitalist Warren Hellman) than I had done in a couple of years, combined with the standing or sitting on the ground all day on the previous day– especially in light of the fact that I was planning on doing the same that and the following day, but…

After the moving job (which provided badly needed cash, and was extremely easy at that) I went home, showered & changed clothes, packed the bare minimum of supplies for a day at a large music festival, and headed off to the Festival earlier than I probably would have, had I allowed myself to sleep in. But, tired but content (with a few extra shekels from the move), I arrived there shortly before the first act, Chatham County Line.

Talk about “Unplugged”…

Yes folks, that is four musician/vocalists singing and playing into one microphone! This is Chatham County Line, all the Way from North Carolina. How they were able to manage such a clear sound & dynamic range, without benefit of having any of their instruments plugged in, is beyond me, but not beyond this bunch:

I just wish I knew what sort of Omni-Directional Microphone they were using for this. What they were playing wasn’t really Bluegrass per se, but kind of a pop sound playing on traditional bluegrass instruments: guitar, stand-up bass, banjo, mandolin, and violin on one song. I forgot their roundabout introduction for this song, something ironic about “old & traditional” before playing a 60s era Rolling Stones tune, “This could be the Last Time”, They did a great job on it, even covering that edgy, distorted lead guitar figure in the original using mandolin & banjo– and their harmonies on the chorus were much better than on the Stones’ version.

Next up was Laurie Lewis and the Right Hands, which included some local musicians– including a kid (named Max Schwartz, I think) playing stand-up bass from the Berkeley High School Jazz Band– and as she introduced him she cracked he was planning on going on the road with some Bluegrass Group after graduation. She had a more traditional sound, including a cover of Emmylou Harris’ “Orphan Girl”. Of the Bluegrass groups I heard at the festival, her group kept the tightest rhythm, although they never really played at anything resembling a breakneck pace.

Here’s a (very badly recorded, using a hand-held $29 phone camera in a pretty stiff breeze) video of Laurie Lewis and longtime musical partner Tom Rozum (on lead vocals here), and they were joined by a trio making the Bluegrass Circuit this year called the T Sisters, and I was able to record the second verse (which used up most of my phone’s memory, but…

This is the point at every HSB Festival where I find it inconceivable that the facilities are not equipped with Space-Time Portals to shuttle you between two acts that you want to see, but who happen to be playing at the same time on another stage. Hot Tuna was coming up next on the Banjo Stage, but I also wanted to see Dave and Phil Alvin who were playing at the very same time a quarter mile away on the Swan Stage. Jorma Kaukonen (Hot Tuna) and Dave Alvin (Blaster, X, Knitters) both have very roots-based styles of guitar, which I very much like listening to: Jorma drawing on the Ragtime finger-picking influence of the Reverend Gary Davis, and Dave Alvin drawing on an Americana/Rockabilly style, filtered through his experience on the LA Punk scene playing with the Blasters and X. I kind of wanted to see Dave & Phil, figuring it would be a lot more high-energy, but plowing through a crowd of a quarter million Festival Goers for a quarter mile just to try to find myself a seat for just one set, before immediately heading back to the Banjo Stage to see Gillian Welch did not strike me as my idea of fun. Between sets I asked my “neighbors” if they would be kind enough to save my seat while I wandered over to the food stands to get some lunch. And being very nice people they said they would.The crowd at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, which has been estimated to number about a quarter of a million concert-goers per day, is a really relaxed, friendly and courteous crowd for something this big…

So today, after having had the Cajun-style Étouffée the day before, I went to an Indian food stand (right next to the Louisiana food stand as it turns out) and ordered some Tikka Masala Chicken over rice, which was good, and leisurely ate my food off to the side of the concert crown, and then on the way back to my seat passed some people that were eating something that looked pretty darn good, and asked what it was. It was Paella, so I scrapped my plans to have Chicken Shwarma for my Sunday meal, and decided I was going to have the Paella the following day.

Got back to my seat just as Hot Tuna was warming up on stage, and listened to a pretty good, but not particularly inspired (inspiring?) set of well-played… Electric Ragtime, for lack of a better description. Oddly, if there was anyone playing lead “guitar” in this group, it was Jack Cassidy on bass, who drove the rhythm as he added melodic/harmonic complexity to the band’s set.

Next up on the Banjo Stage was Gillian Welch

(who had, by the way, recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting from the American Music Association. she joked “does that mean we’re supposed to be dead?”) For the set she and Dave Rawlings came out in matching Buckskin Leather outfits, and performed a set of somewhat traditional Country Folk, performing songs that were a bit more thoughtful and intelligent than the usual offerings of Country Western. Dave Rawlings guitar solos were especially notable because he played them on an acoustic guitar, and was able to play in registers that are usually confined to the electric guitar.

On the schedule for the next set was Ry Cooder playing with Ricky Skaggs. When they came out, I wasn’t able to recognize Ry Cooder on stage. The group, apparently was Ricky Skaggs, and they started the set with a sort of “Blood of the Lamb” Country-Gospels song, which I wasn’t particularly crazy about, and the guy who took the solo didn’t look anything like Cooder when I saw him once before, and the guitar solo wasn’t very inspired, and didn’t sound anything like I would expect from him. In the weeks before the festival there were rumors that Ry would play, or he wouldn’t play. In any case, if he was there (which I was told he was), I really couldn’t tell.

It was a little after 4 p.m.; I was planning on heading over to the Arrow Stage to see the Flatlanders (Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock) at 5:30, but right around that time, a decidedly younger crowd was arriving. These were a decidedly an “Entitlement Kiddie” crowd, pushing their way to the front as if the people who were already there were somehow just furniture to be pushed out of their way as they made their way to the front; and even though they were arriving not too long before the end of the program, they all seemed to be carting in enough beer– in 12-packs, cases or full-size coolers on wheels– to last them an entire weekend of dissipation. They seemed like hardened veterans of the Summer Coachella/Outer Lands $200 a ticket Music Festival Circuit and, by God, if their parents shelled out this much money for tickets, they damn well better get the prime seats! Anyway, (again) even though they were arriving near the end of the day’s program, they seemed to be swarming in by the hundreds, over the hills separating Speedway Meadows (or Hellman Hollow, as it has been renamed), taking trails that weren’t even trails– it seemed like something you’d see on the Nature Channel late at night, and I really wasn’t feelin’ it to hang out for an hour and a half to see the Flatlanders, so I decided I’d come back tomorrow to see my favorite band, Los Lobos, the following evening.

October 5, 2015

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2015, Day 1

(before I begin, I would like to apologize ahead of time for the image quality. I am using a year-old clearance $29 camera and it shows. working on acquiring another REAL camera)

Even though I entered Golden Gate Park from the South, because of the “walk this way” and “enter here” signs, I ended up entering the festival from the North, walking past the Rooster Stage which was, apparently, still being set up.

The first act I saw, at the Banjo Stage, was a fairly good bluegrass group called the Dry Branch Fire Squad.

This stage was at the top of my itinerary because a couple of groups called “The Mavericks” and another called the “Punch Brothers” sounded pretty promising, but first, between the Dry Branch Fire Squad and The Mavericks, there was a horrible White Guy Blues Band™ (“Ofay Blues” to borrow James Baldwin’s term) from San Francisco aptly named the “Monophonics”, who looked & sounded like they got their inspiration from “The Blues Brothers”, not realizing that it was supposed to be a Comedy.

I moved along to the Arrow Stage, where a band called “SaintSeneca” a mediocre (at best) rock band was finishing their set. I thought, perhaps, they might be a slightly renamed Irish band called “Seneca” that I reviewed back in 2008, but they weren’t. Naturally, I figured this might be a good time to hit the Food Stands.

Friday, I went for the Crawfish Étouffée.

And since the food vendors were located next to the Arrow Stage, I listened to a bit of Lee Anne Womack’s set. More or less traditional C & W (which I’m not particularly crazy about), but she was OK. And I figured, since I was eventually planning to hit the Swan Stage to see T-Bone Burnett and didn’t see anything that particularly gabbed my attention for that particular time slot, I figured I might as well go there early to see a group called the Oh Hellos (get it? Oh Hell o?)

From the Festival Group Bio PDF:

Since forming, The Oh Hellos has earned a rightful reputation as a very special live act. The Heaths are joined on stage by an often-epic ensemble – a rotating roster of pickers and players numbering as many as 13 onstage at any given time. The duo has developed an organic, cult following in their short existence, due to extensive sold-out headline tours as well support slots for bands such as NEEDTOBREATHE and festival plays, including Newport Folk Festival

When I arrived at the stage, though, Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Birds were toward the end of their set, and they were pretty good, playing a sort of a Lydia Pense & Cold Blood kind of R & B.

As it turned out (and as it used to happen so often at HSB), the group that stole the show that day was the group I had never heard of previously, The Oh Hellos.

Led by (I believe) a Husband & Wife team named The Heaths (above center), this group from Central Texas played a varied and lively set of Irish-sounding melodies & rhythms that jumped and shifted without being jarring. Also, the surrounding musicians danced & jumped around the stage with abandon. But far from being stagy or gimmicky, this dancing seemed to help the entire group keep a very tight & lively groove throughout, especially the second drummer / percussionist (unfortunately hidden in back, to the left, photo quality courtesy of aforementioned $29 camera) who made dancing an integral part of his drumming, accentuating poly-rhythms that brought to mind an Irish version of early 1980s Tom Tom Club crossed with the vocal stylings of, oh, I don’t know– Cowboy Junkies? Hard to describe it, but I recommend you hear it for yourself. The only complaint I had was that the Bass Player, apparently suffering from some sort of hearing loss, kept turning up his Ampeg SVT to the point where it occasionally drowned out the other players (all the while standing directly in front of his amp/speakers), and it took the Soundboard People 2 or 3 songs before they were able to get a handle on it.

Next up was the Peter Rowan Band. Peter Rowan is a singer/songwriter/guitar player who cut his teeth playing with the legendary Bill Monroe, but he has since developed a style of songwriting of his own. His style falls somewhere between C & W and Electric Bluegrass; but at one point he began an odd rhythmic/melodic riff that at first seemed out of sync, until the rest of the band bit by bit followed his lead, providing a rare authentic acoustic psychedelic break into a genre that doesn’t lend itself easily to this sort of adventurous musicianship (and there is SO much cheesy ersatz psychedelia out there– even in the “psychedelic” 60s).

Finally, the guy I came over to the Swan Stage to see hit the stage. Anybody who’s never heard of T Bone Burnett probably doesn’t get a lot of exposure to popular culture. A name that, along with Joe Ely, I’ve associated with SXSW since I first heard of it decades ago (god i’m old), he is known for fusing everything from punk to country, producing, and for providing the soundtrack to numerous films, from Indy to Hollywood, I was really looking forward to what he would bring to HSB.

I hate to say it, but I was somewhat disappointed. To begin with, his band was too loud, to the point that the different parts seemed to run together into an indistinguishable mush (although I could occasionally barely make out a guitar riff that might have been interesting had it not been buried in the mix). And for a musician who has worked in so many genres & contexts, his songs had a bland sort of sameness and, in contrast to the Oh Hellos, not a lot of variation in rhythms or song structure. His voice was strong, and his songwriting, while a tad didactic for my tastes, struck me as fairly thoughtful & intelligent (again, what I was able to make out in the general mix). My favorite song in the set was actually a Gillian Welch number which was delivered following a short lecture on listening to music for free online– ironically, because much of the Festival was being streamed live online.

All in all, an enjoyable Friday at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.

August 1, 2015

Music Videos in this blog

NOTE: I will be updating these links as I finish updating the rest of my blog.

If any of these videos have expired, please let me know. I can usually update them.

B. Blogger

Little Feat w/ Lowell George – Easy to Slip
Bela Fleck and the Flecktones – Sinister Minister
Gin Blossoms – Follow You Down
Elvis Costello, with the Imposters, hosting the David Letterman Show – What’s so Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?
Townes Van Zandt – Pancho and Lefty
Robert Plant with Fairport Convention – Battle for Evermore
Dead Kennedys – Holiday in Cambodia
Los Lobos – Kiko and the Lavender Moon
Hellecasters – Orange Blossom Special
Lucinda Williams – Passionate Kisses
Richard Thompson – Genesis Hall, 52 Vincent Black Lightning, Waltzing’s For Dreamers, A Heart Needs a Home with Linda Thompson, and Heartbreak Hotel, with John Cale (Velvet Underground) and Shawn Colvin
Joe Ely – Fightin’ for My Life
Emmylou Harris & Nash Ramblers – Other Side of Life
Marianne Faithful – The Ballad of Lucy Jordan
Snakefinger (Philip Lithman) – There’s No Justice in Life
Tom Waits – You are Innocent When You Dream, Tom Traubert’s Blues
Kate Bush – Wuthering Heights, Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)
Gov’t Mule w/the Dirty Dozen Brass Band Horns – Chameleon
Residents – Teddy Bear
Kirsty MacColl – Don’t Come the Cowboy With Me, Sonny Jim (updated), In These Shoes?, and Belle of Belfast City
Nick Drake – Northern Sky
The Pogues – Dirty Old Town (written by Kirsty MacColl’s father, Ewan MacColl), and Fairytale Of New York (with Kirsty MacColl)

July 6, 2015

Welcome to the Excelsior District of San Francisco

I knew about the Excelsior– well, I was aware the place did in fact exist, but the only time I had even been though there was on either the Mission 14 bus, or a SamTrans bus to somewhere in San Mateo County.

And, obviously, I knew that people lived there– just didn’t actually know any of them personally. Most of my time living in San Fran was somewhere between Haight, Cole Valley, or the Inner Sunset (where I celebrated both the Giants’ World Series championship and the Warriors playoff run and championship victories). I had actually spent little time past Bernal Heights in the Outer Mission, but here I am.

mercado y carniceria — Who says we have no use for banks?

If you let your eye follow down the sidewalk to the right, you can see the apartment building where I am now residing. Nuthin fancy, but it’s a place to hang the hat I really need to buy (’cause it gets cold at night). I, of course, buy my produce at the location you see above this paragraph. And the neighborhood has all the modern amenities like coffee and internet…

There’s a chain, if you like that sort of thing. There’s Cumaica, a local (as far as I know) chain, which has better coffee than Starbucks (and which I’ve only recently seen anywhere at all at a few locations around the city:

And they have a Patio (if you like that sort of thing):

Or there’s the place I usually go to, Independently Owned & Operated for (something like) a decade, Called Momá Art Café. They have artists posting their work, usually somehow related to the theme of returned Combat Veterans.

There’s Excelsior Heights…

…or maybe not. My friend Linda tells me it was this view (or one just like it just south of here) that inspired Joni Mitchell to sing about “ticky-tacky boxes…”

At night, the streets get pretty deserted; there isn’t much of a nightlife out here. Some homeless crazies– although I really would not want to be homeless in this area. One place that’s hoppin’ after midnight:

That’s right: the Laundamat! Where it’s ALWAYS Mardi Gras! With complimentary WiFi!

I think the only place I had ever set foot in previously in this neighborhood, was a burger place, which advertised fresh-ground chuck. It was OK if I remember correctly, but not a revelation. Let’s see what happened to this last cultural outpost in the vicinity…

How the Mighty have fallen…

Meanwhile, here I am, at the…

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June 24, 2015

Pics of a Record Store, Outer Mission, SF

I recently moved to the Excelsior District in San Francisco, and ride the bus downtown on Mission Street just about every day. There’s a record store in the Outer Mission near the Safeway where I buy groceries, and it immediately brought to mind a friend I met in St. Helens, OR a few years back. He’s a Hip Young Heavy Metal Enthusiast, and thought he might enjoy seeing a few photos of the place (taken with the finest $29 Camera money could buy about a year ago…):

Enjoy!

Jest keep in mind: I got my EYE on you…

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May 23, 2015

God is Power

AA Big Book, page 45, “We Agnostics”

Lack of power, that was our dilemma. We had to find a power by which we could live, and it had to be a Power greater than ourselves. Obviously. But where and how were we to find this Power?

Well, that’s exactly what this book is about. Its main object is to enable you to find a Power greater than yourself which will solve your problem. That means we have written a book which we believe to be spiritual as well as moral. And it means, of course, that we are going to talk about God.

GOD IS POWER – 1984 by George Orwell

He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of selfdeception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except!

Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. ‘If I wished,’ O’Brien had said, ‘I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.’ Winston worked it out. ‘If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.’ Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: ‘It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.’ He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a ‘real’ world where ‘real’ things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred to him. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.

ACCEPTANCE – AA Big Book, Acceptance Was The Answer

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation — some fact of my life — unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God’s world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.