Tag Archives: lyric

Cohort

Cohort: (n) a group of people banded together

I have a son who’s convinced that I am becoming more conservative as I get older.

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Age has done one thing and only one thing for me–it has insisted that I be practical.

It stands over me, often in a threatening pose, barking in my ear that the plans I had made to do something beyond my physical abilities are not filled with initiative, but rather, reek of stupidity.

I become more and more astounded with the simplicity of the statement, “Those that are not against us are for us.”

Therefore, mankind is my cohort, and I, its.

I am looking for reasons to enjoy the people around me instead of tagging them as enemies to be avoided.

Every time I read something, I find one little tiny nugget of valuable common sense. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the Bible or the Communist Manifesto–each document has a golden gleam which makes its writing valuable and worthy of human hearing.

But also, each document is chock-full of filler–statements thrown in, sometimes as afterthoughts and often in ignorance.

So when a Republican talks, I listen for sense. Likewise, when a Democrat shares, I probe the speech for reasonability. In the process of doing this, I find myself making more friends and being far less critical.

Recently a friend asked what I thought about a song that was being touted on the Internet. I replied, “They started on the same beat, didn’t miss a lyric and ended in pitch.”

There’s a lot to be said for that. It is a fine beginning for discussion. But often, humans will find one word within the body of the poetry which they consider distasteful, and relegate the entire presentation to being hellish nothingness.

A cohort of critics.

How boring.

How boorish.

How stubborn

How meaningless.

I found out some time ago that the world never gets anything right. Celebration occurs when the effort comes close.

 

Donate Button

Subscribe to Jonathan’s New Podcast

 

Awoke

Awoke: (v) past of awake.dictionary with letter A

Just like the next guy sittin’ around waiting for a bus, I love a good story, especially if it’s sprinkled with a little mysticism and the possibility that there might actually be a God somewhere who gives a damn.

Because to be quite blunt with you, I do get tired of believing in things that don’t occasionally offer a dividend. If God wants my life, my repentance and sometimes my money, every once in a while He ought to show up and do a little two-step, letting me know that He’s still involved in the choreography.

I know that to some people, this may sound irreverent, but true irreverence is to continue to worship the irrelevant and insist that it’s meaningful.

So as a writer, I have, on occasion, felt divinely inspired to pen some thoughts which I felt came from a genesis other than my own heart, soul, mind and strength.

Yes, there have been those opportunities when I awoke from a dead sleep with a clarity of mind that could only be described as celestial, to grab pen and paper and write down a thought, a poem, a lyric or a paragraph which was flowing out of me like heavenly milk and honey instead of reluctant glue.

Now I will be honest. Sometimes, when I awoke again in the morning to arise from my bed, and I looked at the scribblings, they had the sentence structure of the Rubik’s Cube.

But there are those precious moments when the original inspiration is still so fresh on the paper that I fear the ink might smear.

So if I find our there is no God, I still feel I am better off by believing that every once in a while, when I awaken in the middle of the night to scrawl a thought or two… it was because God had become my alarm clock.

 

Donate Button

Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix

*******************

NEW BOOK RELEASE BY JONATHAN RICHARD CRING

WITHIN

A meeting place for folks who know they’re human

 $3.99 plus $2.00 S&H

$3.99 plus $2.00 Shipping & Handling

$3.99 plus $2.00 Shipping & Handling

Buy Now Button

 

Archaic

dictionary with letter A

Archaic (adj): very old or old-fashioned

I am of the belief that human beings do need things in their lives that are “fashioned.”

Yes–well-constructed, organized, purposeful, sensitive, gentle, aware and involved.

Without these “fashioned” virtues, we begin to rely on our own understanding and become a prideful lot, not worthy of interaction.

Unfortunately, no one ever uses the word “fashioned” without adding the prefix “old.” So at the whim of any cynical individual lies the weapon to disembowel great ideas, emotions and courtesy.

We also can attack art because it dares to reflect a stream of intelligence from a former time.

Certainly music cannot contain any beat, lyric or sentiment that was ever expressed before, lest we become slaves to our history instead of innovators in techno-pop.

Here’s my criterion for determining whether to use something that is well-fashioned: has it survived the past, still works today and has all the signs of being universal for the future? If the answer is yes, it is not archaic, just underused.

So I am not going to be discourteous just because the tendency leans in that direction.

I’m not going to be surly in order to appear focused and stubbornly irreversible.

I’m not going to reject the beauty of poetry because a generation of numbskulls have deemed it corny.

And I’m certainly not going to follow the bigotries of my time which have been conquered–often by the blood of martyrs.

Before you call something archaic and throw it in the trash-heap labeled “old-fashioned,” just make sure we can actually live without it.

 

Donate Button

Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix