(Ah-ah) (Ah-ah) My headphones are playing a duet With a fire engine (Ah-ah) I walk through the cloud of an ex And I feel no tension (Ah-ah) All the buildings are blocking the wind Of late October (Ah-ah) 'Round the corner, it shoots out again And I'm starting over (Ah-ah) Dance, dance Dance, dance around the door Dance, dance Dance, dance around the door Hold still Limit what you see Be free for a while (Ah-ah) Lie in your room like you're lying on a hill There's a mountain on your window sill (Ah-ah) There is help for raw souls A language for the shy (Ah-ah) You don't have to say hello But look them in the eye (Ah-ah) There are two things, a great fog of stuff engrossing, fleeting, bewildering And then, a feeling of tilt that we're rushing down a slope Do we not see it all the time because we're sliding at the same speed? A sense of safety preserved by the static distances between us Sometimes I try to imagine a village hundreds of years ago Where little changes during a lifetime Maybe the cobbler tries a new heel on a boot, crops are rotated But nothing changes how people are What they spend their time doing or thinking about The world is dying, the world is living (Ah-ah) (Ah-ah) There’s something that I should do But I never know how (Ah-ah) Things I should say to you But it's total whiteout (Ah-ah) In the night reading actual air Always reforming (Ah-ah) Imagine that I'll be somewhere new In the morning (Ah-ah) I was asked to write a song about social media And I didn't want to, anyway, I'm pretty hooked So I don't feel I'm in much of a position to critique it And self-critique is loaded for me anyway Because I've done plenty of that And while I know that people can identify with it And get comfort from hearing someone else address themselves sternly I'm also trying to get away from self-regard in general Even though the unexamined life is not worth living More opposing truths, they're everywhere I'm still training to hold them I'm trying to look out, leave the mirror out of it See the tree and contemplate it And not question who or what I am in relation to the tree But I don't know what it means yet That we are partially migrating into a silent conversation It seems to be increasing unity and tribalism at once And maybe the two are racing now without a finish line I was gonna say that likely, few got good thinking done (Ah-ah) During the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip craze And this is not so different But I've recently been heartened and disappointed to learn (Ah-ah) That the story was greatly exaggerated Anyway, we're crazy but we're also not crazy We're complicated, we want things to be simple And we polarize into camps and we harden and entrench (Ah-ah) And distort and amplify and shut down and entrench some more Now you don't have to join a drum circle (Ah-ah) And get all peace and love and Haight-Ashbury And anyway, that only took a few months to turn into A bad scene, hard drug, dystopia where some people will rob you (Ah-ah) And you can't be too open, but the hippies sure had a point Empathy is good, lack of empathy is bad And now the lines of non-facts waiting to get in the conversation (Ah-ah) Are longer and longer And some people can't be beat in an argument And we have to hold on to that hippie point harder Empathy is good, lack of empathy is bad Holy math says we're never not together