Some other song

I walked the crowded lonely avenue again last weekend playing old songs in my head and thinking about criminal investigations and our adversarial culture. Do investigations stop when the suspect dies, or to they continue? If the suspect dies by own hand, is he then considered guilty of the crime? Men, unjustly accused of various offenses, have offed themselves, we all know. An old Waylon Jennings song, from his clean cut days played in my head:

Someone's gonna get hurt before you're through
Someone's gonna pay for the things you do
How many hearts must break,
how many will it take
To satisfy you,
just to satisfy you

Another love, another fool
To play your game
Another love, another fool
They're all the same

Today in America, when one is accused of some offense, the immediate and automatic assumption of the authorities handling the investigation, is that the accused is or will soon be planning retaliation against the accuser. Consequently, the accused is now being accused of two offenses, one in the past and another one in the future that, due to the strange way future usually works, has not happened yet. I kept walking the dirty avenue, a Ray Davies song playing in my head:

Gotta stand and face it life is so complicated,
Ladi dah di dahdah, ladi dah di dah dah,
Got to get away from the complicated life son,
Life is overated, life is complicated,
Must aleviate this, complicated life.

The Jesus freaks, with their megaphones, urged me to join them on the road to salvation, young girls were showing their chests and body tattoos, the beggars were begging, pizza smells, espresso aromas, music was playing in my head. The record stores were deserted and I wondered if they would survive this media and medium revolution. I walked into a bookstore and opened a volume of selected works by a 90 year old European poet. Here is a fragment:

Forget the suffering
You caused others.
Forget the suffering
Others caused you.
The waters run and run,
Springs sparkle and are done,
You walk the earth you are forgetting.

Sometimes you hear a distant refrain.
What does it mean, you ask, who is singing?

What is life about, he was asking at 90, as he had asked at 20. Russian Questions, as we call them here. Elsewhere, he referenced Greek and Roman myths, ancient artworks, literary figures, real and imagined, things largely foreign to the highly uneducated graduates of American universities in the last, oh, 40 years.

What are our points of reference? Those of popular culture, is the simple answer. Television, popular music, movies, which are not even called "films" any more. Too snobish. (Personally,I like the word 'talkies'.) I walked out of the bookstore without buying anything. Some other song was playing in my head now.