“Everybody’s talking at me / I don’t hear a word they’re saying / Only the echoes of my mind.”
Fred Neil wrote that song, Harry Nilsson recorded it and it became the theme song to the brilliant movie, “Midnight Cowboy.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBemzu1Fchk
I often nod off and hear that song playing in my head when people start talking.
Yes, I hear those lines along with this one: Tell me something I don’t know.
Gawd knows it’s tough to find someone who can do this: Tell me something I don’t already know.
Perhaps this is why there is such a din in the world today.
All this tweeting and twittering and everyone trying to outdo and out-talk each other.
Perhaps they have nothing new to say so they recycle everything heard and said before?
It’s like hearing how all the good songs have been written ‘cos all the greatest combination of notes have already been used up?
So, we sit around and regurgitate.
Which is why I ask, Tell me something I don’t already know.
Then again, perhaps I am just an old soul who has lived life too much too quickly and with too much pain and passion?
Loved too hard, loved too much and have heard it all.
“I love you, baby”.
Yeah, baby, tell me something I have not heard before.
“I’m leaving you, honeybunch.”
Okay, babe, but tell me something I have not heard before.
It then all becomes one giant spitball of blabbering.
Or as Elaine Benes put it, “Yada Yada Yada.”
One doesn’t have to be a Yoda to realize that there are too many Yada Yada Yadas.
It’s everywhere.
I watch television and ask those I am watching, “Tell me something I don’t already know.”
What? Another war somewhere, someone has been overthrown and thousands have died?
Tell me something I don’t already know.
Same with movies.
He says this, she replies that and he then says this.
Come on, people: Tell me something I don’t already know.
Same with songs where the next line is almost telegraphed to you.
You hear it and yawn, Tell me something I don’t already know.
Then, when least expecting it, something happens and someone comes along like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
And it’s not some John Le Carre hero.
They speak.
They speak some more and you are left speechless.
Nothing else matters.
Tell me something I haven’t heard before becomes, Tell me more.
This is when two people cut the crap and start talking with their hearts.
We don’t do this enough.
We spend way too much time talking way too much shit.
We waste invaluable time on people who don’t matter.
When you find that right one, there’s nothing left to ask.
There’s so much new to hear.
Even just the silence and closeness of being together.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz6GzKWiIAs
© Hans Ebert
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