Well, It's About Time...
...the closest I'll get to any sort of years' end retrospective thing...

2008? Can it be? Omigosh. Another year, almost in the books. If I could find the master clock that controlled the march of time, I'd take a sledgehammer to it. Just think of it, seconds wouldn't turn into hours, etc., etc., and we'd never get any older than we are right at this minute. But, as the character Holling VanCoeur said, on the old "Northern Exposure" TV show, "time will slip like water through your fingers, no matter how tightly closed they are. And if you think about it too much, it'll drive you crazy." So we have to tell ourselves not to think about it. We then focus on what not to think about. And the harder we try not to think about it, the more we think about it. So, let's think about time for a while. Tick, tock, tick, tock. We could visit the music charts for various perspectives on time...here are 10 'Timely' tunes...

"Time Has Come Today", by the Chambers Bros. That's a cool tune, although you'll never hear it on oldies radio stations...I guess the song, which came out in 1968, is too 'extreme' for oldies-automated-or-satellited formats. Let's hear it for politically-correct radio. (Insert 'raspberry' here.) PFFFFFFFFT....

"Time", by the Alan Parsons Project...and it pretty much echoes what Holling VanCoeur said above..."Time...keeps flowing like a river...to the sea...TO THE SEA.....and it's gone, forever...gone, foreverrrrrrrr...." QUICK! Take the needle off the record! I love the song, but not right now.....!!!

"Time" by Pink Floyd...pretty much mines the same territory as Alan Parsons, and expresses pretty-much the same mood. Which means, that if you play these two songs back-to-back enough times, you're more than twice as likely as the average musically ignorant person to climb an 80-foot tree, just for the pleasure of leaping off the top branch.

"Time Is Right" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band, from the mid-1970's album, "Nightingales and Bombers". The song closes with the refrain, "Time is right for quittin' time...Time...Time...TIME...TIMETIMETIMETIME......." The thot just occurred to me, that would be a great song for workers to "punch out" to.

"Out Of Time" by the Rolling Stones, recorded back when Keith Richard actually looked like a Human Being, back when Brian Jones was alive. His 'time' came in 1969, at the bottom of a swimming pool. But, Time never seems to run out for this band. They still march (or in Keith's case, stagger) onward. They've probably played this song onstage Countless Times by now.

"Time Of The Season" by the Zombies...this was a Big Hit Single back in 1969. It was recorded two years before that, on their "Odyssey and Oracle" album. Musical incubation, if you will. Only, when it was released as a single, The Zombies had Already Broken Up. I guess their "Time" had come...and gone...

"Time For Livin'" by The Association. Yeah, this little ditty seeks to relieve the omnipresent gloom and foreboding of the previous songs. It's cheery, sorta. I always liked The Association; great harmony vocals. Turns out, tho, that Time ran out for their bassist, Brian Cole, who died in 1972 from a drug overdose. Oh well.

"Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is" by Chicago, from back in the days when they actually had some credibility as a band...well, think about it...when someone asks you the time of day, it takes time to tell the person what time it is, and by then, time has advanced...OH, STOP IT!!! JUST STOP IT!!!! Okaaaaay...

"Time Machine" by Grand Funk Railroad, from their very first album, cut in 1969. "Hey Baby, Step into my Time Machine", sings lead guitarist Mark Farner. As long as it takes me back to when I was younger, I'd go for it. But only if I actually BECAME younger. Not this current older version of me, transported to, say, 1969. Why? I'd probably miss my computer too much.

"In The Time Of Our Lives" by Everybody's favorite band, the immortal Iron Butterfly, with a lead singer who sounded like God himself...the song begins with over a minute of buzzing, screeching, distorted, overmodulated guitars, crashing in the gloom as the voice of the supreme being speaketh...after all these years, I still pause in wonder when I hear this tune.

I'm sure there's a whole lot more songs out there that deal with the ever-swinging pendulum of the big cosmic timepiece that monitors our existence. But, really, I just wanted to see if I could think of 10 songs, and so I did, and I didn't even have to use lightweight almost-rock, such as "Isn't It Time" by the Babys, which came out in the mid-70s.
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My achievements in '07? Well, I've lived in Oregon for over a year now. I've played a whole lotta guitar. I had the Worst Flu In The World, and lived to tell about it. And I've walked on the Beach many times. Just in case I don't type another post before years' end...thanks to all of you who stop and spend time here, and hopefully I'll write another post, suspiciously like this one, in a year from now...