I am sick and tired of being sold an attitude by the music that plays in the places where I shop. It finally became too much and I had to do a podcast about it. Click on the graphic, use the embedded player below, or subscribe and download free on iTunes!

Don’t forget, you can get all the written–or spoken–wisdom you need right here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I was going to do another top ten about unintentionally horrifying movies which proved so popular last Halloween, but I realized I would only have to include Good Will Hunting again, so it would be a rip.  So, in this overview of some of the season’s hottest Halloween costumes, along with several enduring classics, Mr. Paul Maul takes a good, hard, stiff look at what your Halloween costume choice reveals about your level of emotional development.

.

LADY GAGA: Your ever-more outrageous acting out is a function of whatever childhood damage led to your narcissistic tendencies.  It is simply a shield to protect you from both your own feelings of inadequacy and the nagging suspicion that you are the product of that one night when Madonna had sex with David Bowie.

.

VAMPIRES INSPIRED BY THE TWILIGHT SERIES: You have a nihilistic outlook on life, seeing our time on this planet as ultimately empty and pointless.  This is stunningly ironic since you seem to wish you were someone who could live forever.

..

.

THE MAD HATTER: A very popular costume this year.  Wearing this says you would like to be seen as a literary person, even though you wouldn’t know Lewis Carroll from Eleanor Roosevelt and had your first exposure to Alice in Wonderland by seeing the version directed by the guy who did the remake of Planet of the Apes.

.

SPIDERMAN: You are haunted by feelings of guilt over something in your life, often something that feels as serious as having decided to spare the life of the a-hole that ended up killing your uncle.  As a result, you walk around with the classic martyr complex, exacerbated by the way you have internalized your anxiety: FYI, continually quoting the phrase, “with great power comes great responsibility”makes you almost as big an a-hole as the guy who killed your uncle.

.

.

HARRY POTTER: You are a Devil worshipper.  Get help.

.

.

MARILYN MONROE: See: Lady Gaga, minus the bit about Madonna and David Bowie.

.

.

ELVIRA: You are a perfectly healthy person who feels no shame in revealing massive amounts of cleavage to other partygoers while maintaining a general air of forbidden gothic horror that makes you even more unattainable and exciting.  Keep up the good work.

.

.

FREDDY KRUEGER: Halloween is your time to hide behind the mask of a man who terrorizes people’s dreams and is hell-bent on bringing about their violent deaths.  The other three hundred sixty-four days of the year are your time to feel exactly the same way about your boss, but instead of being hell-bent on his destruction, you hold in your anger and load up on the Mylanta.

.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN: You see yourself alternately as a tramp who is not worthy of love and a genius who was misunderstood just because of a couple of child brides.  Perhaps much to your chagrin, neither is true.

.

.

JESUS: To cover up your own bitterness about how God couldn’t possibly have created such a horrible world, you want everyone to know how irreverent you can be about organized religion.  Your cynicism becomes severely tested, however, when everybody at the party demands that you forgive or heal them simply by a laying on of hands.  You can’t exactly say no, can you, smart guy?

.

I’m sure many of you have your own inner-self-revealing costumes that didn’t make the list. Feel free to add them to the “other” category in the reader poll below!

(polls)

Don’t believe everything you hear. Unless it’s the Paul Maul Quickie Wisdom audio podcast, in which case you should believe every freaking word! 

Sure, Neil Diamond is going to be a Kennedy Center honoree this year.  Call somebody who gives  a crap! And won’t you please download all the free Paul Maul audio–and video–podcasts you like on iTunes?

.

.

Click on the Quickie Wisdom logo to hear Episode 48 – Neil Diamond

Don’t forget, you can get all the written–or spoken–wisdom you need right here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Well, I’m in a big quandary.

.

All these narrow-minded special interest groups are threatening to boycott Dancing With the Stars over the selection of Chaz Bono as a contestant.

.

They suck.

.

However, I have always boycotted Dancing with the Stars because I think it’s a lame ass television show.

.

Yet, if I continue my boycott now, people may think it’s because of Chaz Bono.

.

Holy crap, am I going to have to watch this lame ass show just to let everybody know I’m okay with Cher’s son choosing to be transgender?

Sometimes, life just isn’t fair.

Holy crap.

I just realized.

I haven’t had a single positive thought since Howard Jones was in the charts.

INTERNET CURE FOR DEPRESSION NUMBER THREE

.

PYTHON LOAF

Singer/Songwriter Andy Allen’s ode to the soul-cleansing power of bodily elimination takes the impossibly funny to new levels of transcendent melancholy.  If you are pre-programmed to, um, turn up your nose at scatological humor, then this once you may need to seek a chemical solution to your blahs.  Otherwise, you will be bursting into a grin that, however guilty it may be, will also lead you to be singing this song to yourself for the rest of the week.  Maybe even the rest of your life.  After all, almost everybody goes to the bathroom.

Here’s another short, insightful Paul Maul takeaway to inspire and empower you as the post-holiday work week begins.  There’s always time for a quickie!

“All people really need to succeed is a little encouragement, a little gentle guidance and a deep, abiding fear of Neil Diamond.”

.

Came across these two YouTube music vids and found them almost eerily appropriate.  These folks saw things coming. As Rod Serling might say, “no comment save this:”  Maybe the reason so many of us feel powerless in the face of giant corporations making our lives difficult is that we are not all able to vent our frustrations with music.  Sure, Twitter and Facebook and blogs are fine forums for those of us seeking to be more than a voice in the wilderness, but when it comes to really getting a point across, there ain’t nothing like belting out your convictions in song, backed by a boffo horn section or a noisy electric geetar.   You get to speak your own personal truth, and everybody else gets to boogie down or thrash around, depending on your genre.  It’s a win-win.  Empow-WOW-erment in action.  I think it’s time for everyone to start that garage band they always wanted to start back in high school. Okay, maybe you’re too old to have your local rock star status make you more attractive to the opposite sex, but you’ll be able to stick it to the man in more than 140 characters while actually working up a sweat.   And if you sing about it now, maybe history will catch up to you in thirty years’ time as well.  It ain’t never too late.  Motivate this!

There’s only so much oil on the ground

Sooner or later there won’t be much around

Tell that to your kids while you driving downtown

That there’s only so much oil on the ground

Can’t cut loose without that juice

Can’t cut loose without that juice

If we keep on like we’re doing things for sure

Will not be cool – It’s a fact

We just ain’t got sufficient fuel

There’s only so much oil in the ground

Sooner or later there won’t be none around

Alternate sources of power must be found

Cause there’s only so much oil in the ground

There’s only so much oil in the earth

It’s a fact of life – for what it’s worth

Something every little boy and girl should know since birth

That there’s only so much oil in the ground

There’s no excuse for our abuse

No excuse for our abuse

We just assume that we will not

Exceed the oil supply

But soon enough the world will watch the wells run dry.

.

by Emilio Castillo, Stephen Kupka, 1974

.

WHEN THE OIL RUNS OUT

Think about the fat men who wear their slippers to drive their cars

while their machines are running, they wont walk very far

they never realize what they’ve got,one day they will lose the lot

because….

Chorus:

What’s gonna happen when the buses don’t run

and what’s gonna happen when the winter comes

what are you gonna do,

what are you gonna do

when the oil runs out?

Think about the record industry and the people its used

self indulgent pampered popstars which ones did you choose

It’ll be far more drastic than no-more 12 inch plastic because….

Are you prepared for such a drastic change of lifestyle

you say “yeah” I don’t believe you,look at your home

the things that you own, the job that you work in

they all could go

what about the tax exiles who live in the sun

when the oil runs out, they’ll have nowhere to run

And what about the comfortable people who just can’t go without

they’re forever panic buying, in case things run out

they never realise what they’ve got, one day they will lose the lot because….

What’s gonna happen when cycling becomes a strain

and you need a drop of 3 in 1 on your bicycle chain

what are you gonna do,

what are you gonna do

when the oil runs out.

Are you prepared for such a drastic change in life style

you say “yeah” I don’t believe you,look at your home

the things that you own, the job that you work in

they all could go.

(Copyright DREWETT 1980 Published by KRISTANNAR MUSIC)

.

Taylor Swift’s foray into nails-on-the-chalkboard territory at the Grammys has generated an Internet firestorm, and points up three very important things:

1. With Toyota taking a dive, Haiti in peril and a group of people gathering in Nashville with no idea of why calling themselves ‘tea baggers’ is so funny, the fact that the Taylor Swift gaffe counts as news should be a source of national shame.
2. The bar for national shame continues to be systematically lowered.
3. America has no tolerance for imperfection.

Like a man afraid of intimacy who finds minor physical imperfections in his dates to avoid further commitment (“I don’t know if I could marry a woman with a neck mole.”), our nation gloms onto the tiniest flaw in a presentation without stopping to consider how it might fare if it had to belt out something in front of millions of people, let alone do it next to the same woman who made “Whenever I Call You Friend” one of the most annoying songs of the 70’s.  You have to go some to add an extra layer of ick to Kenny Loggins, but somehow she did it.

At any rate, this demand for precision excellence in a performer is only a reflection of our own fear of not achieving enough in the eyes of our parents, our boss, our lover, or the boss who is also our lover (a scenario that leaves even the most self-assured person in a miasma of oddly-pleasurable toxicity).  Every time we give YouTube another hit and gleefully watch Taylor Swift be less than faultless, we are projecting our own dread of one day being found out as the emotional sham artists we really are.  We hope to divert interest in our own shortcomings by mocking the momentary lapse of talent in someone who gets paid a lot more than we do to be great.

Everybody sucks sometime.  The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can get back to sucking most of the time and call it a day.

Led Zeppelin IV, the album that gave the world Stairway to Heaven was released 38 years ago this week.  As of the turn of the 21^st Century, Stairway had been broadcast on the radio over three million times.  In 1991, somebody took the time to calculate that if the song was played back-to-back as many times as it had actually been played on the radio up to that time it would go on playing for 44 years.   These are all intriguing facts which really amount to nothing besides allowing us to extrapolate on the corresponding size of the band’s wallets.  (And you thought I was going somewhere else with that.)

Similarly, the Internet is full of minutia about the creation of Stairway to Heaven, including the fact that at least a few portions of the song’s lyrics seemed to come to Robert Plant via some kind of automatic writing.  If this is true, then one of the most popular rock and roll songs of all time was created in the same manner employed by certain psychics to transcribe the communications of dead people.   Then there were the Christian evangelists in the 1980’s who claimed that the “bustle in your hedgerow” lyric when played backwards said “Here’s to my sweet Satan.”  Finally, there are the lyrics themselves, which yield their meaning about as readily as documents on yak vellum.

Why, then, was this song used as the theme at so many senior proms?  It’s about as romantic as an epidural and makes about as much sense as an episode of Lost.  None of the lyrics refer to anything remotely rite-of-passage and it’s hard to picture high school sweethearts having their nuzzling fueled by lines like “and the forests will echo with laughter.”  Plus, it suddenly rocks out in the last part, leaving gently swaying adolescents with a major decision about whether or not to suddenly start jerking their mullets around. Nothing about the song screams “prom” to me, and yet….

It all comes down to one lyric.  In its own way, it is a quintessential teenage lyric, one that seems profound and deep to the 17-year old mind and one that sums up the feelings of transition that well up as one leaves public school.

Yes, there are two paths you can go by

But in the long run

There’s still time to change the road you’re on

This is a message we are all longing to hear as kids, and from whom do we get most of our philosophical fodder as teenagers but leather-panted troubadours?  It’s not like our freaking parents are going to come up with anything worth repeating.  “Why were you out so late last night?” is not as memorable as a lyric that speaks to choice, possibility and a tinge of regret.  That, by comparison, is worth waiting through a fabulously inappropriate prom song for.

It’s got a lousy beat, and you can’t dance to it.  I’ll give it a ten.