The Hammock Papers: Jimmy Buffett, "The Night I Painted The Sky"

05 July 2010

Jimmy Buffett, "The Night I Painted The Sky"

I came from the north escaping convention
A modern invention that won't let me be
To the shores of St. Martin with my fiction addiction
To restart the fire, a dreamer's remedy

Independence Day, and all I remember
Was a midnight rainbow that fell from the sky
As I stand on the beach, I slowly surrender
To the child in me that can't say goodbye

The rockets in the air and the people everywhere
Put away their differences for a while
Oh, I am still a child, when it comes to something wild
Oh that was the night, I painted the sky

I dug in the sand like a boy on a mission
And there in my hands, a pyro's delight
If un bombadier, a night time magician
I sparked the sky, as the rockets fly from view

Rockets in the air and the people everywhere
Put away their differences for a while
Yes I am still a child, when it comes to something wild
Oh that was the night, I painted the sky

Oh the mortars they roar in anticipation
Proceeding the sigh of the uplifted eyes
It showers us all in sulfuric sensation
The colors shine and a fiery rhyme tonight

The rockets in the air and the people everywhere
Won't you put away your differences for a while?
I am but a child, when it comes to something wild
Oh that was the night, that was the night, oh that was the night
I painted the sky

Thanks guys ... that was fun.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL