Another Day In America Laurie Anderson

And so finally here we are, at the beginning of a whole new era. The start of a brand new world
And now what?
How do we start?
How do we begin again?

There are some things you can simply look up, such as:
The size of Greenland, the dates of the famous 19th century rubber wars, Persian adjectives, the composition of snow
And other things you just have to guess at

And then again today's the day and those were the days and now these are the days and now the clock points histrionically to noon. Some new kind of north
And so which way do we go?
What are days for? To wake us up, to put between the endless nights

And by the way, here's my theory of punctuation:
Instead of a period at the end of each sentence, there should be a tiny clock that shows you how long it took you to write that sentence

And another way to look at time is this:
There was an old married couple and they had always hated each other, never been able to stand the sight of each other, really. And when they were in their nineties, they finally got divorced. And people said "Why did you wait so long? Why didn't you do this a whole lot earlier?" And they said "Well, we wanted to wait until the children died."

Ah, America. And yes, that will be America; a whole new place just waiting to happen. Broken-up parking lots, rotten dumps, speedballs, accidents and hesitations, things left behind. Styrofoam, computer chips...

And Jim and John, oh, they were there, And Carol, too. Her hair pinned up in that weird beehive way she loved so much, and Greg and Phil, moving at the pace of summer
And Uncle Al, who screamed all night in the attic. Yes, something happened to him in the war, they said, over in France, and France had become something they never mentioned, something dangerous

Yeah, some were sad to see those days disappear. The flea markets and their smells, the war
All the old belongings strewn out on the sidewalks, mildewed clothes and old resentments and ragged record jackets