A Prairie Home Companion: November 17, 2007

Perversity
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Listen

November and the trees are bare
Smell of cold is in the air.
The woods are lonely, dark and gray
And all the birds have flown away.
Along the roads you see dead deer.
Wintertime is almost here.
I look around and think, Hot Damn
I shouldn't be happy but I am.

PERVERSITY, PERVERSITY
You've been so good to me.
The wind is blowing and the leaves
Plug the gutters on the eaves
The water will come trickling
Through our ceiling around spring
And will make an awful mess
Yet I feel pure happiness.

PERVERSITY, PERVERSITY
You are my philosophy
It is cold and so I wanna
Take my clothes off in the sauna
Into a snowbank I will dive
Cause two and two adds up to five
Life just goes from bad to worse
But thank goodness we are made perverse.

There are wealthy young people sunk in depression in expensive resorts on Barbados And there are happy old people in northern Wisconsin who have nothing but beer and bratwurst and fried potatoes

You don't have to be sad just because it's not summer.
You don't have to march to that summer drummer.
You don't have to line up in that column.
Just because you're old doesn't mean you're solemn.
Just because you die doesn't mean you have to lie down.
You can fly up right out of the ground.

PERVERSITY, PERVERSITY
You don't learn it at the University
And books won't tell you what to do
Except maybe Albert Camus.
No, I think the best perversity teachin
Would come from an old bachelor Norwegian.
The harder it gets O happy we
P E R V E R S E