Marsha, Thankk You for the Dialectics, but I Need You to Leave

They could prescribe you any illness you'd like

If you define the terms of your ailments

You could sing a pretty malady like a black canary

But a crow don't know the smell of carbon monoxide

How many years have you been on that couch

They could've quilt'd you in the throws by now

You draw a line in the sand where it ends and you begin

But the tide rolls in, so who knows? Oh well

And a little identity never hurt nobody

But lately you've been focusing too much on yourself

So how many milligrams of you are still left in there

Cause back in my day we didn't need no feel-good pills and no psychiatrists

No, we just drank ourselves to death, and god damn it, we liked it

Who makes the call? What's a symptom, what's a flaw

Can it be both? Well I suppose that's an answer

Would you give up your humanity for just a touch of sanity

Cause God knows it's not like it's cancer

And good news to the purists: they've discovered a cure

For the symptoms of being alive

It's a painless procedure with a low rate of failure

But very few patients survive

And a little conformity never hurt nobody

But lately I've been worried that you're losing yourself

So how many milligrams of you are still left in there

Cause back in my day we didn't need no feel-good pills and no psychiatrists

No, we just bled out in our bath, and god damn it, we liked it

Doctor, what's my prognosis if the studies show that

Disease is in the eye of the beholder

Tell me "so it goes"

We depress to impress, I guess

In layer after layer to get off our chests

It's cold out now, we can take it off later

Better safe than sorry, and we both know the danger

So doctor, could you run another test

Got a feeling that this time I might just pass it

Well, if you raise the average

We'll all sing when the bell curve rings

In lyrics symptomatic of the way we think

If our harmonies don't sync, we can change our voices

A chorus on condition of our diagnosis

Back in my day we didn't need no feel-good pills and no psychiatrists

What can I say, except don't heed no evil wills of moral nihilists

I said, "Back in the days of lobotomies and shock therapy and mad scientists

Oh don't you make me waste my breath. God damn it"

Ain't your you-dentity at stake

Does aspirin kill you with the pain

You're not your thoughts, you're not your brain

You're just the character you've made

Up in your head, down in your heart

What seem like separate body parts

Come together to believe they're you

And not just chemistry

It's not the way that you were raised

Or what the advertisements say

Not what you pay for, what you pray for

What you want, or what you say

And I see your tendency to redefine disease by what you need

And I'm afraid I can't prescribe the diagnosis that you seek

And something tells me that you need

Forgive me now if I misspeak

But something tells me that you like

And something tells me

You prefer

To be sitting there flipping through those old issues of People

Well that's our time, see you next week