Climbing The Floor
(B. Mosley)
appears on Light & Blood
Here, I took a selective look back at my first 40-odd years. My father—a PTSD-stricken Vietnam War veteran—had ended his life a few months before I wrote this song…and I was finally able to cough up and spit out the Objectivism he had me swallow as a teenager. I was finally beginning to become who I was meant to be.
Around that time, I attended some Brazilian Jujitsu conditioning classes, where we did deep core strengthening movements. There was one drill where we travelled across the room on our fingers & toes with our bodies an inch off the floor…climbing, if you will.
I was starting to play more & more in and around NYC, building an audience. This song was prominent in that process…not the version on the record, but an uptempo, swinging version featuring Trevor Exter on cello. My world was shifting very rapidly away from the high-dollar corporate consultant life I’d led just a few years before. I would soon be signed to a small label and be touring nationally, living for—and on—the road.
Oh…my mom gave birth to me when she was 19…hence, “hopeful children”.
Perhaps this song was also my take on Nietzche’s adage, ‘That which does not kill us…’
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Born to hopeful children, a worried little man
The Trail of Tears and Viet Nam and goddamned Ayn Rand
So often overwrought, lost off in thought by the time that I turned nine
Bet a dollar to a donut, I would never be fine and now I’m
Climbing the floor and gettin’ over it
And gettin’ on down
After all, I’ll be standing tall or fallin’ down or crawlin’
It’s all on the ground
I been knocked down and I been left alone
I been caste out, I been sung about, and I been loved up on
And I been rollin’ in the dough for no more than sittin’ on my butt
Now I could no more pay back what I owe than I don’t know what, and I am
Climbing the floor and gettin’ over it
And gettin’ on down
After all, I’ll be standing tall or fallin’ down or crawlin’
It’s all on the ground
Had a lot and lost it…a lot of what, I don’t know
Bet I do know that I been sittin’ pretty and you know
I been lying lo(w) and behold it all together come apart
Found it hard to get ahead…got a heart instead and started
Climbing the floor and gettin’ over it
And gettin’ on down
After all, I’ll be standing tall or fallin’ down or crawlin’
It’s all on the ground
Born to hopeful children
I was born to hopeful children…