Ben Travis: Music
Shoot Me in the Head
(c)2002 Ben Travis)
I wrote this song while sitting in the nursing home with my dad watching his condition deteriorate. He only had to go into the nursing home at the very end, and he was pretty bad by then. He spent a lot of the last days unconscious. I learned more about the night life of nursing homes than I ever wanted to, and it inspired me to write this song.
(verse 1)
A woman pushes her husband down the hall
Outside the door
You won’t see any carpet here
They’ve got concrete floors
You can hear other people’s televisions
And an old man screaming just down the hall
And the funeral home made up a calendar
And now it’s hanging there on the wall
(chorus)
We all want to hold on to life
And hold our own
But shoot me in the head before you
Put me in a nursing home
(verse 2)
Fluorescent lights come on at night
And make our faces pale
And if it had better locks on the doors
You could call it a jail
There’s a cord with a button on the end
But it might be a while till anyone comes
And the man sleeping in the next bed
Wakes up in the middle of the night and hums
(bridge)
Yeah yeah, I can smell the food from here
Yeah yeah, we could be here for years