Song 834: This week the playlist focuses on Lights of Downtown by The Long Ryders, written by Stephen McCarthy, and you can find a cool YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. When this enlightening description started emerging from radio speakers at the end of the summer of 1985, I resided in a comfortable home a few blocks from the downtown area of the city of Berkeley, CA, which I shared with five of my singer/songwriter colleagues. A few years earlier, soon after POTUS Reagan ended the federal funding for mental health institutions in early 1981, the number of homeless people wandering around that downtown area greatly increased, and when Mr. Ron essentially said that homeless people choose to live on the street, I got a very different impression from the ones I saw and heard wandering through the Lights of Downtown Berkeley, though, at the time, I had no idea what caused their insanity! Now, however, I DO have a much clearer understanding of such mental problems, so I share that understanding in my book Expecting the Broken Brain to Do Mental Pushups, and you can get a copy from Amazon of the most recent edition of it by clicking on the title.
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