One of my favorite songs on this amazing album, which was written with Eastern faiths in mind. With that in mind, I too am fascinated with Eastern religious philosophy as well, so maybe I can offer some insight. Themes of constants like death and time, and things not-so-constant like the human experience and memory permeate, and the writing mixes these two concepts beautifully.
In short, this song expresses the great Shawshank quote, "Get busy livin', or get busy dyin".
We all aspire to improve ourselves and change over time, and I feel that in this song the artist desires to move away from particular negative qualities about his past self he thinks are worth giving up and forgetting. He places himself in a metaphorical room of the mind with which to wall off time and space (meditation?). This way, he's able to practice living in the moment, the now. Ah, but there's a problem as the artist is so repulsed of himself that he has absolutely zero patience for this slow continual process of personal change.
The repeated lines "F-now, I'm outta here tomorrow" indicates that he has repeatedly checked into & out of this "room". He's struggling with the repetition and becomes impatient as he isn't getting expected results, making his intent even more feverish. The things he despises about himself are too hard to let go because he keeps "sleeping with his past self" and coming back to what he knows best. Moving into the unknown is like taking 2 steps forward and one step back. The duality of existence is the strangeness he speaks of because in a paradoxical sense, if we're trying to improve ourselves, why do we then continually sabotage our new growth by reverting to our old, ingrained bad-habits? Obviously this can be frustrating.
Regardless, his allusion to death means he just wishes he can start living the life he wants to live because it's the longest thing he actually has, and doesn't want to fuck around wasting it. "You only keep what you can't sell" means that we have great (and seemingly limitless amount of) things to offer this world during our brief stay on earth (which is basically the best hotel reservation ever), so hit the pavement and make shit happen! Such a positive song since I've often found the thought of death to be an excellent motivator.
One of my favorite songs on this amazing album, which was written with Eastern faiths in mind. With that in mind, I too am fascinated with Eastern religious philosophy as well, so maybe I can offer some insight. Themes of constants like death and time, and things not-so-constant like the human experience and memory permeate, and the writing mixes these two concepts beautifully.
In short, this song expresses the great Shawshank quote, "Get busy livin', or get busy dyin".
We all aspire to improve ourselves and change over time, and I feel that in this song the artist desires to move away from particular negative qualities about his past self he thinks are worth giving up and forgetting. He places himself in a metaphorical room of the mind with which to wall off time and space (meditation?). This way, he's able to practice living in the moment, the now. Ah, but there's a problem as the artist is so repulsed of himself that he has absolutely zero patience for this slow continual process of personal change.
The repeated lines "F-now, I'm outta here tomorrow" indicates that he has repeatedly checked into & out of this "room". He's struggling with the repetition and becomes impatient as he isn't getting expected results, making his intent even more feverish. The things he despises about himself are too hard to let go because he keeps "sleeping with his past self" and coming back to what he knows best. Moving into the unknown is like taking 2 steps forward and one step back. The duality of existence is the strangeness he speaks of because in a paradoxical sense, if we're trying to improve ourselves, why do we then continually sabotage our new growth by reverting to our old, ingrained bad-habits? Obviously this can be frustrating.
Regardless, his allusion to death means he just wishes he can start living the life he wants to live because it's the longest thing he actually has, and doesn't want to fuck around wasting it. "You only keep what you can't sell" means that we have great (and seemingly limitless amount of) things to offer this world during our brief stay on earth (which is basically the best hotel reservation ever), so hit the pavement and make shit happen! Such a positive song since I've often found the thought of death to be an excellent motivator.