Chin Up, Carry On

“Chin Up, Carry On” is not only the name of one of the new songs I’ve recently recorded as Lt.-Colonel David Davis, it’s also the only good advice I’ve been able to offer myself these past however many years. It is the only advice I would ever offer anyone. It’s all any of us can ever do it seems to me sometimes. Life will do to us what it will, however often and however hard it wants to, and there’s very little we can do to prevent calamity from striking. We are, in the end, very little things.

Powerlessness and the futility of existence seem surely the underlying actual motiviations for the great gnashing of teeth and performative rending of garments we witness ad nauseum in the digital public sphere. As a card-carrying cultural and political agitator most of my life, the question I finally failed to answer was—what for? Choosing the right sides of major geopolitical and ideological struggles accomplished nothing except occassionally to give me a sense of smug self-righteousness, and to delay or prevent me from acquiring any real sense of personal self-awareness or of achieving, however miniscule, philosophical growth. The only thing I’ve ever had any hope of influencing, even a little bit, is my own destiny. I choose to dust myself off and resume my journey in the direction, at a pace, and in the manner of my own choosing.

The two cultural texts occupying my mind the past couple of weeks have been George Moore’s novel Héloïse and Abélard, first published in 1921; and Tokyo Vice, the HBO series which debuted in 2022. One hundred years apart, give or take, both George Moore and Tokyo Vice offer the same advive: if you’ve acquired enemies in your life, it’s because you’re doing something right. Fuck ‘em.

Focus on yourself. Chin up, Carry On.

Here is an excerpt of me singing the final vocals to the Lt.-Colonel David Davis song “Chin Up, Carry On” last week at Sunrise Studios, on East Hastings Street, Vancouver, B.C. Filmed clandestinely by Cole Friesen, my outrageously talented musical partner, producer and good friend.

Merry Christmas to you all.