| They could prescribe you any illness you’d like if you define the terms of your
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| ailments
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| You could sing a pretty malady like a black canary, but a crow don’t know the
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| smell of carbon monoxide
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| How many years have you been on that couch?
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| They could’ve quilt’d you in the throws by now
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| Your draw a line in the sand where it ends and you begin
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| But the tide rolls in, so who knows? |
| Oh well
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| And a little identity never hurt nobody, but lately you’ve been focusing too
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| much on yourself
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| So how many milligrams of you are still left in there?
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| 'Cause back in my day we didn’t need no feel-good pills and no psychiatrists
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| No, we just drank ourselves to death
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| And god damn it, we liked it
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| Who makes the call?
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| What’s a symptom, what’s a flaw, can it be both?
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| Well I suppose that’s an answer
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| Would you give up your humanity for just a touch of sanity?
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| 'Cause God knows it’s not like it’s cancer
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| And good news to the purists: they’ve discovered a cure for the symptoms of
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| being alive
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| It’s a painless procedure with a low rate of failure
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| But very few patients survive
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| And a little conformity never hurt nobody, but lately I’ve been worried that
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| you’re losing yourself
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| So how many milligrams of you are still left in there?
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| 'Cause back in my day we didn’t need no feel-good pills and no psychiatrists
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| No, we just bled out in our baths
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| And god damn it, we liked it
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| Doctor, what’s my prognosis if the studies show that
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| Disease is in the eye of the beholder?
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| Tell me «so it goes»
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| We depress to impress, I guess, in layer after layer to get off our chests
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| It’s cold out now, we can take it off later
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| Better safe than sorry, and we both know the danger
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| So doctor, could you run another test?
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| Got a feeling that this time I might just pass it
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| Well, If you raise the average
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| We’ll all sing when the bell curve rings in lyrics symptomatic of the way we
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| think
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| If our harmonies don’t sync, we can change our voices
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| A chorus on condition of our diagnosis
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| Back in my day we didn’t need no feel-good pills and no psychiatrists
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| What can I say, except don’t heed no evil wills of moral nihilists
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| I said «back in the days of lobotomies and shock therapy and mad scientists
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| Oh, don’t you make me waste my breath
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| God damn it!»
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| Ain’t your you-dentity at stake?
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| Does aspirin kill you with the pain?
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| You’re not your thoughts, you’re not your brain, you’re just the character
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| you’ve made
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| Up in your head, down in your heart, what seem like separate body parts
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| Come together to believe they’re you, and not just chemistry
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| It’s not the way that you were raised, or what the advertisements say
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| Not what you pay for, what you pray for, what you want, or what you say
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| And I see your tendency to redefine disease by what you need
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| And I’m afraid I can’t prescribe the diagnosis that you seek
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| And something tells me that you need, forgive me now if I misspeak
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| But something tells me that you like, and something tells me
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| You prefer to be sitting there flipping through those old issues of People
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| Well that’s our time, see you next week |