Marsha, Thankk You for the Dialectics, but I Need You to Leave

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