The truly healthy and happy person is one who can witness - even play victim to the many carcinogens and ruinous offerings that get tossed out and in front of them like glossy beach balls or nervous squirrels getting from one tree to another collecting nuts - while still permitting themselves to stop and smell the flowers. They don't have to be roses, because that's getting picky, that's getting greedy, just any flower, any sprig of colorful beauty amidst the damaged, scratch and dent sale that most of everything's become will work fine for the noses.There needs to be a daily collection taken somewhere inside the heart chamber that puts everything into its columns - the good and the bad - and makes it feel sufferable if they are no worse than equal. It sounds about right, and it should do enough to get them on to another one after a good dinner, some vino or a cold beer and a couple chapters in an engaging book. There needs to take place a sort of vernal wellspring, where new and blossomy moods can prevail upon the light's comeback after a trip around the world. There's a bigger reason than just an idiotic war over petroleum and refineries and keeping specific pockets deep and full of green that the buzz word of the times is change. There's more to it than that - than politics and wars without end. Maybe that's obvious, but since this Sonic Youth, Pixies and Pavement-loving generation has been living, no other time has felt so completely fraught with tumultuous confliction and irresponsible behavior on a worldwide scale. The advent of technology becoming our nervous, digestive, immune and circulatory systems - the desire for fictitious uber-connection and the development into a society that has gotten more and more submissive about our bodies and minds and bucks, has allowed for a great sickness to fall over it. Brooklyn New York's Tim Fite is trying his best to not become a statistic. He's trying to fight the impending sludge that's not so impending, but more up in our grill than we'd like to admit. He looks around at all of the flaws - people popping pills for all of their little aches and pains, rampant lying about anything that you can name, grotesque malfeasance in government and nothing to say that anything's going to change - and writes a song like "The Barber" on his inspiring and incredible new album Fair Ain't Fair, where one reading of it could go to suggest that it has to be a personal decision to take the black out of the storm clouds, to not sit idly by and just have everything happen to you. It's possible to inflict what you will and to self-medicate with your own attitude - change is a willing friend. He sings, "Who puts the green in the grass, the cream in the calf, the clean in the bath/Who puts the… lies in the lust…the toast in your drank?/ Well I do/I put it all there." Surrounded by calamities and robotic processing and strolling, Fite has written his loveliest reminder yet with Fair Ain't Fair that hands don't get forced so much as they're numbed and dulled and cajoled into a stupor that makes alternatives seem unlikely or farfetched. He admires the "beautiful potential for disaster" that he writes about on "Big Mistake," a song that every person should listen to once or twice every day before they make any plans of decisions. It will give you what you need to think straight, to persevere in whatever task comes down the pipe. There's no harm in fucking up and there's no harm in deviating from the pack, resisting captivity, resisting cooperation with the mundane gloom.