hot water music - trusty chords

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Like I explained, most nights before they ran me to bed they gave me this pill, knocked me out and kept me out. Or if something went haywire in the dose and I woke up, my eyes were all crusted over and the dorm was full of smoke, wires in the wall loaded to the limit, twisting and sparking death and hate in the air - all too much for me to take so I’d ram my head under the pillow and try to get back to sleep. Every time I peeked back out there would be the smell of burning hair and a sound like sidemeat on a hot griddle.
But this one night, a few nights after the big meeting, I woke up and the dorm was clean and silent; except for the soft breathing of the men and the stuff rattling around loose under the brittle ribs of the two old Vegetables, it was dead quiet. A window was up, and the air in the dorm was clear and has a taste to it made me feel kind of giddy and drunk, gave me this sudden yearn to get up out of bed and do something.
I slid from between the sheets and walked barefoot across the cold tile between the beds. I felt the tile with my feet and wondered how many times, how many thousand times, had I run a mop over this same time floor and never felt it at all. That mopping seemed like a dream to me, like I couldn’t exactly believe all those years of it had really happened. Only that cold linoleum under my feet was real right then, only that moment.
I walked among the guys heaped in long white rows like snowbanks, careful not to bump into somebody, till I came to the wall with the windows. I walked down the windows to one where the shade popped softly in and out with the breeze, and I pressed my forehead up against the mesh. The wire was cold and sharp, and I rolled my head against it from side to side to feel it with my cheeks, and I smelled the breeze. It’s fall coming, I thought, I can smell that sour-molasses smell of silage, clanging the air like a bell - smell somebody’s been burning oak leaves, left them to smolder overnight because they’re too green.
It’s fall coming, I kept thinking, fall coming; just like that was the strangest thing ever happened. Fall. Right outside here it was spring a while back, then it was summer, and now it’s fall - that’s sure a curious idea.