Lyrics of ' Sad Screaming Old Man ' by Jeffrey Lewis

I'm used to apartments with walls that are weak
Sometimes I'd hear it all if my neighbours would speak
But this recent apartment and bedroom that I got
Started out seeming decent, more boring than not

For two or three years nothing happened at all
There was an old man next door that I would see in the hall
He shuffled politely and wears an old suit
You know, a standard old geezer, a quiet old coot

He used to seem normal but then all at once
He started these nocturnal groanings and grunts
It's hard to get used to, it gives me the creeps
Pretty much every night now, he screams when he sleeps

Dark night of our souls
Dark night of our hearts
Dropping down the bottomless hole
I just need to get some sleep
I don't know when I might begin
But I don't want another minute
In this same-old story purgatory
Stop the torture old man
And please don't be myself from the future

If it was a dog bark or a screaming infant
I'd probably be fine, back asleep in an instant
But picture me lying there alone in my bed
When this old man just lets out these shrieks near my head

And now every night at like 3 in the A. M
I get woken up by this miserable mayhem
Who's being dismembered? What the hell is wrong?
I'm scared that he'll send me insane before long

And it makes me afraid just to be me like I am
Cause it could be my fatal moment, screaming old man
Tell me what did he do, in his youth for this torture
And what if I'm him and it's true that he's me in the future?

Dark night of our souls
Dark night of our hearts
Dropping down the bottomless hole
I just need to get some sleep
I don't know when I might begin
But I don't want another minute
In this same-old story purgatory
Stop the torture old man
And please don't be myself from the future

I'm used to apartments with walls that are weak
Sometimes I'd hear it all if my neighbours would speak
But this recent apartment and bedroom that I got
Started out seeming decent, more boring than not

But now it's like trying to sleep in a Guantanamo cellblock
Or a hospital hellhole for some horrible shell shock
Or a medieval dungeon with sadistic conditions
Where some pitiful someone is getting whipped while you listen

And you know in the dark when your mind is just spinning
And you get visions of weird things with no ends or beginnings
I drift off for a bit and then he's screaming some more
And I'm scared that he's me and I'm the him from before

I get some paranoid fantasy sci-fi scenarios
They seem dumb in the daylight but for now again there he goes

Dark night of our souls
Dark night of our hearts
Dropping down the bottomless hole
I just need to get some sleep
I don't know when I might begin
But I don't want another minute
In this same-old story purgatory
Stop the torture old man
And please don't be myself from the future

Well you know Jeffrey, it's true what you say
I once was like you but then I turned out this way
I lived my own life complaining love wasn't there
It was never enough to sacrifice for, or care

And I once had a cat and I had one or two pals
And I would go and hang out, sorta like that way you do now
But now all I can do is just scream in the darkness
For pain inside ninety years, empty and heartless

If you grow seeking freedom, you're a rose, breathe and bloom
So you know it's already leading you down the road to this room
Thought I'd get glory from war, in the dark in a trench
Then I spent forty years more just in a park, on a bench

And it's all existentially hopeless eventually
You're just dementedly shrieking like me, like you were meant to be

I am sent not as a warning
But as an acceptance
So accept it
It is already written
It is already happening
You are already here