Lord Buckley passes sentence...

...on me.

I don't quite know what made me unearth my old recordings of The Great Hipster today, unless it was a simple need to find something, anything, that would make me smile.

I've listened countless times, can do most of his "bits" from memory. Better still, thanks to my time hanging with old jazz musicians, I'm reasonably fluent in Buckley's favorite language, Classic Jive.

But when I got to his story of Nero, I dug that the public's impression of the Roman emperor (as relayed to Nero by one of his pals) was an accurate summation of what I'm beginning to think is the best that can be said of me....

"Them...cats is sayin' you ain't nowhere, you ain't never been nowhere and ain't ever gonna be nowhere 'cause you is nowhere in front!".

And, as his sidekick went on to say, "...you done boined the town down last night, and the pop-u-lance is out there. They is gettin' mighty salty wit' you, indeed!"

So Rome burned, while Nero stood by layin' down tunes on his fiddle, and the pop-u-lance didn't like it a bit....

I can dig it, Nero baby.

If none of this makes the remotest sense to you, that's okay. All I've ever really wanted to do was repeat the words Lord Buckley laid down on another occasion:

"M'lords, m'laides, would it embarrass you very much if I was to tell you...that I love you?"