"Don't know that I will/But until I can find me/A girl who'll stay and/Won't play games behind me/I'll be what I am/A solitary man."

Meade chose the old Neil Diamond song as the soundtrack for one of this morning's sunrise videos:

Out on the walk, we'd been talking about Neil Diamond, because we'd met a dog named "Sunny," that got Meade singing the old Bobby Hebb song "Sunny," and I brought up Bobby Goldsboro's "Honey," and that led to a search for another example of rhyming names that were in song titles. He said "Sherry," and I said "Cherry Cherry," and I reminisced about how I did not like Neil Diamond when I first heard him. "Solitary Man" came out in 1966 — my favorite year for music — and it just felt too old for me. I was 15. Talking about it this morning, I said that these days he'd be called an "incel," part of the "manosphere."

Anyway, watching that video, I glommed onto the words "A girl who... won't play games behind me." I wondered if Neil was the source of the "no games" concept. He was not. There was a very popular book that came out in 1964, "Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships." Wikipedia says:

It has been described as one of the first "pop psychology" books. As of 1965, there had been eight additional printings after the initial run of 3,000, and a total of 83,000 copies had been published. A Time magazine article titled "The Names of the Games," speculated that the book's popularity was due to its applications for both self-help and "cocktail party talk." Carol M. Taylor, in the Florida Communication Journal, noted that many concepts and terms from transactional analysis had made their way into everyday speech.

So when you talk about "games," know the roots. It's the 1960s. The best of times, the worst of times.

The Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders song "The Game of Love" came from 1965 — still a year before "Solitary Man" — but I don't think it's expressing hostility toward games. They're all come on, let's play:

I adored that kind of thing at the time. Wayne and his co-musicians didn't seem too old. I was 14, and my dear friend Meade was only 11. Anyway, speaking of old, Meade, now 72, chose the Johnny Cash version of "Solitary Man" for his Sasquatch-at-Sunrise video. Johnny Cash always seemed mysteriously old. Born old, I think:

CORRRECTION: I had the wrong sunrise video before. Fixed now. Here's the "wrong" one, the one where I said "I, unaccountably, look like Sasquatch":