Hard Times A-Comin'

"Hard Times A-Comin'."  Where did that come from?

Discogs tells me it's the b-side of a single by Earl Richards as demonstrated with photographic proof on the linked page.  (It for some reason won't let me upload the picture & it's just as well I suppose.)

But I haven't heard that single nor that b-side.  Speaking of, the Wikipedia entry about a- & b-sides doesn't let us know just why we refer to them as "a-sides" & "b-sides" although I suppose it makes sense.  Nowadays of course there are digital singles & they don't have sides.  They exist in the dimension of sound.

But back to the title of this post: why would I call it "Hard Times A-Comin'"?  Am I implying something?  Are you inferring something?  Are you one of those people who have a problem distinguishing between the words "imply" & "infer"?  In general, I never did but I did have someone once ask me, "What are you inferring?"  To which I replied, "I don't know, what are you implying?"  He didn't get the joke.

Frankly I'm lucky I didn't get beat up.

But I want to stress that I'm not talking about the country or the world or the economy or the climate or my old age or anything like that, although almost certainly hard times a-comin' for all those things.

Hey, maybe it's a message from my brain!  Do brains do that, send signals that hint at meaning?  Why would brains do that?  Wouldn't they want to be direct?  Brains don't have to be like religious texts or other mythic riddles, they can simply tell you what they want, right?  Or else - is that how we're wired?  To forever deal with ambiguous nonsense because we desperately need to trust our own interpretations?

Wow, that's depressing.  Is it true?  I don't know.  But if so, wow, how (let me reiterate) depressing!