I'm Not From Around Here

I'm not from around here, so I hope you take this the right way, but even though you seem to be neurologically complex enough, you flesh-bearing bipeds make an incredibly contradiction-riddled species, as if you're all bent on comic self-destruction. Of course, you could be vastly superior in some inscrutable way. So allow me to share some of my recent observations and perhaps you might be able to help me understand your kind.

I saw one of your kind walking with a quadruped progeny substitute. The poor thing was tethered to a territorial freedom constraint. Still it managed to defecate on a chlorophyll-covered status exhibit, when someone ran out of a privacy protection unit and yelled, "Get that mongrel out of my yard. Why don't you dump its shit on your own damn lawn!" The other pretended like she didn't hear and muttered underneath her breath, "Animal hater."

I ventured into one of your culturally vacant expanses of sameness and found myself in the middle of one of those mass consumption pits. They were running some sort of consumer feeding frenzy, when I overheard a verbal exchange between two discretionary income disposers.  "John's out of town," one said, "I've been shopping now for two whole days. This is really gonna cost him."

The other just chuckled and replied as she winked her eye, "Serves him right."

I headed out to the surrounding asphalt field neatly divided into grid-lined stalls packed side-to-side with air-polluting transportation pods as your sun was shining through your withering ultra-violet buffer. I passed some bipeds operating carcinogen intake units. One said
"I don't know why people complain about smoking indoors. I mean like I don't complain about other people's perfume."

Labels: music, song, songwriting

The Easiest Way to Write a Song

My latest song was a gift.

Some songs play hide-and-seek with me. Others tease and flirt. The words come but the melody won't surrender. Or a melody haunts me while its words never show.

Every once in a great while a song just jumps up says, "Here I am!"

I scramble to get it all down and enjoy every second of the game. That's exactly how "All My Friends" showed up. I heard it on my morning walk, went inside and started, scribbling down the words. Found the chords for the ready-made melody and recorded this scratch track.

All My Friends

I looked around for the sound effects, but the free-sound-effects website I found made it too difficult to download what I wanted, so I picked up my pocket recorded and did it myself.

It's only a scratch. Somebody else can make it sound better.

Labels: all my friends, song, songwriting, sound effects

A Most Extraordinary Shock

A woman named Susan Boyle sang "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables on Britain's version of "American Idol," a program called "Britain's Got Talent."

Toward the end of this video, after Susan stunned the audience with her performance, one of the show's panelists mumbles to one of his peers that what he had just witnessed was the "most extraordinary shock" of the show's history.

Why was he shocked? Because Susan stepped forward to sing dressed in an ordinary house dress, her hair arranged in a conventional style, her 47-year-old frame far from svelte. In short, a very conservatively dressed, average-looking, middle-aged woman.

Watch and you'll see, before Susan sings, the panel's leading judge rolls his eyes, expecting a flop. A disgusting display of prejudice, in the sense that the word prejudice comes to us. Susan Boyle, the no-frills singer, was pre-judged. She's going to fall on her face, the panel clearly assumed. The audience, in lock step, smirked and all but gagged when Susan announced that she hoped to be as successful as Elaine Paige someday.

During Susan's stunning performance, no one could argue with her talent. From what I could hear over the din of the screaming morons in the audience, she sings very well. Afterwards one judge, reeling from shock, called Boyle's performance, "the biggest surprise I have had in three years."

And as the audience heard the judges fall over themselves with praise, the auditorium of sheep could not contain their expressions of conversion.

Why was anyone surprised? Because Boyle was not decked out like a pre-teen prostitute? I'm afraid that their shock betrays the shameful shallowness of the public eye. What have we become that an average-looking woman shocks people with her voice? Have we become such slaves to appearance?

Susan's performance was outstanding. The audience's performance was appalling!

Labels: britain's got talent, prejudice, susan boyle

Abominations

Can you think of a creature that flies and has only four legs?

Neither can I. Maybe the flying squirrel, but it doesn't actually fly? If you ever run across one, though, don't eat it.

Flying creatures with four feet make the list of Biblical abominations. Along with aquatic life without fins or scales, blemished sacrificial animals, artwork made of silver or gold, prostitutes and dogs procured in church, the thoughts of fools, lying lips, tilted scales, sleeping with your wife's mother, and of course, homosexuals. Especially the effeminate kind. You'll find most of these and more listed in Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

Despite their prophetic scope, none of the scriptures of our major religions warns us about many of the abominations we encounter today. So I suppose it's incumbent upon us to identify and warn each other about modern abominations.

I'll start with those that have come to my attention and hope you will make me aware of those I've missed. Wherever possible, I'll post your comments as well.

• SUVs, especially the Hummer H2
  
• Westboro Baptist Church
  
• Advertising, Spam, Popups, Phone Spam, Billboards and all kinds of in-your-face product hustling
  
• Leaf Blowers
  
• Jet Skis
  
• Not recycling
  
• Restaurant comment cards and “How Am I Driving?” bumper stickers
  
• PBS and NPR Pledge Drives, "the fund-raising equivalent of water-boarding"—Charles McGrath
  

Labels: abomination, advertising, Bible, environment, npr, pbs, scripture, spam