NaPoWriMo

So, beyond half-way through National Poetry Writing Month, and I’ve still managed to write something every day. In fact, today’s entry was written yesterday evening, so I’m a day ahead. I suppose it’s true that the more you use something, the easier it gets to use. This is as far as I have ever gotten in a multi-day challenge to be creative.

I still can’t rhyme to save my life,
Which caused the family untold strife.

My poetry is formless (sometimes meaningless) – let’s face it, there aren’t many rules for poetry, so if you say it’s a poem, it is. Still, I’m hoping the quality has improved over the month, although that’s probably questionable.

What have I learned?

I can write something every day as long as it doesn’t have to be good.
Something will inspire me every day, even if it was annoying.
Poems that mention Rocky the Chihuahua get more hits than anything.
Blind John Ellsworth may have a book when this is all done.

A long, long time ago, two kids sat in a room with plastic electric-look guitars and sang along to Beatles records. One became a musician. One did not. Listen to Jim’s records. Read my poetry. It all worked out for the best, don’t you think?

Pets

I’ve never been able to understand people who think any deceased person can immediately be replaced with a dog. Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent twelve years in and around animal rescue, but the worst possible gift for anyone is a living being that requires constant care and feeding. It is the gift that keeps on costing. (I have five dogs. I love my dogs. The costs never end.)

A pet as a gift makes no sense any time, much less as a distraction from grieving. A pet is a living being with a unique set of needs and a unique personality. It is not a fashion accessory. A pet owner makes a commitment to a pet to care for him for his lifetime. This should not be a commitment by proxy. It should not be an arranged marriage,

Pet owners require the ability to find their pets. Hopefully, this will happen at their local rescue. The human-pet bond is a magical thing, but it cannot be forced or assumed. If you’ve decided to adopt, go to your local Adopt-a-Pet and meet the pets. If your dog is there, you will recognize him. If he’s not, try again the next week. Your dog is waiting for you. However, your friend’s surprise pet is not.

You can divorce a hastily-chosen spouse. You can’t divorce a pet. Divorcing a pet means leaving him at the shelter – which depending on his age, size and breed could be a death sentence.

The next time one of your friends is widowed or divorced or dumped, just drop off another person of the proper sex and age and say “Here’s your new partner. You have to clean him and feed him, but I’m sure you’ll get along fine. Forever.” If you think that seems insane, why would you do it with a dog?

Writings

Having a challenge apparently makes me write everyday even if some of it is probably crap. OK, most of it is crap. However, it does seem to make me pay more attention to the scraps of thoughts that randomly pop into my head. How else would you explain producing what sounds like a Civil War piece out of the Spousal Unit resigning from a game of Words with Friends when she was in the lead?

(Go see Blind John Ellsworth’s “The Battle of Virginia”. The last stanza was written first.)

How To Write A Song

Editor’s Note: Reprinted from SecondHand Trpytophan (original posting July 5, 2008), where I was a guest author for a day. Thanks, Karl for making me write a blog entry, which I think was the longest I had written to that point. As soon as I find your email address, I’ll ask permission to reprint this. (Since I wrote it, I didn’t think you would mind.) I have edited it to remove some of the more scandalous parts, which is why I included a link to the original. For anyone that is trying to figure out how my mind works (a futile effort, perhaps), this may explain parts of it. This is how I will end up creating at least a couple of the poems this month. You have been warned.

How to Write a Song

There are any number of basic ways to write a song, with varying levels of complexity. This article will show you a couple of time-honored shortcuts to help you on your way to quickly becoming a successful composer. Once you’re composing songs, you form a band, and you’re on your way to stardom and easy riches!

Traditional Composition Method

The traditional method of musical composition requires copious study and hard work and has been practiced for centuries by many geniuses (and many not so much.)

First, you have to learn to write both music and lyrics, which can take some time, but may be worth the effort if you’re going to do this for a living and not just try to cash out with one big hit. You could choose to only learn half of the composing job (either words or music), but then you would have to find your own Bernie Taupin or your own Elton John, which implies that there are more than one of each in the universe.

Stop and consider that for a moment. Multiple Reginald Dwights running around with their hair (and Lord knows what else) plugged. Hmm. Have you stopped shuddering yet? Let’s continue.

Then, you must learn an instrument, so you have a way of reproducing your music, rather than just trying to do it in your head or trying to hum everything. This is the hard way. Nobody does anything the hard way these days, except possibly the Amish, and they don’t sing very much, and they’re probably not on the web.

Assisted Composition Method

A simpler way is to take some mind-altering drugs and then write whatever comes to mind. Lyrics can sometimes appear very quickly with this method, so have a pen and paper ready before ingesting the drugs. You may want to mark the pen as “the pen” to make sure you can identify it when needed. It might be easier to just set up a tape recorder. Remember to speak clearly, about 2″ away from the microphone. If you can’t speak clearly, you have very good drugs. Don’t try to work. Just enjoy it. If you can’t breathe, you’ve overdosed. This is a problem if you haven’t already started a career, but a boost to sales if you have.

The challenge of this method is that the quality of the song produced is often directly related to the quality (and quantity) of the drugs ingested, so for every “Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup” (which is basically poetry defined) that you compose, you will get at least forty-two variations on “Damn. That’s one big pink elephant and I need to pee.” which really doesn’t rhyme with anything.

The Xriva Method

The most time-effective way to write a song is to just borrow someone else’s music and possibly even their lyrics, especially when you’re just getting started as a composer. This is called “stealing” by the record companies, “sampling” by rap artists, and “parody” by Weird Al. However, if you borrow dead people’s music, it’s called “to the tune of” and that’s the best way of all.

If anyone ever complains about your song re-using an older tune rather than your writing your own music from scratch, you can just say, “Hey, it’s not like Francis Scott Key wrote the bloody music to the Star-Spangled Banner! It was originally a drinking song!” (History will show they were drinking Guinness, the drink of gods, a meal in a bottle, the blood of an Irishman. If you’ve had four or five pints, you’ll understand the tune. You will still not understand The Star-Spangled Banner.) This is a good defense, and also shows you are a musical historian as well as a composer.

Find a tune that you like (say “Camptown Races“, which everybody seems to know), and when your lyrics are complete, your new song is instantly ready to be performed by many other people. These performances are called “cover versions.” People who are performing “cover versions” simply pay royalties to perform your music, instead of writing their own from scratch. Royalties are how Sir Paul McCartney could afford to get divorced ~~recently~~. (I believe in “Yesterday”, indeed.)

Next, find a subject you know something about, or would like to know more about. (Just remember, if you don’t know much about the subject, you might have to do research, which can rather be time-consuming and cut into your musical career.)

Most people seem to write about love or sex. In rock music, it’s usually love. In country music, it’s usually lost love. In blues, they often write about death, usually during or shortly after sex.

Many artists find that in addition to a subject, they also require a muse – someone to help inspire their work. The muse often is the subject of the song. This could be your spouse, your lover, someone you want to be your lover or your Old English Sheepdog. When I first heard a writer had a muse, I heard “amuse”, so all of my songs tend to be humorous. Somewhat.

Since I’m old and married, I often write about the perils of growing older, like losing my keys or garlic-induced farts. My lovely Spousal Unit is my muse, so I often tend to write songs just to annoy her, which is what happens as muses age. However, I want my work to be taken seriously, so I usually end my song titles with “Blues.” This means something sad is either going to happen in the song, or has happened recently and is the main theme. Now, if you’ve ever been around somebody farting, it’s pretty sad, especially if it’s an enclosed space. Having your song be a blues song also means you don’t need to play many notes on a guitar to actually perform the song.

[One more great thing about the blues – you generally only write about half a song, since everything is repeated. So, instead of having to explain why Karl seems so sad today, you just say “Karl is dyin’ inside, Yes, Karl is dyin’ inside”, which makes the point more subtly. Then, you go on to the next verse, which is probably about sex or someone else dying or perhaps Karl’s favorite porn site being down.]

An Annotated Example

Here is an annotated version of my newest song, to show you how to put this all together. It’s a rather short piece, which demonstrates that good songs don’t need to be really long to be successful (four minutes of “na na na na Hey Jude “, my ass.) However, all good songs should have a backstory – which is why VH1 can produce so many “Storytellers” episodes.

Here is the backstory for this particular song. My Spousal Unit and I took my vegetarian niece to our local Genghis Grill recently, since it is one of the few places in the bloody universe that she can eat her damn vegetables while I can actually get some cooked dead animals and not just assorted leaves and berries. (However, I am not bitter about vegetarians. I love them. Especially baked.) While choosing the ingredients for my delicious Mongolian stir-fry, I slightly overdid the amount of fresh garlic on my entree. Had I been an automobile, the results would be called a “backfire.” In a restaurant, it requires looking askance at the table next to you, which is called “diverting the blame.”

I thought it was worth writing a song about this condition, mainly as a warning to future generations on the dangers of excess garlic, not that any Italians would ever listen to me. Actually, the first line just popped into my head, so I had to finish the rest of it, since the Spousal Unit and my niece both seemed disturbed when I recited the opening line in the car going home (more backstory.) As an aside, “Camptown Races” is a good basis for many songs, since if you just leave the “doo-dah”s in, you have that much less to write lyrically. This gives you time to actually bring out the joy or angst in the rest of your lyrics, depending on your mood.

I also wisely used the name of the company in the title of the song. This is called “product placement.” If the song is popular, maybe they would sponsor my tour. They could also post the lyrics at their stores, for a small fee, payable to me. Posting lyrics without writing music is called “poetry” and it is a good way to meet chicks, almost as good as writing songs. It is also a good way to do half a songwriter’s job, and still get full credit as an artist.

Genghis Grill [1] Blues [2]

by Blind John Ellsworth [4]
to the tune of “Camptown Races” [3]

Daddy’s having Genghis Gas [5]
Doo-dah, Doo-dah
Flames are shooting out his ass [6]
All the doo-dah day. [7]

Got the runs all night, [8]
Got the runs all day.

Too much garlic every time
It always ends this way. [9]

Garlic’s good on anything
Doo-dah, Doo-dah
“Til it makes your anus [10] sing
All the doo-dah day

Got the runs all night, [11]
Got the runs all day.

Give me garlic every time
To blow my cares away. [12]

Garlic comes in bulbs and cloves [13]
Doo-dah, doo-dah
Spread it on some toasted loaves
That’s garlic bread [14]

Got the runs all night,
Got the runs all day

Garlic is a tasty plant
That keeps vampires at bay. [15]

Garlic, garlic everywhere
Garlic, Garlic [16]
It can help you keep your hair [17]
All the Garlic day

Got the runs all night,
Got the runs all day

Garlic helps your penis grow [18]
Your lover shouts “Hooray!”

Notes

product placement
a blues song – which means a serious subject ahead!
so Stephen Foster’s descendants don’t sue immediately
a pseudonym, also helps deflect lawsuits
slightly more subtle product placement
the pain promised by “blues” title
don’t rewrite every line – that’s just overkill
a pun, based on the original lyrics to make sure the audience pays attention
“ends”? in a fart song? I crack me up.
use the proper term in printed lyrics to seem more intelligent, just change it when singing to “asshole” or “buttocks” to seem more bluesy
repeat the chorus so the slow folks can still sing along
again with the fart puns?
learned this on the Food Network – possible product placement in future verses
change from usual verse structure – just to show we can
remind non-Italians why they know about garlic besides garlic bread
clever changing of the chorus like George Harrison changing “hallelujah” to “hare krishna”
Anti-spam mechanism. Why click on ads if you can just eat garlic?
More anti-spam. Upgrade my penis, indeed.

So, that’s it. Now, you’ve seen how to write a song, using an existing tune and produced four verses, so you can have a three-verse single plus an extended album version with naughty bits they won’t play on the radio. You’re humming “Genghis Gas” now, aren’t you? Where are my royalties?

Cliches

I woke up this morning with “Two Ships Passing in the Night” in my head. It’s a very strange saying, when taken literally. I tend to take things literally before coffee. After that, the pieces wrote themselves. (This is my defense.) So, there are three poems today instead of one. At first, they were all one piece, with different sections, but they make more sense (such as it is) standing alone. So, I’m an overachiever today. This will probably be the last time that happens. I suppose I should save the extra ones for my writers’ block days.

It’s lucky poems are like Tweets, only longer. I can always come up with a Tweet. Mostly.

There’s a National Poetry Writing Month?

So, there’s a National Novel Writing Month (NaNoMo) which I knew about. I’ve actually been on the mailing list for years, but while I have the first paragraph of my novel done, I’ve never progressed beyond that. Sad. I restart every year. It’s a fictional biography based on my life. Apparently, I haven’t done enough interesting to get beyond the first paragraph.

Today, I found out April is National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo.) One poem a day for a month. That, perhaps, I can do. Especially since it doesn’t have to be a good poem.

A poem is either a song without music, or it’s prose that isn’t very prose-like. How hard can that be?

While some poems have rules (like sonnets and haiku), most don’t. In fact, you can call almost anything a poem, since there don’t appear to be any poem police anywhere.

So, follow Blind John Ellsworth this month and see if I can actually produce a poem a day. It should be interesting. One is done. How hard can the rest be?

Please Sign My Petition

I’m beginning to wonder if the ease with which people can share their cause du jour online doesn’t do more harm than good. In many cases, people are actually spamming your friends. Since “friends” is a relative term in the online universe (thank you, Facebook!), we all may just be annoying people we only tangentially know. We may also be inviting people to support causes they actually oppose. (If done on purpose, this is funny. If not, it’s really annoying.)

The main cause of angst in the Facebook world is Causes. Causes is a lovely application for non-profits to reach out to their donors and constituents to keep them updated on the activities of the organization. It’s also a way to fund-raise. As the president of two non-profits, I liked it. However, it’s a separate application, which can make it a pain to use. We’ve actually pretty much retired it, since we can do most of what it does from our own Facebook page, and then, we don’t have to update multiple sites.

As a casual user, I hate it. I am bombarded by requests to sign petitions and support causes, and most of the time, the requests come from people that won’t even send me a personal note. If I get a request from someone I know, someone that I interact with regularly, then I have some hope they actually sent me the request on purpose. Most of the time, Causes just helpfully sends a note to everyone in your address book if you don’t tell it not to do so. This is called a “spambot” when a program does it without the user knowing.

It gets even more dicey when you’re not really “friends” with someone – you’re a co-worker, or a distant relative (or worse, in-law), or friend of a friend, or met them at a conference. Causes doesn’t differentiate. It also assumes that if someone signs one petition, they will want to sign more.

Here’s my personal issue – I’m the President of Sparky’s Pals, which does humane education. It’s an outgrowth of the years my wife and I have spent in animal rescue. However, I am not a vegetarian. I think the “PETA – People Eating Tasty Animals” shirts are actually a bit funny. I’m still annoyed at HSUS for trying to make Michael Vick a poster child. Now, many people in rescue will think I’m a bad person. However, they’ll know why I’m not signing their petitions.

I’m also the President of a community radio station, KNON 89.3 – the Voice of the People. However, I am not a raging liberal Democrat. I didn’t vote Obama. Twice. The only useful thing Obama has done is create the petition system on the White House site, because it lets people annoy him. I do not believe he will ever take action on any of the petitions. However, I do sometimes think Texas should secede, and that petition made the limit for a White House response easily. Then, they raised the response quota. Well-played.

The difference between Causes and the White House petition swamp is that the White House owns their system. Somebody there actually reviews the ideas. For Causes, I’m not sure the targets ever find out there are people annoyed at them.

Here’s my request – the next time you sign an online petition, think “If I had to put a stamp on this, sign it, and mail it somewhere, would I still sign it?” Before you click to send it off to all your friends, think, “Does <whomever> think this way, too?” If you don’t know, uncheck the name. If you don’t know for the majority of your friends in the list, ask yourself if they should be your online friends at all.

If Facebook wanted to make life easy for people, it would force applications to use the groups people create. In my case, baseball players probably don’t care about animal rescue. Animal rescue people don’t care about gun rights, at least not the way I do. Very few people care about my thoughts on religion. I know this. I could just uncheck name after name when I’m signing a petition, or I can just not use the system. I’m thinking about just blocking the Causes application to end the madness.

For anyone still reading that wants to send me a petition, here are my rules:

If it’s something I don’t believe in, I don’t sign it. If you don’t know if I believe in it, why not ask me? If it seems really rude to ask me, are you really my friend? Maybe it’s best to just not send the petition.
If it’s not local to me (say Texas or closer), I don’t sign it. While I care deeply about the plight of the cockatoo in Namibia, I really don’t think anyone is going to help it. People are starving there – do you think they care about animals?
If it’s not written in clear, correct English, I don’t sign it. Take some time to edit, people! I don’t believe anyone in authority pays attention to something that is not well-written.

Feel free to use my guidelines.

I would start a petition about this, but the irony would be lost on most people.

Finally, could you like this post? My wife said if I can get one million people to like this post, I can buy a Mustang.

All Hallows’ Eve

I hate Halloween. It’s a stupid holiday. Technically, it’s not a holiday, because I had to go to work today. It is also a holiday of strife in my household, because my wife likes Halloween.

The difference may be that she was allowed to go trick or treating when she was growing up. I was not. My parents were convinced I would be poisoned by the same people whose houses I was in every other afternoon. It’s also possible they didn’t want to reciprocate. To add insult to injury, my mother discovered she was hypoglycemic in the midst of my candy-eating years, so I got carob instead. Carob looks like chocolate. So does dog poop. I think I would rather have dog-poop-covered raisins, because then I would know why they tasted bad. If my parents had just given out carob raisins, nobody would have bothered us the next year. Our house may have been papered or burned, however.

By the time I escaped my parents’ house, I was too old to beg for candy door-to-door, and people don’t like others begging for alcohol, unless you’re on a date.

There have been some years where children are being bused in from other neighborhoods to beg for candy. My wife does not mind, because she is a Democrat. Share the wealth. I am a Libertarian. Get your own damn candy, and I won’t stand in your way.

So, I do not enjoy Halloween. At least tomorrow we can celebrate dead people.

How did we ever survive without texting?

So, day two of the Spousal Unit’s unscheduled visit to Forest Park Medical Center, and as I negotiated with our dog sitter to go walk the PsychoPuppies, and am getting ready to send out the patient update, I realized that I can’t live without texting.

Cell phones are great, but then you have to talk. Sometimes, it’s just not worth a conversation, and other times, you don’t want to give the recipient an opening to change the subject.

Email is useful – you don’t have to talk, so you won’t get off on side issues – but not everyone has a mail client available all the time.

Texting gives you the advantage of interrupting your recipient wherever he may be. It also forces you to get to the point, since you have a limited number of characters per message. (From a recipient standpoint, once your phone is on mute, you’re ignoring the world, and can reply at your leisure. Also, a text at the right time can get you out of any number of interminable situations, even if you didn’t really receive one.)

Unlike phone calls, you can send one text to multiple people – or I can with Google Voice, anyway. (There are services to create distribution lists, as well.)

During the weather shitstorm in Dallas earlier this week, newscasters were reminding people that everyone was trying to call friends and family simultaneously, and texting used a lot less bandwidth, so if a call wouldn’t go through, a text might.

About the only negative is that we’re all being charged for using excess bandwidth that’s there anyway. However, given the number of messages I’ve sent from a hospital room recently, it’s worth it.

Wounded Knee

It’s time.

I don’t like going to the doctor and I’m very allergic to surgery, but I may be tolerating both very soon. It may be time to finally fix my knee.

My right knee went out yesterday while I was bending down to look at furniture at IKEA. If I tried to build it, it would probably be fatal. So, I’m back to limping around and no male my age likes to hear the word “limp”.

A bit of back-story – I hyper-extended my right knee in soccer practice in high school, either 1977 or 1978. I’m pretty sure it was junior year, so 1977. It hurt like hell when it happened, but the pain diminished rather quickly over time.

It was a stupid injury. I remember it like it was 35 years ago. I was playing fullback, chasing down a ball, cut back around one of my classmates, slipped and landed full-force on my right knee. I landed so hard, I kicked myself in the butt. This is known as “hyper-extension” and it is very bad. In exotic dancers, it’s called “flexibility” and is much more popular to watch.

I spent a couple of days at home with ice or heat (who remembers?) on my knee and spent the rest of the season on the sidelines. I was on the JV anyway, so it wasn’t that much of a demotion.

My mom took me to see an orthopedic surgeon and he said it wasn’t hurt badly enough to fix. Apparently, in the 70’s, there were knee injuries and then there were real knee injuries. He invited me to come back if I ever really hurt it. So, I finally had a knee injury after six or seven years of playing soccer, which would be cool, and it wasn’t worth fixing.

So, I can still say, “Yeah, tore up a knee playing soccer”, but there’s no cool scar to show off, and if you played soccer in Texas, it meant you couldn’t make the football team.

Over the years, it would go out every now and then. I would limp for a couple of days, and then it would straighten itself out and I’d be back to normal. So, I never really saw a reason to have it checked since a) it didn’t cause pain very often and b) it wasn’t bad enough to fix anyway. The most annoying part of the recurring pain was that it was completely unpredictable and it didn’t help determine the weather, like some injuries. Maybe only bad hips can tell when it will rain.

Fast-forward to December, 2009. My knee went out again. My wife convinced me to go see her knee specialist – she has a guy for almost every part of her body, which is not as slutty as it sounds, it just means she gets injured a lot.

First question – “When did this injury occur?” “Uh. That’s a good question – either 1977 or 1978, I’m not really sure.” Dramatic pause. “Why are you coming to see me now?” A clever answer would have been “Because now I have insurance and can afford you”, but I told the truth – it only went out sporadically and I had an existing (approximately 32-year old) medical opinion that it wasn’t worth fixing, anyway.

Dramatic pause. “Somebody told you it wasn’t worth fixing??”

“Yes, I had it checked right after the injury happened.”

“Ah. 1977. Well, back then, it might not have been worth it. Now, we can fix it.”

I assumed this meant prices have risen enough to cost-justify the doctor, hospital and related costs associated with out-patient surgery. (I also wondered if it was the same doctor, since he was not exactly young.)

So, then the questions went on – had I considered rebuilding it? Would I use my own tendon or a cadaver’s? (“Wow. Literally a dead man walking.” Even the doctor smiled.) It sounded painful, but doable – just a matter of scheduling. Then he mentioned the one major problem – no travel for up to six weeks after surgery.

Remember, this was in December. I was still in Lotus. January is Lotusphere. I was presenting. So, no surgery in December or January. February I had customer visits scheduled. March was end of quarter and completely unpredictable as to travel. By April, I had forgotten my knee had gone out.

A few months later, I received a lovely card from the doctor, as did my wife. He was retiring. “Oh, shit. I was going to have him fix my knee.” So, I forgot about it.

A couple of weeks ago, my knee went out. Ouch. I hobbled a bit, and it went back. Then, my left knee popped.

An unsettling thought occurred – “Hmm. Which knee did I actually injure in high school?”

If you can’t remember which knee you hurt in high school, perhaps your time there were not your “Glory Days”, in spite of what the Boss may say.

Both knees straightened themselves out in a couple of days.

Yesterday, I knelt down to look at the back of an entertainment unit my wife wanted to purchase and when I straightened up, BOOM! My right knee (“Dammit! That’s the one I hurt!”) popped out. It hurt. A lot. It was excruciating. It was much worse than usual. At first, I could barely wobble, and even though we were in a furniture store, there weren’t any chairs around to get off of it. So, I staggered around drunkenly until I found the proper limping motion to keep the weight off my leg, and then I was able to walk. Barely.

Bravely, my wife continued shopping. It’s why I love her so.

Eventually, we loaded the five boxes of the entertainment center parts into the car. Ouch. We drove home. We unloaded the five boxes of the entertainment center parts. Ouch. Ouch. (I dropped the end of one of the boxes on my foot. Try hopping in pain on a bad knee. It’s redundant.)

We went out to dinner. We parked uphill across the street from the restaurant. Ouch.

We went home. We walked the dogs. Ouch.

Finally, I tried to just lie down and put my leg up, but I couldn’t find a comfortable position. Luckily, I had dogs pushing me in various directions, trying to help me find the right way. Ouch.

I thought, “The last time this happened, I slept it off. So, I should be better in the morning.” That was last time. This time, notsomuch. So, for the first time in years, I called in sick – although I can actually just work from home, so I’m not really out sick, I’m just not in the office. Technically, it was more calling in “can’t drive“.

I had to tell some of my team why I wasn’t in. I’m sure the word has spread on the floor, so now everyone at the office knows why hiring the elderly is a risk. Also, I weigh slightly more than I did in high school, so nobody believes the “tore up my knee playing soccer” line, anyway.

Tomorrow, I go to see the orthopedic surgeon. Not my orthopedic surgeon, of course, since he retired. His replacement. I have a feeling my knee may have a replacement, as well.

If they fix one knee and not the other, I hope I don’t walk in circles.