Musical Monday vol. 8

I apologize about the lack of a sports post on Friday. But I can explain!

Football is actually easier to write about than baseball, I'm realizing, in part for the many reasons I disliked it so much for so long. It's heavily commercialized. Every game has a whole week to get hyped up into a Clash Between the Gods and the Titans All Over Again, and This Time It's Personal. All the strategy and tactics of the game are sliced up into little sound bytes, then the sound bytes are sorted out by TV pundits. Who, like prospectors panning for gold, will take one or two shiny nuggets of awkwardness or poorly-phrased cliche, and on the basis of such, attempt to stake out a claim on a probably-nonexistent story.

Baseball, by contrast, is a much slower and more elegant game. It has just as much commercial penetration and is just as swarmed by pundits aiming for a scoop, true. But there are literally more than ten times as many baseball games than football games in each sport's regular season--162 to 16. And once the season starts, games occur on almost a daily basis, so there's less time to build up a crazy story around any particular game. Baseball is more about numbers, the history of various players as they travel to one franchise to another, statistical averages over time. In other words, things that take a significant knowledge base to write about intelligently. Which an extremely casual, possibly ADD-having quasi-fan such as myself has trouble carrying around in her brain!

(Of course, I still know how to make a monkey wrench or which combat items to use when I'm fighting Spam Witches in the Valley of Rof L'm Fao in KoL. But those are things I do almost every day! And it tells me funny jokes all the time!)


Going to open mic night with my little sister was way more in my comfort zone, and about as far removed from the glitzy world of professional athletics as one can get. This is a little cafe, not too far a drive from Elgin, where young people get up on stage in front of one another and attempt to amuse with comedy or entertain with music.

For many it was only an attempt. There was some silly show on mute in the background, and more than one person ended up just providing an awkward soundtrack while we all learned, for example, that if you're up in front of a firing squad and they all intentionally miss because they think the charges against you are stupid, you can still die of a heart attack because you believe you've been shot. I'll keep it in mind if it ever comes up! And wait to be killed by actual bullets. Cheery thought.

We ended up getting to sing almost dead last, because everyone seemed to have a reason they needed to get home early. Understandable, and an unfortunate side effect of scheduling open mic on Sunday nights. Why they don't do it on Friday nights, when most people are likeliest to be free the next day, I do not know. But it's been going on long enough that I suppose it's a tradition now, in other words a habit agreed upon by many people. And if one person's habit is hard to break, trying to get thirty to fifty people to all break a habit at once has got to be bad for business.

Still, it made me a bit wistful to see one group after another get up and leave. The more Americal Idol I watch, the less appeal the world of massively commercialized music has for me. But it still hasn't killed my craving for audiences. I want to get to has. I want to earn by being not lame. I want to singy my shiny sounds for more than fifteen people someday! Very much yes!

*does dance of impatience*
(which bears an embarrassing resemblance to dance of needing bathroom)
(which comparison would probably have the late Dr. Freud penciling me in twice weekly)

Anyway, along with a couple old favorites like [but the ghost] and [static], I got to play one of my new songs. Very, very new. Like *checks practice grid* written on Friday. It's been my tradition on Musical Monday to include the lyrics of a new song if I've got one, and this is one. But I am still nervous about this one because of the nature of it. Y'all know I recently said some stupid things and had a fight with my big sister Amber. That being the biggest thing on my emotional horizon, it is what I wrote about. Moral of the story of the song is: my misperception and impulsiveness caused you pain. Recognizing this fact is also painful. I employ some hyperbole, but I hope not too much.



[missing]

I hit a sour note
stepped on a sidewalk crack
bus barreled down the road
driver did not look back
reached underneath my coat
for what controls the sound

my fingers turned the volume down

my voice it would have shook
I pressed the keys instead
what I wrote must have looked
different than what you read
I guess I lost my chance
to tell you what I mean

when tears wiped my words off your screen

I know I earned this blame
my sin has found me out
I went and called you names
after you'd come to doubt
I'd want you in my life
because we disagree

about a man from Galilee

I have a bottle here
that says it's not impressed
neither are you, my dear
I beg you, be my guest
come take a look around
before we blow this joint

you'll see somehow I missed the point

cause I jumped up
and bit you
all you fed me is what you consume
I did not mean
to hit you
saw you standing in another room
if I'd just thought
to listen
if I can't see you that doesn't mean you're

missing, missing, missing