Soundtracked

Man Of War

"Good news! Your blog is being turned into a novel! But the publisher chose this as the cover picture, and it's in your promotional contract so you can't pick another:

Your job today is defending this decision by giving your potential readers the story behind it."

What's up you guys? Ok, lemme get this out of the way...sometimes coming up with prompts is hard even though I've got a cache of them the size of War And Peace. And then, other times I come up with a good prompt and it's not the right time for one reason or another to drop it on the "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS" , so I save it...only to forget about it for awhile. And this one fell into the "forgotten" pile for months...until yesterday, when all I had to do was find an image just weird enough to go along with it . You know a prompt is good when you get an email reply like 30 seconds after you post it that simply says "The fuck???"

And here again is another example of the creative power the members of WDC share with each other...I don't remember where exactly I saw it (or else I'd cite the source), but there was a thread of convo between I believe Cinn and Joey Says...Where's Winter? where I made a usually otherwise disposable remark along the lines of "'The 14th Fuck' would make a great title for a poem!" and left things at that, comfortable enough to see where the day would go, but not planning on actually writing that poem.

That is, of course, until I came across the pic you all see at the top...and then the wheels started turnin' and the black smoke began to billow from the chimney of whatever decayed remains in my mind ignited, enough so that there was gonna be a poem for this picture/prompt. Wanna hear it? Here it goes:

The 14th Fuck

We don't talk enough
about how important
the 14th fuck is.
It's unlucky
to get stuck on
13 for too long, and
we all know
each given fuck
isn't created equal.
There really isn't
a roadmap for it,
but is that necessary?
You're only using
landmarks anyway,
like a Patron Saint
Fucks-Giving Fairy
whose wings you ride
to rid the burdens
of irritation
from your damned soul.
         -"The 14th Fuck" , from "World By Design" 

Also, I've come to the realization that I don't use enough image prompts...so be prepared, if you are or become a regular of the 30DBC. You will likely see this prompt again (maybe not in the same round), but with a different picture. I hate that it's taken me this long to figure out that Image Prompts and Creation Saturday were made for each other .

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"Man Of War"   -Radiohead

"When you come home, I’ll bake you a cake...made of all their eyes.
I wish you could see me, dressed for the kill."

I know I said I would try not to talk about songs I've used before, but fuck it...this is an exception because I've waited like 20 fucking years for this song to come out, and forgot that it did over the summer until last night when I fell down the usual Radiohead YouTube rabbithole I probably find myself in at least once a month or so .

Extended snippets of this song showed up in the 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy   and was often credited as "Big Boots". They recorded it for the '97 album OK Computer but were never satisfied with it, so they just sat on it. And every time they put out another album, a reworked version of an old, forgotten song would make it...and I was always hoping for "Big Boots" because lyrically it's ominous and paranoid, while musically it shifts similarly (delightfully ominous to menacing paranoia). And when it came time to ready up a 20-year anniversary edition of OK Computer, the newly-retitled "Man Of War" was one of three previously unreleased songs (the other two I'd already had on compilation cds I'd made back in the Napster days ) as part of the package...and we also got a video for it, which is an incredible souvenir from the "freaked out, world is burning" paranoid Radiohead era of the late 90's.

Speaking of Radiohead, I am completely here for this definitive worst-to-best ranking of every Radiohead song officially released  ...in case you're looking for me later and can't find me .

Also, I wanna be here for this list of songs about depression  ...but it seems like there are a lot of songs by Twenty One Pilots on that list. Not that I don't like them, because I kinda wanna like them, but I saw them on Saturday Night Live last season and...I think maybe they confuse me, if anything? Like, there's two of them; a drummer and a guy holding a guitar. And during their performance he maybe touched his guitar like five times in each song. I know there's tv studio trickery goin' on and all that, but it's distracting af to me when I guy holds a guitar and doesn't play it for longer than like an intro, or 20 seconds during a song. I don't get it.

And finally, since many of us are a little more introverted than others, or care to admit, and the topic of maths came up in I think Charlie ~ 's comments section the other night about how cool it'd be to have some advanced stats for our blog that could track how many times we say "fuck" in an entry, let's start off with some word problems for introverts  . Don't forget to share your results...preferably on a dry-erase board in your kitchen that only you will ever ever ever see .

Whew...ok guys, I'm done here. About an hour to go before the NFL Playoffs start, which gives me time to not do anything before I sit in front of the tv, doing nothing . Peace, stop all the taps, and GOODNIGHT NOW!!