The Friday Friday Song

For about a year now I have, every Friday, sung a little ditty that I call
"The Friday, Friday Song". I generally declaim it quite loudly and off key two or three times a day while in the office. This may be one of the reasons I've developed a certain reputation here for being a bit of an eccentric. That is actually super huge when you consider that my day job is at a university where eccentric is pretty much the norm. In fact I think we are largely fruit and nuts with just enough normal people cake to hold us all together. But I digress. Again. Sigh. Well it is after all FRIDAY!

So while the Friday Friday song is my principal claim to fame in the realm of song writing, and is now requested by some of my peers, I don't think my Canadian Tenors will be recording it anytime soon. Chief among it's charms you see is that it must be sung somewhat off key. Or at the very least with at least one vocal break on any one of the top notes. The lyrics go like this.
"It's Friday! Singing the Friday Friday song. It's not very good but it's not very long. Friday, Friday FRIDAY!" There is, of course a big crescendo up to the last Friday accompanied by a wiggle and a jiggle and a throwing of one's arms heavenward.

I'm not sure why I had the urge to share that with you today. Perhaps because I've been thinking a bit on the various forms of writing in which I'm engaged on a regular basis. Neither poetry nor song are forms with which I have experience not aptitude and yet both inform my writing quite strongly. I search, often and always, to find the right poetic phrase that brings a scene description or a character speech alive. Something about the poetic form being a kind of shorthand for a visual, visceral chunk of information. Constructing a phrase that not only captures the attention, but tugs at memory by making you experience not just the words but the visual and emotion image. And song. I often look at the structure of stories and scripts as if they are pieces of music. Some are tone poems, some cantatas, some studies, some concertos. But they all have rhythm and tempo and crescendos and timbre.

All that to say that even though these forms are things over which I have no mastery, it is still very important that I keep writing things like the Friday Friday song. I may never write a book of poems nor an album of songs, but I will continue to think about them and include them in my writing practice as key components of great writing.