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.

On Lilies and Ozone and Poets

Lost Hour came a little early tonight. Lot’s of reason’s for that I guess. My stomach was growling so I’m trying to assuage it’s complaining (assuage is your word for the day) with a glass of organic milk. I had dinner with my family tonight and my fourteen year old nephew was rooting in my sister’s fridge for some milk which I pointed out to him was immediately in front of his face, top shelf centre. He read the carton and defaulted to the orange juice. “ I don’t do organic, he said.” Nope, I’m not kidding. I paused in mid mastication of a really delightful potato salad, (which my sister does in the French manner) cocked my head to the side and said, “What?”. And further conversation confirmed that in fact my ears have not yet begun to fail me. I would type it out here more or less verbatim for you, but I hate typing all those quotation marks, and the niceties of punctuating dialogue within prose are pretty much of zero interest to me – but I digress. He did not wish to sample the organic milk. I think even the imagination challenged of you can conjure up, in your mind’s ear, the incredulity in my voice when I inquired if that was because he found all those extra hormones and chemicals where what made the milk so tasty and nutritious. His older sister, a sweet girl not particularly known for her acerbic comment piped in with, “No, he’s just a fourteen year old boy.” Which, according to her means he is set in his ways and astonishinly suspicious of anything hitherto unknown to him.

I did eventually resume chewing and reflected, (after swallowing, so don’t be thinking I was talkin’ with my mouth full) that given she grew up with three brothers, and I grew up with none, that she was vastly ahead of where I was at her age in terms of understanding men. She laughed a very self-satisfied little laugh while my sister chimed in from far across the room, that what I said was probably very true. I thought, without saying, as I was chomping through another mouthful of that very delightful potato salad. That in fact I still seem to be way behind the curve on that front. That despite having recently written a spec script for Supernatural which has been widely praised by a number of young men as being astonishingly effective at capturing the respective character voices of the two hot young male characters so central to the narrative. Huh.

Another reason Lost Hour made an early appearance could also be the electricity in the air. Literally. Vast quantities of sheet lightening scored with loud classic rock on the radio scored my drive back north to Vancouver. I’ve never seen such a storm like that in all my years living here. A solid hour of massive horizon filling flashes. The sweet flinty smell - ozone mingled with the heavy scent of lilies coming from the bunch of star-gazers on the car seat next to me – was so intense, so present that I imagined it was seeping into my skin through my pours. Bonding with the flesh beneath and sealed there for all time by the warm rain splattering my face and arms through the open windows. I shouldn’t wonder if there was, henceforward, a faint whiff of ozone and lily emanating from me whenever temperatures rise above seasonal norms.

Good practice for me though, being up again during Lost Hour. Starting August 1 I am planning to participate in the 3:15 Experiment. Organized by a writer friend of mine, a bunch of us will rise every night in August at 3:15 a.m. and write. Supposed to be a poetry experiment in expressing the collective unconscious. I’m going to join with although I’m not much of a poet. Or I’m not much of what I think a poet is. Though my understanding of that is remarkably stunted as causality of not taking Eng. Lit in high school or university. I did have a boyfriend once who laboured at removing some of my heavy ignorance of all things poetical. Despite the fact that he took back his poetry text books upon the dissolution of the relationship, the exposure must have worked a bit as I did in subsequent years, from time to time, buy a few slim volumes – Byron, Keats, Yates, Shelly and a bunch of other 19^th century romantic types mostly.

Okay sleepy now. It has been such a full week that I’m really, really tired of thinking and talking and talking and thinking. Just too many people in my head right now. People past and people present and people future. I want to run away, alone, to a cabin in the woods for a year and a day. Or, at least to the land of nod for another six hours. One minute left in Lost Hour, so I’ll post this later. Night and God Bless – or nite-n-g’bless – as we say in my family.