FAWM song #2: “Jackasses with Horns”

“Jackasses with Horns” page on fawm.org

Wrote and recorded this one in a day, which is a nice speed-up for me. This song came pretty easily, and I’m as happy with it as I could imagine being with a song that I spit out so quickly.

The title refers to the unicorns of Unicorn City—jackasses with horns is what they’d be, if they were evil, which they (probably) are. Of course, at this point in the show, the only person to hold that opinion is the stableboy, who has to deal with their very sharp horns if they happen to wake up while he’s cleaning up their little steaming presents for him.

This idea is actually a lot less prevalent in the final version of the show than you might expect from the title, but it was the true inspiration for the show. Originally, I was just planning to write a sketch comedy set in a fantasy realm, but the stableboy-who-has-to-care-for-unicorns-he-hates was the only idea that I liked. So that started a story that kind of grew around it.

Anyhow, this will certainly get an edit to make a few things more precise, but for the most part, I’m quite happy with it.

Lyrics:

Every evening, forty-seven minutes past the break of dusk.
Half a mile away you’ll be assaulted by the musk.
Don’t show early or the monsters won’t be yet asleep
But get there late and you won’t have time to feed and muck and sweep.

Special hay bales, that’s the only grub they deem fit to consume
Treated with rosemary, comfrey and a single orchid bloom.
They won’t frolic if they do not get the perfect blend
It all smells the same once it get out of the other end.

Because

They’re not noble.
They’re not bright.
They’re all stubborn
And they’re full of spite.
Stupid blooming bloody unicorns.
Jackasses with horns

“They’re so gentle” all the stupid little girls are proud to squeal
Til they see you, then they’ll try to butcher you like you were veal.
Horns as sharp as baselards, each one aimed at your spine.
They gave me three belly buttons two in front and one behind.

Oh-oh-oh

They’re not noble.
They’re not bright.
They’re all stubborn
And they’re full of spite.
Stupid blooming bloody unicorns.
Jackasses with horns

In nightmares I hear them
Bleating a scheme
I wake every a-after-
Noon in mid-scream.

And then I arrive here
In moonlight’s gleam.
They’re plotting someting
A wicked regime!

I can tell you think that I am influenced by all this booze
But I swear that I have more than thoroughly a-paid my dues.
Fifth time you get bit you will not think they’re cute no more.
And you’ll want to join me in my one-man holy equine war

You’ll see that

They’re not noble.
They’re not bright.
They’re all stubborn
And they’re full of spite.
Stupid blooming bloody unicorns.
Jackasses with horns

FAWM Song 1: Where the Unicorns Are

\”Where the Unicorns Are\”

Here’s the first one… in all it’s confused, muddled glory.

PINCHAL:
Aathenaar isn’t known for much.
I’ve heard it’s a bit of a dump.
If the kingdom were a body
Then it would be the

EMMALINE:
Navel?

PINCHAL:
Rump.

It’s got no grand cathedrals
No nature to behold
They say the dining’s only fine
If you wish to dine on mold.

The baron is a tyrant
The stench is quite bizarre

EMMALINE:
Then why do you want to go there?

PINCHAL:
It’s where the unicorns are

EMMALINE:
Oh. There are nice things, too.

Every house is made of wood,
Or maybe dried-out straw.
The kids and cows will play outside
From the start of spring’s first thaw.

PINCHAL:
But… the unicorns?

EMMALINE:
Oh. I don’t know about that.

PINCHAL:
Have you been there?

EMMALINE:
Well, no. But I have a friend who… well, wants to.

WAJIDA
Aathenaar has gone awry
Its people need to learn how to defy.
If they would let me I’d be their ally
So much suffering I could rectify

EK
We’ve got the sun above us
And salty earth below.
I can keep fourteen percent
Of every single crop I grow!

BRANGE
Money Money Money

PINCHAL
A unicorn is mystical
Can inspire a career
And that is why I need to know
Will I find some here?

ZEB
They’re mean and awful nasty
Why doesn’t everyone agree?
Those bloody beasts should all be
Exterminated by me.

You’ll want to drown your sorrows!
EK
There’s a noble underclass
WAJIDA
And all the dragon attacks
WAJIDA and EMMALINE
Are now a thing of the past

PINCHAL
I hope that when I get there
I find in Aathenaar

ALL:
The happiest cleanest most industrious best protected most alkaline most heavily taxed fourth most pungent curiously alcoholic barony with a population of over 500 and under nine hundred and ninety nine in the entire kingdom!

That’s where the unicorns are!

BRANGE
Cash!

FAWM, Day 1

My creative work for the next month is going to be devoted to February Album Writing Month. Except for, you know, the show, or that other show.

The bulk of my songs, if not all of them, will be for Unicorn City, which Three Legged Race is hoping to mount this fall, so there’s definitely some time pressure.

Today I wrote lyrics for song one, “Where the Unicorns Are.” It’ll be the opening number. I can’t say that I’m pleased with it, but then, that’s not really the point.

I had to play around with a few different concepts on this one, eventually settling on Pinchal the bard (who has a major, but sort of an outsider role) trying to ascertain whether or not this trip will provide what she is actually looking for, and letting the rest of the characters introduce themselves and the town through the song.

It doesn’t exactly work, though, and I think the reason is that too few of the other characters really like the town, and none of them are easy to introduce in the amount of time they have. So I’m trying to do too much, and as a result not doing much of anything. Also, it could probably stand to be a bit less literal.

Oh well. If all goes well, tomorrow I’ll have a recording to share.

Bitchslapped by Burnout

Well, I’m back.

Not that I was gone, except for a 4-day period when I was technically in Boston (of which I saw the convention center, my hotel room, a couple of chain restaurants down the street from the hotel, and the fact that Sinbad apparently is still alive.)

But the three-week-or-so sabbatical from writing, a period of burnout triggered (though not caused) by some spectacularly bad laundry room techniques—I’m calling it done. I needed the break; things were getting UnFun, but now I need it to be in the past.

(This happens to me periodically. Not much to fear.)

February is shaping up to be, well, insanity. Most notably, FAWM, which I don’t have time for, but I am going to do anyway. But also, I’ve got rehearsals for Three Legged Race’s new show After, Life starting on Saturday, and another show at Gorilla Tango, Improvised Joss Whedon, that opens in February. Much more about them later. Oh, yeah, and there’s also work, of which the fallout from those four days in Boston still needs to be dealt with, as well as a major project that has to be done by March. So for the next month, basically, I don’t get to sleep. Oh well.

Anyhow, this crappy little post is just here to get me to post again. I’ll be entertaining/funny/coherent/less whiny soon. See you then.

Measure of a Man

If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals. — attributed to J.K. Rowling (although I can’t believe that the subject never came up earlier in the whole of human history.)

As wonderful as the improv community is, and it genuinely is, it’s not so inspiring to watch how differently people in it behave, depending on the status of who is watching.

I’ve been to several auditions recently. Most recently today, at Second City. Not one of the professional revues, or the Touring Company, and not something that anyone will be making a living off of, but something with, I think, some official support and certainly some prestige. It was after work, so I went directly there, and arrived about half an hour early. And I wasn’t the first one there. Nobody showed up late, or even terribly close to it, and as near as I can tell, everyone who signed up showed up.

Contrast that to some of the other auditions I’ve been to recently. I arrived early (I’m like that), but not nearly that early, and I was still first. One had ten scheduled, and only half of us showed. Another had “several” (the auditor didn’t specify) and I was the only one who came. He even waited for fifteen minutes, and called the people who had signed up, to no response.

Needless to say, these weren’t shows that had the cachet of a Second City production.

I understand the human nature, that “important” people get treated better. Improvisors tend to pride themselves on the wonderfulness of the community, though, so I wonder why they aren’t more fastidious about extending this wonderfulness, no matter how high the status of the potential recipient.

It’s late, this isn’t well thought-out. But at some point, this will make it into Unnamed Hypothetical Improv-set Novel.

My Sister’s Exes

The name that appeared on Kyle’s phone didn’t belong to someone he wanted to talk to. So he ignored the call, and the ghastly tone that alerted him to a new voice mail. All simple enough.

His phone rang again twenty minutes later. Then, fifteen minutes after that, and ten minutes after that, and five after—

“Hi, Michelle,” he grumbled.

“Hi-hi,” she bubbled back. Michelle always bubbled. It drove Kyle crazy. “Howya doin’?”

“I’m great. What’s up?” No extraneous words, no extraneous emotion.

“Oh, nothing. Just wanted to chat.”

Kyle hadn’t expected that, but when the words came out he knew he should have. It was just the kind of thing that Michelle would do. Most people in her situation would have only redialed so insistently if, say, Lisa had been in a horrible accident, or needed a blood transfusion, or maybe if she wanted to create some convoluted scenario in which they’d get back together. That last one, incidentally, dwelled far beyond the realm of fantasy. Lisa only made decisions after thorough consideration so she had no need to ever change her mind, and she had decided to dump him.

“Oh,” Kyle said.

“So I was at the mall today and I saw—“

“I don’t actually want to talk to you, Michelle,” Kyle interjected through her yammering. “I mean, not because of anything you did. Just that, you know, I’m not with your sister anymore so… There’s kind of a break, okay?”

Michelle giggled, high-pitched and delicate. “No there isn’t. I maintain really good relationships with all of Lisa’s ex-boyfriends.”

“You maybe shouldn’t, kid.”

“Well, I can’t have any boyfriends of my own yet, so I have to live vi-… vih-… what’s the word?”

“Vicariously.”

“Yeah, vicariously.” Michelle continued with the exuberance of someone even younger than she. “See, you knew exactly what I was thinking. It’s like we’re soul-mates, but for in-laws. What’s the word for that?”

“I hope there isn’t one, Michelle. We’re not soul-mates, or in-laws, and we never were.”

“You’re just saying that because you never got married, but everyone thought you should have, so—“

In that moment, Kyle realized that if he had to suffer the indignity of being dumped, he might as well take some benefit from it. He pulled the phone away from his ear.

In the muffled distance to the end of his arm, Lisa’s wails of “Kyle? Kyle?” grew more frantic.

He stretched his other arm, and with a ceremoniously deliberate pace extended his pointer to the hang-up button.

Naturally, Kyle broke down twenty minutes later, frantically calling Lisa to apologize and beg her not to tell Michelle any of what happened and maybe casually hint what an amazing person he was and that she could do a lot worse and all that, but for the first eight minutes or so of radio silence he felt absolutely righteous.

*****

No commentary on this one, except to say that I have no specific plans for this one, but it could wind up lots of places.

New Music: Mayan Apocalypse Chord

Lunchtime post that I’m all excited about because I get to use my “Songs” category for the first time. This is the first song that I’ve ever written for ukulele, and the first full song that I’ve recorded on the uke.

I can’t claim credit for the phrase “Mayan Apocalypse Chord,” however. I first saw it on the Ukulele Underground forum used by  Ukulele JJ in a discussion about the chord that is notated 2012. So credit for that goes to him.

I’ve now been playing uke for 2 months. I won’t tell how many times I had to record to get as close to a clean version as this is. Mainly because I didn’t want to count that high.

Public Bathrooms

Public bathrooms are a surprisingly dangerous thing. You could ask Letitia Baling, except that she sadly is no longer with us, because parts of her drowned in a shiny toilet bowl. She was not, at the time, large enough to successfully use a toilet seat.

The automatic hand dryer must be blamed for this particular unfortunate circumstance. Even the simplest of such devices have quite a large number of moving parts, and this one was a spectacularly deluxe model. While normally these parts would be safely covered by a metal shield, there are many ways for this protection to be breached. Rust, for example. Hungry mice gnawing through the bolts. Clever sabotage, or even terrorism. Or, as in this case, an explosion, caused by water that made its way into the dryer’s electrics, which caused the wires to short out and spark a fire that ignited a pocket of pure oxygen trapped in the blower by a serious manufacturing flaw.

The explosion caused all of these unusually sharp parts to shoot out at a truly stunning speed, sadly just as poor Letitia was walking in for a pee. They chopped through her like a warm Minnesota spoon through a lime Jell-o mold.

How did all of this debris hit her? Letitia was known as a woman of exceptional grace and nimbleness. She had once drawn a hail of more than 12,000 rocks catapulted from a castle outside of Lyon when its master, a thoroughly insane older man, ordered the action when he became convinced that Letitia was a horde of invading Mongols. (Needless to say, the old man’s belief regarding Letitia was incorrect on a large number of levels.) In this attack, Letitia managed to position herself in the one spot in a 60-foot radius not to be struck by a single stone.

So how was she hit now? It wasn’t the smoke, of which copious amounts filled the room. Letitia had spectacular hearing, and had even learned a rudimentary but effective form of echolocation. She could dodge in the darkest night, and have enough energy left over to dodge the night itself.

It wasn’t even precisely the water on the floor, which was enough to slip up most mortals, although that came closer.

The true culprit was Letitia’s weakness for shows. She owned hundreds of pairs of gloriously dubious quality. The hot pink high heels she wore today were so shoddy that they leached oils when they got wet. This was enough to make Letitia lose the flawless body control to which she was so accustomed.

As she felt her body open up to receive any kind of incoming missile, it occurred to Letitia to wonder where all the water came from. Because her sonar was otherwise occupied, she failed to notice the garden hose connected to one of the faucets. This hose was delivering copious quantities of liquid into the tube that directs the air. A brand-new janitor, in her enthusiasm to make everything perfectly clean inside and out, had put it there and turned the water on to its maximum level.

This custodian was also responsible for Letitia making her way to her final resting place. She came into the bathroom to find Letitia lying in pieces on the floor, and considered it a great tragedy that such an obviously great woman should be struck down so close to her goal. So this worthy custodian took the initiative to move what once was Letitia, bit by bit, to the throne where she obviously deserved to meet her reward.

Many of these bits were small enough to slide into the bowl, and when the custodian left the stall, the toilet’s sensors flushed them into the sewers and ultimately the Earth herself. Perhaps owing to the diligence with which the custodian maintained the plumbing, at no point did Letitia create any sort of a clog.

There have, in the days since Letitia’s passing, been some rumors claiming that it was the force of impact that delivered Letitia’s limbs to their final resting place. This is patently untrue; our heroic if unnamed custodian is solely responsible for Letitia’s peaceful repose. Upon my honor as a storyteller, to claim anything else would be absurd.

*****

This lunchtime post is just a bit of absurdity inspired by some overzealous warning sign that I saw on my holiday travels. Have no real plans for it—might be adaptable as a 3LR sketch, but maybe not—but I enjoyed writing it.

Airport Drinking

Donald Darby flies a lot.

He used to fly for his job, pharmaceutical sales, but he was fired from that three months ago. So now he just flies for himself.

Donald has been to Atlanta, and Washington D.C., and Chicago, and Denver, and a host of the little regional airports like Islip in New York, or Ft. Myers in Florida. He noticed none of them.

Donald doesn’t like to travel, but then, he doesn’t like much of anything. Homely, shy, and sad, it is a wonder he lost his job due to the recession rather than uselessness.

When he’s not otherwise occupied, Donald sits on his failure of a couch and watches television. He does not remember any particular show after it’s finished. Somebody else is living their life for him, and that is somewhat better than the alternative.

Donald would like very much to drink his troubles away. He and bars, however, are a recipe for a travesty, for he knows no one, is too frightened to introduce himself, and probably wouldn’t like them anyhow. And drinking alone? While Donald’s knowledge is nothing that would dazzle the most inbred hill person, he knows that drinking alone is pure alcoholism-to-be.

Airports, however, are a loophole.

There’s no stigma to drinking alone in airport bars. It’s noble. Your flight was delayed, and you’re making the best of a bad situation.

So Donald has quaffed Margaritas at the genuine Mexican cantina in Des Moines, chugged Milwaukee’s Best in Albuquerque, and sipped Sangria on Concourse C at Sea-Tac.

It’s not such a bad life. Or perhaps it is, but it’s better than anything else he’s tried. So while he realizes that his money will soon run out, he has hope: Hope that he will run out just a bit before that happens.

*****

Well, that’s a bit of a bummer, isn’t it? Pretty straightforward, and not necessarily planned for anything, the idea hit on a two-hour layover in Atlanta’s rather unpleasant Concourse D. Was I drinking alone? Only my hairdresser knows for sure.

Baru’s New Home

The journey lasted just an instant. It felt like it involved a flip. Baru was well-schooled enough to know that was illusory, just a function of switching from four spatial dimensions to three. He knew the fact, but not well enough not to feel it.

Before he could see it, the new world collapsed around him. One, two, three seconds, and just as suddenly he adapted. Again, merely a mental side effect that Baru already knew about, caused by the sudden lack of sensory information. He frankly expected worse. Rumor had it that some interdimensional travelers felt the constriction for hours, and had paralyzing nightmares about the experience in perpetuity.

He peered out the window at the planet bobbing below. It would be Earth, naturally. There were other planets in this dimension, some with intelligent life and some with the same blandly generic greenery, but this was the one most nearly hospitable to Tivolian physiology. While not exactly comfortable, it was the only planet close enough that the political notion of conquering and colonizing it periodically arose. The idea never gained serious traction, not out of any moral or military reason but simply because nobody wanted to live there. At best it would be a prison colony.

Baru idly wondered if he would set foot on Earth’s surface. Maybe he should take advantage of the opportunity, just to say he’d done it, but he wasn’t one of those people who grew up dreaming about setting foot on strange new worlds. In fact, he might avoid it just to enjoy the reactions that other people would have.

“You went all the way to another dimension and didn’t even get off your ship?” they’d shriek in horror. He would arch his eyebrows; and make a small, superior smile; and airily note that “It is impossible to understand the motivations of an artist without being an artist oneself.”

Of course, he might have to, should whatever food and water supplies on there were on board run out. Baru resolved not to let that happen. He was confident he had all the information he needed to find his way home, so it was just a matter of working his way through it. He saw no reason to delay.

*****

Something from Exile Issues, which genuinely is my main project, although so much of what I post here is from other things that are still in the future. It comes from early-on in the book; Nathan (known as Baru on his home planet) has just officially been kicked out. I’m still doing my first edit of the book, which is taking longer than anticipated. Partly it was tough to get enthusiasm for the project—it’s awfully intimidating to have a whole book filled with things that I didn’t do right and have to make them right—and partly because I’ve been splitting my efforts. The latter is dangerous, although I think I’m still on the safe side of the line; I’ve gotten back into the habit of working on Exile Issues, while having other things in the works has nice side effects like feeding this blog and preventing burnout and giving me a head start on projects when I finish this one.

Speaking of burnout: December 29 would technically be the blog’s 6-month anniversary. Really, though, October is when I got serious about it, and even then there were hiccups until Mid-November. Since then, though, nearly daily posts, and everything’s still going good. So I’m going to call this an accomplishment.