Lumber Nine

Oh! Lumber 9 is mighty fine
While Lumber 8's just not so great
But -Man!- wouldn't we just be in heaven
If we lived in a house made from lumber eleven...

I have to walk over the freeway on my way to the bus stop. Some days that winds up being a bigger effort than others. When I start imagining myself being picked up by the wind and blown over the fence and down into the path of oncoming traffic, it often helps to count. Something about being focused on the numbers and not the dark fantasy, maybe.

This song was written for SpinTunes 16, Round 2. The challenge: Count Me In - Your lyrics must prominently feature counting. How and what you count is up to you - you can count up or down, by ones, fives, tens, logarithmically, exponentially; you can count steps in a process, miles in a journey, hours in a day...

Milk?! How Vomitable!

Written for the SpinTunes contest challenge: "Write a song based on a scene from a book or movie."

This song is based on a scene from the 1963 movie The Raven, written by Richard Matheson and directed by Roger Corman. It's all immensely far removed from Edgar Allan Poe by this point. "Crow" fit my meter better than "raven," but Wikipedia says, "There is no consistent distinction between 'crows' and 'ravens'..." anyway, so I figured I could get away with it. (And it wouldn't be a bigger liberty than Matheson took with the original Poe...)

I had been keen to work in the line, "You mean, he only used his hands?!" but I couldn't figure out any way to say it that didn't sound like I was talking about something completely other than what I meant.

Instead, I was aiming more toward the mood I get from these lines: "Instead of facing life, I turned my back on it. I know now why my father resisted Scarabus; because he knew that one cannot fight evil by hiding from it. Men like Scarabus thrive on the apathy of others; he thrived on mine, and that offends me. By avoiding contact with the brotherhood, I've given him freedom to commit his atrocities unopposed."