I Always Wanted to be a Female Weird Al

I did, too. I spend most of middle school scribbling alternate lyrics to pop songs in my notebooks. I even had a name -- Strange Liz Yankatooth. I don't know why I thought that was funny, but I totally did. Actually, I do know why I thought that was funny: BECAUSE I WAS TWELVE. Now that I am no longer twelve, I find it faintly embarrassing, but in the interest of bloggerly honesty, I'm giving it to you straight.

Anyway, I was inspired by the delightful Sybil Vane of Bitch Ph.D to reprise those days this morning. Professor Vane had the fabulous good taste to put up Philip Larkin's poem "This Be The Verse" today, and I normally never comment, but since a)hey, my blog is totally anonymous and I therefore started with no readers and, you know, maybe my navel-gazing will amuse some of those folks and b)I knew exactly how she felt with the parenting frustration because I feel like that approximately every two minutes, plus c)I really love that poem, which my college boyfriend used to recite to me and which I once wrote out in calligraphy for my best friend, who put it in a place of honor on his bedroom wall in Fort Greene, I put up the Strange Liz version, which I thought I should throw up here for posterity, in case I want to let my kids read this blog when they're older, or hell freezes over. Whichever:

They fuck you up, your progeny
They do not mean to, but they do.
Their egos swell quite monstrously
Until there is no room for you.

They bring to mind your childhood tears,
And all the things you'd like them spared,
And send you screaming to your beer
Whilst growing faults you haven't shared.

They suck away your very life
Until you're passed out on the floor,
They bring cacophony and strife,
And then they waltz right out the door.

There you have it. I could do shit like that all day. I just realized, though, that I forgot to give it a title. What should I call it? "Bring Me The Hearse"? "Fisting Ain't Worse"? (Okay, maybe not on that last one. I think I used up all my assonance dendrites today, though.)

That's all for now. Maybe I'll dig up the alternate lyrics to Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" that I wrote when my son was a few months old. They're called "Fake Plastic Diaps." I still have to get it together to send them to Thom Yorke.

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