Don’t forget to get your vote in before 1:00 p.m. (EST) March 24.

Edit: Voting is now closed. I tied for second place, or, if you prefer, “First Loser.”

rattle

what do you call this creek we’re in and where’s my paddle
we’ll win the war without this battle
so let the baby have his rattle

…along with some clever ideas involving shaking the rainstick in 11/8 time. A rainstick is a percussion instrument, by the way, for those of you who thought that was a euphemism.

This gets added to a growing list of Songfight!s that I didn’t get around to entering, including

one less

one less bottle to drink
one more crime in the kitchen sink
one tough row to hoe
gotta backflush the filter when the water won’t flow

I’m not certain what that was supposed to be about, but I sure like the way it scans.

If you were ever in a Cub Scout troop you may know that these organizations can have any number of leaders, as long as they are all named after characters from Kipling’s Jungle Book and the alpha is a male named Akela. Our alpha was indeed quite alpha, an ex-military man who in retrospect reminds me a great deal of Buster Keaton, only without the gift for physical comedy, or, when you get right down to it, much of a sense of humour at all.

After all the games, group activities and so forth, the Cub Scout meeting ends in a circle on the floor of a church basement around an empty space that you can pretend is a fire. In this environment Show and Tells are shown and told, badges and other awards are doled out, and stories are recounted. And it was around the imaginary campfire that one of our leaders, a woman who we knew as “Kaa”, recounted for us how as a child she looked forward to the weekends more than anything else she could imagine, but that now Saturdays seemed to come and go by “like that”, and she punctuated that with the snap of a finger.

I’m sure that her message was well intended, an important lesson along the lines of “treasure your youth” or “make the most of every day” or something like that, but all I could think was, “Well fuck, that’s a pretty heavy trip to lay on a bunch of nine-year-olds.”

I’ve been waiting over a quarter of a century for the opportunity to write a song about it, and this week’s Songfight! has graciously provided it.