Five Song Friday: The Greatest Thing Ever Written
Episode #127: Bike Buddies, Lemon Studs and Tiger Boys
You’re about to read The Greatest Thing Ever Written.
Are you ready? I doubt it.
Let me tell you what’s going to happen.
You’re going to start off highly skeptical.
Like, there’s no way this will be The Greatest Thing Ever Written.
You’ll swear you can name twenty dead white man masterpieces off the top of your head that can kick this thing’s ass with their eyes closed.
Names like Shakespeare, Hemingway and Seuss will come to mind. But you can forget those suckers and losers.
I’m telling you, it’s not even close.
This will be the greatest thing you’ve ever read in the history of things that can be read.
It will be the funniest, smartest and most insightful of all things ever written.
Nothing will compare.
Not the Harry Potter. Not the Bible. Not the Fifty Shades.
The words you read will be the greatest words you’ve ever seen. You will not believe the words. This thing has the BEST words in the world. Everybody says so.
You will think, oh my goodness, these words!
You may faint.
If not, you will reach for your dictionary, but SORRY… you will not find any of these amazing words in there because they are all new words and your dictionary is quite old.
You will be FLABBERGASTED.
You will say, “This cannot be!”
Oh, it BE. Believe me. It BE.
You will find yourself overcome with emotion, sentence after sentence.
Which emotion? All the best emotions. Every one of them!
SIMULTANEOUSLY… which means all at the same time.
You will want to laugh and cry in one breath, but you will also be spiritually moved and carnally aroused and intellectually enriched and also super scared (more than any dumb book about sewer clowns).
There will be so many swirling layers of meaning and truth, your brain will feel like a dog chasing its own tail. Your legs will go numb and there will be a low humming sound inside your skull.
That’s your brain overheating. That can happen when smaller brains try to process things made by really smart people with much larger, more beautiful brains.
And if you smell smoke, it’s too late.
But wait, I don’t want to die, you say.
At least let me live long enough to read The Greatest Thing Ever Written!
Give me that final mercy, you say.
You will wonder when this life-altering text will reveal itself and change everything and that’s when you realize… it’s already mostly over.
Whaaaa?
Imagine one of those dramatic dolly zooms that make the hallway go long and stretchy into infinity. The room is spinning. Now you feel queasy like a character caught in the twist of an M. Night Shamalama-ding-dong movie.
This is it. You are here.
As Palmolive Madge used to say, YOU’RE SOAKING IN IT.
What the hey? Come again now? How did he do that?
That’s what happens when you start reading The Greatest Thing Ever Written all willy-nilly without a care in the world, like it was just the cocka-doody phonebook.
This is not for amateurs. You were warned!
Maybe not warned explicitly, but it was implied because the title makes it clear that this is not just another collection of pedestrian paragraphs and bush-league vocabulary words.
This is literally The Greatest Thing Ever Written in all of recorded time.
But no, you couldn’t be bothered with safety.
You just grabbed the bottle with both hands and chug-a-lugged.
You didn’t check the label for three Xs, a skull and crossbones, a red hot pepper with the word “PELIGRO” written in flames or a winky-faced Satan with his fly open.
Unlucky for you, this bottle had ALL of those things!
Now you’ve just gulped down The Greatest Thing Ever Written like it was no big deal, when it is, in fact, the BIGGEST of deals. The hugest of HUGE.
You scarfed this thing like Joey Chestnut going at a pile of buns and wieners, when it was designed to be savored in tiny, fancy courses, with a fork and knife like a civilized human being.
That’s too much too fast!
This is The Greatest Thing Ever Written, not a shot of Jägermeister.
You should probably lie down. Elevate your legs. Call a church person.
What happens next?
You’ll get a nagging feeling in your belly bottom. You’ll reconsider the last 700 words, parsing the sentences in search of those previous promises.
You will ask yourself a series of questions, each one making you feel more nauseous.
Was this, in fact, The Greatest Thing Ever Written?
Yes, and everybody alive and everybody who ever lived thinks so.
Was it about anything? Because at second glance, it feels an awful lot like nothing.
It was about EVERYTHING. If you think it was nothing, then YOU’RE the nothing.
Wait… where’s my wallet?
Maybe you left it at home.
Five Song Friday #127
“Diamond Bike” - Offcuts
I did not have a Diamond Bike, but when I was 13, I had a Diamond Back beach cruiser. I loved that bike as if it was a human person. Not in a weird way, but more like a best pal, bosom buddy kind of situation. Like if my bike was a human person, we’d stay up late watching action movies and eating pizza and laughing about sports things. Nothing weird like romantic picnics or long walks on the beach. I mean, I KNOW it’s a bike for Christ’s sake! I didn’t put a dress on it like it was WEARING the dress. I don’t even know where the dress came from or who put those dangly earrings on the handlebar. Probably some kids doing a prank.
“Four Walls and an Amplifier” - Brock Berrigan
I’m thinking if you have four walls and an amplifier, you should reach out to the guy with two turntables and a microphone. Get him to call up the milkshake lady and you got yourselves a party!
“Bit Part” - The Lemonheads
Here’s a fun drinking game you can play if you go see The Lemonheads perform live. Take a swig every time you see a middle-aged lady hand another middle-aged lady a phone that has Evan Dando’s 1991 glamour shot on the screen. Drink again if they look at each other and do the wide-eyed “hubba hubba” look. Make sure you have an Uber lined up, because you will be HAMMERED.
“Shrinking Violet” - Kinny
Here’s how my dumb mind works. This song comes from Kinny’s album called Can’t Kill a Dame With Soul. My brain takes “Kinny” and “Kill” and immediately tries to build some sort of South Park gag. Something like, “Oh no! They killed Kinny!” But then I realized that’s not really a joke. It’s just taking two things that sound like each other and mixing them up. So there is no “there” there. But I have nothing else, so instead of just dropping it, I write about the nothing gag and cross my fingers and go full “meta.” I am so sorry. This will not happen again. Though we all know it definitely will.
“The Green and Fresh Quest” - Ride the tiger
Always wanted to ride a tiger. Sounds like a lot of fun with close to zero potential for disaster. A soft-boy meat bag straddling a giant pussycat with 6-inch knife teeth and four Hugh-Jackman-Wolverine paws? Sign me up!
“Don’t waste your crazy!” - Fiona Apple (Born September 13, 1977)
Thanks for reading!
Sincerely,
DJ CrankyPete