A Few Minutes of Fame

Inspirational song: Juke Box Music (The Kinks)

Why do songs stick with us like they do? How is it that a three minute experience defines generations, inspires millions of teenagers, and turns up everywhere as a shared cultural movement? You can't say that it's necessarily brilliant writing. Tubthumping did not have brilliant lyrics, but name me one person who couldn't sing along with "I get knocked down, but I get up again" as if they wrote the damned thing? The most inane musical phrases become the most beloved guitar riffs. What is it about catchy tunes that make us fall in love with them?

I want to make one of my three-stanza essays be as popular as a song-of-the-summer one day. Would I have to repeat myself throughout? Form a rhythmic cadence of words? Construct a sentence with a good beat you could dance to? I know I'm capable of coining phrases that stick. My mother still sometimes refers to the feral cats outside her fences as "hobo kittens," after I named them that. Maybe someday I'll progress from assigning nicknames to providing the world with whole short sentences that get repeated as if they have lasting worth. Once upon a time I used to be Mr S-P's best comedy ghost writer, although he sometimes re-wrote my best jokes, not always to their benefit.

Perhaps I should set my goals a little lower. First, I could get a tweet that gains traction, with more than one or two re-tweets. Then maybe I can aim for a blog post that gets read by more than a hundred people--real people, not stat-bots. One of my pieces of flash fiction is still on the front page of Ant vs Whale. I wonder how many people read that, and of those, how many remembered the story once it ended. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, and see where it leads me. I know I have the skills. There are days when I look at what I've written, and in the words of bad guy Taggert, I say to myself, "God darn it, Mr Lamarr, you use your tongue purtier than a twenty dollar whore." But I'm a long way from having people quote me like they quote Blazing Saddles. But a girl can dream.