To say that I have a love-hate relationship with the song of the day is a serious understatement at best. Creating a body of poetry in the 21st century using only the scraps of time available in an otherwise very average American life is, to put it generously, a Quixotic undertaking. The feedback I receive for such is so close to nothing as to make little odds, though I deeply appreciate that impossibly attenuated strand of response it does generate - I doubt the tiny handful of those who pay attention to it at all realize how much it truly does mean to me.
But at the end of the day I have to be right with it for what it is within my own self. The nature dictates that I will sift through a lot of dross as the days roll on. And very often I think, I can stop, I can stop doing this and time will just roll over it and it will vanish without a trace. A couple of people will say "aww" and that will be the end of it. Sometimes I think, I will stop and not say a word about it, just let the weekly status reports clock the ever-increasing stagnation of the song count and continue posting the backlog and when the songs run out just stop and say not a word about it. Archive it and move on. Six years to some sort of closure.
Sometimes this seems less crazy and obtuse and absurd than continuing to blunder along for another 19 years, not getting appreciably any better as far as I can tell, sharpening the stick of my evident pointlessness and obscurity for a further pair of decades.
And then a day like today will come along and I will rediscover a song like Lists which I just love so god damned much. I have no recollection of writing it at all (again this is very much the rule rather than the exception) and it didn't make enough of an impression on me when I transcribed it a year or two ago that I remembered it. The internet is notoriously full of lists, I myself despite decades of contrary evidence tend to expect far too much from lists, there are whole websites and books and movements dedicated to supercharged listing for greater effectiveness and personal fulfillment.
Such a delight to come upon this nasty indictment of listing, a mean little lash with its barb of twin references to "getting things done"-esque aphorisms nested in the second-to-last couplet. Death is stalking you, it reminds me, and it will win in the end. Best laid plans etc. Quit whining and get on with it.
