Lit Lovers Rejoice! Sir Archie Ferndoodle Rides Again.

by Roger White                                                                              

 

Fellow time/space voyagers and other occasional devotees of “This Old Blouse,” I am more tickled than a coffee can full of dung beetles to announce the return of my dear friend, back-porch expectorational master, and legendary raconteur of the obsequious and purulent, Sir Archie Ferndoodle (applause, applause, applause).

As I’m sure you remember, the esteemed Dr. Ferndoodle holds an associate’s degree in postmodern comparative limerick studies from the University of Southern Panama’s Correspondence College and has been featured five times in the American Anthology of Poetry. Just a few of his classics include “Oh, Staff Sergeant, My Staff Sergeant!,” “Why Is the Man Always from Nantucket?,” and possibly his greatest epic, “The Squirrels Stopped Talking to Me Today.”

Sir Archie has a rare treat for us in this installment. In his inimitable style, the Fernman has taken several classic tunes from the songbook of popular culture and rendered them as his own, with updated, shall we say, acerbic lyrics so pertinent to today’s manic milieu. Or something.

Disclaimer: The Spouseman—and the newspaper/periodical/bathroom wall compendium in which this diatribe appears—doesn’t necessarily agree with the views and opinions of Sir Archie. He is his own woman, and we bear no responsibility or legal burden for his espousings. So there.

With this heartfelt caveat (and sincere attempt to head off legal action), I give you Sir Archie’s renderings. By the way, it’s important to keep the tune of Archie’s specific song choice in your head for these to make any sense whatsoever. If that is, indeed, possible. So. Archie’s first offering is called “Ivanka in the White House”:

 

Ivanka in the White House

(to the tune of “Drive My Car” by The Beatles)

(verse 1)

“I asked my girl where she wanted to be,

In New York City or in D.C.,

She said Daddy, I wanna be near you,

In the White House with Jared the Jew.”

 

(chorus)

“Ivanka, you can have the West Wing,

We’ll set you up with all of your bling,

You can sell your furs and your rings,

And Dad will tweet for you.”

 

(verse 2)

“Barron’s got a floor to himself,

With a team of counselors for his mental health,

But Melania and I aren’t sharin’ a bed,

So you could move in with me instead.”

 

(chorus)

“Ivanka, you can have the West Wing,

Or you-know-where, I won’t say a thing,

Damn, it’s so good to be the king,

And Putin, I owe you.”

 

“Tweet, tweet n tweet, tweet, yeah!”

 

Um, ok. For his second favoring, the Fernman has rendered this ditty entitled “Perry in Charge”:

 

Perry in Charge

(to the tune of Tom Jones’ “She’s a Lady”)

(verse 1)

“Well, I’m the Energy Top Dude,

And now solar power’s screwed ’cause oil’s my cash cow,

Yeah, I ran for president,

I told Donald to get bent, but that’s all past now.”

 

(chorus)

“I’m Rick Perry, woah, woah, woah,

I’m Rick Perry,

Those rumors are false, ’cause I’m no fairy,

And I’m towin’ the Trump line.”

 

(verse 2)

“Well, I’m not sure what I do,

But I think I make the rules on nukular weapons,

But this can’t be as hard

As Dancing with the Stars, man, I was steppin’,”

 

(chorus)

“I’m Rick Perry, woah, woah, woah,

I’m Rick Perry,

Renewable power’s our adversary,

Let’s build that pipeline.”

 

And last, and surely least, Ferndude gives us “Lysergic Wood,” which he says is his ode to psychedelic substances:

 

Lysergic Wood, An Ode to LSD

(to the tune of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood”)

(verse 1)

“I once ate a squirrel,

Or should I say the squirrel ate me,

He showed me his brain,

We baked it into a nice quiche lorraine.”

 

(chorus)

“We smoked purple crayons,

As the walls melted into the sea,

Then Timothy Leary appeared

And said why’d you take three?”

 

(verse 2)

“I played canasta with Jesus,

His Holiness beat me two games out of threezus,

Then me and the squirrel flew to Mars,

But squirrel wasn’t squirrel, he was Pat Benatar.”

 

(chorus)

“We smoked purple crayons

As robots made love to the cow,

Then Hunter S. Thompson said man you’re in big trouble now.”

 

(verse 3)

“And when I awoke,

I was in a cell with a large man named Mel.

He kept pinching my ass,

Dear God from now on, I’m sticking with grass.”

 

Roger White Sir Archie Ferndoodle holds an associate’s degree in comparative limerick studies from the University of Southern Panama’s Correspondence College. Sir Archie’s classics include “Oh, Staff Sergeant, My Staff Sergeant!,” “Why Is the Man Always from Nantucket?,” and perhaps his greatest epic, “The Squirrels Stopped Talking to Me Today,” For further adventures, visit oldspouse.wordpress.com.

 

 

‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy

by Roger White

For this installment to make any sense to you, my fellow life travelers, it will behoove you to be of a certain age range—namely, somewhat old to pretty darn old. It will also be of great benefit to your reading comprehension and pleasure if you are listeners of a particular genre of music—i.e., rock and roll that also ranges from somewhat old to pretty darn old.

Let’s put the bandwidth at somewhere grayer than The Cars but not so geriatric as Jerry Lee Lewis. Give or take. So if you don’t currently fit these parameters, I will wait to write the rest of this column until you comply. You have 20 minutes.

Oh, forget it. I got stuff to do. Please continue.

You see, it occurred to me the other day, as I tried with scant success to decipher the words to one of the endless string of hippity-hop rapster tunes my daughters devote their entire afternoons to (see previous column entitled…well, heck, see all previous columns), what wondrous adaptive mechanisms our brains are. If we can’t make out the lyrics to a song we listen to over and over (sometimes under duress), our minds create lyrics for us—and even a backstory to go with those faux lyrics—so we can make sense of what we’re hearing and thus not go entirely insane.

Specifically, I was driving home from a genuinely miserable day at the cube. The radio was still in daughter mode, so when I turned it on, Katy Perry was asking plaintively, “Baby, are you tired of work?” You know it, sister, I replied. Understand that I recognized the singer only because I have been taken to task several times for not knowing who Katy Perry is or realizing her great significance to Western civilization. My daughters truly believe it is my life’s goal to embarrass the bejeezus out of both of them.

So anyway, I got home and relayed with a smidgen of pride to my girls how I related to Ms. Perry’s song. I got the exaggerated eye roll and the pitiful head shake, in unison. “Dad, you are such a goober. She’s saying, ‘Baby, you’re a firework.’”

Oh. Well. It was then I hopped into my lemon-yellow time machine and found myself back in my senior year in high school, working at that tiny self-serve gas station, stacking cans of Havoline in the back. It was 1976, and the cheap box of a radio in the next room was playing the new song by The Eagles, hot off the presses. What follows I must say in my defense transpired mainly because I couldn’t hear that darn radio very well. Did I mention the radio was cheap, and small? Anyway:

Catchy tune, I thought as I strained to listen, and what a unique way to give vent to how things can get so messed up at times:

“Flies in the Vaseline,

Surely make you lose your mind,

Flies in the Vaseline, uh huh…”

I could identify with that. I asked my friend the next day if he’d heard the song. “Neat,” I said, “because it’s true, ya know. Sometimes it feels like there’s just a bunch of flies in your Vaseline. Everything going all wrong.”

My buddy’s face morphed from utter confusion to complete hysterics when it dawned on him that I was talking about “Life in the Fast Lane.”

Just so you’ll know I’m not the only goober in the family (and so I can shine the warm lights of shame on my wife, as well), when I divulged my dark secret some years ago to my lovely spouse, Sue, she laid on me a beauty of a “lyric lapse” of her own. Now, here’s where you may look at me like a medicated cow if you haven’t heard the song.

My dear Sue actually thought that in the song “Peace of Mind” by Boston, where the chorus goes thusly:

            “I understand about indecision,

            But I don’t care if I get behind…”

…that it went like this:

            “I understand about indecision,

            But I’m not scared of the FBI…”

I thought for a while there that she was just saying this to ease my discomfort, but no, you can’t make this stuff up. We surely all have our own versions of tunes, the most classic being, of course, “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy…” I bet Jimi never knew how many people through the years would be pondering his lifestyle choices because of that one line. And, yes, CCR will always and forever be accused of some sort of scatological preoccupation for directing us to the “bathroom on the right.”

There are dozens, probably hundreds of others. There are even books and web sites devoted to this phenomenon. But you can’t really worry about it. It happens to everyone, I guess. You have to just let the water run off your back, like Van Morrison says:

            “Hey, wet amigo!

            Dazed when the rains came…”

Roger White is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas, with his lovely wife, two precocious daughters, a very fat daschund, and a self-absorbed cat. For further adventures, visit oldspouse.wordpress.com.