The Alphabet Clown

“I’m at the enema roast.”

“Where is the beauty in Queens?”

“Howdy in the stream.”

“A, B, the alphabet clown.”

“Feeling like I dumped a load.”

I’m not the world’s biggest internet fan. I’m sick of stumbling upon people’s private conversations on Facebook. My 72 Twitter followers seem far more interested in what Patton Oswald has to say than what I have to say. Of the 17 emails I’ve sent to various publishers over the last three months, 15 still have not been acknowledged. The list goes on.

But thank heaven for all the websites that provide lyrics to just about any song that’s been recorded.

For years I thought Smokey Robinson was saying, “I’m at the enema roast” in “Ooh Baby,” when what he was really saying was “I’m at the end of my rope.” In “You Don’t Have to Be a Star, Baby,” I thought Billy Davis, Jr. was asking “Where is the beauty in Queens?” But he was simply stating “What is a beauty queen if it don’t mean I’m your number one.” When John Fogerty sang “Down on the Corner,” I thought he was using some unusual Cajun phrase like “howdy in the street,” though the lyric is actually “Down on the corner, out in the street.” Mick Jagger, as far as I was concerned (from about the age of ten), was singing a line from a children’s song when he yelled “A, B, the alphabet clown” in “Get Off of My Cloud.” Of course, what he was really yelling was “Hey, you, get off of my cloud.” And I am truly mortified to have thought that Karen Carpenter was saying “Feeling like I dumped a load” in “Rainy Days and Mondays.” My favorite singer was merely crooning “Feeling like I don’t belong.”

My biggest problem now is this: how can I be sure that everything on those lyric sites is correct? I mean, it’s the internet!

Perhaps I should loosen up on my criticism of the internet and all it entails. It really is quite amazing. The things you can create, the things you can find out, the speed with which it can all be accomplished... And the vast majority of it was developed right here in the United States of America. (Al Gore, right?) After all, I’ve sold e-books through the internet; I published blogs over the internet; I’ve gotten writing assignments through the internet; I’ve found old friends through the internet. So forget my condemnation. With the internet firmly in mind I now return to American exceptionalism and will gladly start singing “Jose, can you see, by the dawn’s early light...”