"The Secret Of Happiness"
Warren Fingerbird retired from his high paying government job
as a chicken interrogator for the Department of Agriculture,
and decided to become a famous songwriter.
He had a small talent and a big ego.
His songs weren't very good,
but they began making him a profit,
which he enjoyed telling other songwriters,
just to make them cry.
"Quantity over quality" was his motto,
and he flooded the market with his music.
He was the world's fastest songwriter,
writing over a dozen songs every day.
They weren't bad songs...just not good songs.
He had mediocrity down to an art.
With about five hundred songs a month out there,
the odds were in his favor that a sucker or two would buy one,
listen to it once, and then use it for a frisbee or a coaster.
Fingerbird was in his mid sixties,
so he hired singers and musicians
to try to make his music into modern country, hip-hop, and pop,
but even with synthesizers and the modern technology,
it always sounded like The Lawrence Welk Show blew up.
Because he never had an original thought,
he took other people's old hits and changed them around.
Some of his titles were :
Crab Diver,
As Time Goes Bye-Bye,
Good, Good, Larry Brown,
On the Street Corner Where You Work,
Cotton Doll,
On the Funny Side of the Street,
I Can't Stop Rubbing You,
Just a Kosher Waltz with Me,
and Straighten Up Your Fly Right.
He loved to email everybody in the music business
about his latest royalty check,
and craved to tell others what they were doing wrong.
After all he was the authority who had 10,000 mediocre CD's in his catalog.
All in all he wasn't a bad person...just extremely weird,
but there were a lot of struggling musicians who daydreamed
about what would be the most satisfying method of killing him.
One of them was this:
Drop Warren Fingerbird from an airplane,
and have him hit the ground three feet from a trampoline.
Warren loved insults,
and received them with as much manic glee as he dished them out.
This is why some of us kinda liked him.
He had a Kevlar brain.
The public taste runs to crappy music, so why not write it?
And, furthermore, Fingerbird was convinced he was a musical genius,
so maybe he had found the secret of happiness:
Do something even if it's wrong,
do it a lot, do it fast, and never have a doubt.
At Fingerbird's funeral a woman whispered "I thought I saw him move."
Her husband said "Shhhh."
Copyright © July 31, 2006 Jack Blanchard. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
