The Meme Begins, Maybe

For some reason, writing haikus on the internet is a thing.  It’s become a bit of a meme.  On message boards around the net people have been delivering their posts in that particular seventeen syllable structure: three lines of five-seven-five.

The haiku is restrictive.  Sometimes you just can’t say what you want in seventeen syllables.  Besides, you shouldn’t have to force every different kind of thing you might want to express into the same structure.  That’s just boring.  Variety is the spice of life, or so the trite cliché goes.

So, based on my post from yesterday, I’m suggesting that people start writing their message board posts and social media status updates in the style of classic blues, with accompaniment.    I’d suggest tweeting that way too, but I just don’t see how you can write the blues, with accompaniment, in just one hundred forty characters.  I find that sad, sad enough to deserve its own blues song: the too-short tweet blues.

I’ve gotten in love

(dun-daaaa-dah-dun!)

And I’ve gotten in fights

(dun-daaaa-dah-dun!)

But I can’t tell the whole story

(dun-daaaa-dah-dun!)

In one hundred forty bytes.

(See?  To the point.)

Now I’m writing the blues

(dun-daaaa-dah-dun!)

Devil-may-care

(dun-daaaa-dah-dun!)

Will this be a meme

(dun-daaaa-dah-dun!)

Or will nobody care

(Notice how I rhymed “care” with “care?”  Brilliant!)

The blues is versatile, well, as versatile as a one-four-five chord progression in either twelve or sixteen bars can possibly be.  The blues already has a pretty strong emotional association with most people, so your posts about bad break ups and other ways that you’ve been screwed by life would be perfectly suited for this idiom.

(When I consider the number of Black Keys albums sold it’s apparent that tired blues clichés rehashed by white dudes is what you hipsters want anyway.  I’m kidding, jeez.  You hipsters have the sense of humor of hippies.  Great, now the hippies are mad at me too.)

I’ve been writing this blog

(dun-daaaa-dah-dun!)

Spouting stories and deeds

(dun-daaaa-dah-dun!)

But what’s the fucking point

(dun-daaaa-dah-dun!)

If nobody reads?