Tonight, I have spent several hours watching MTV’s sister station. I refer to MTV2, the sister whose tits aren’t quite as big or perky but she more than makes up for them with style and class, as opposed to VH1, the older, fatter sister who sits around talking on the phone all day and whose friends speak in hushed tones of their worries that she will never marry.

This weekend, MTV2 has decided that it is going to show several hundred videos in the order of their beats per minute. This means that the songs start very slow, and at the end of the rotation, the songs are going very fast. They actually showed several songs per BPM count, with the count ticking up a notch every forty-five minutes or so. It was interesting to see the wide variety of songs that could be the same BPM: some hip-hop thing, some generic ’80s song, two Moby songs in a row! Just incredible. The tragedy here is that when they get around to the really fast songs, I will be at work and thus unable to engage in a dance marathon.

Which is not to say, of course, that I haven’t had my share of dance marathons recently. Just last night I experienced a fairly intense dance mania. It was non-MTV2 related, so I served as my own DJ, flipping back and forth between CDs as the urge struck me, dancing around to a song until it bored me and then switching to something else. Such events are not uncommon in my apartment, although this one was a bit longer than usual.

Generally speaking, the longer such a marathon goes, the more my cat becomes concerned for both my well-being and his own. His concern manifests itself in the form of loud mewling and impressive vertical leaps at my head. Unfortunately, last night, I decided to try to calm him down by picking him up and cradling him in my loving arms. In any other case his violent kitty emotions would have been soothed by such a measure, but you can see last night’s results for yourself:

I now have a big freaky scar on my arm. But these are the sacrifies one must make…

…in pursuit of the dance.

It’s peculiar, this old life.

A few years back, when I was more musically active and constantly whistling promising new melodies into my tape recorder, I stumbled across a series of notes which I was sure I had heard before. This, of course, is not uncommon for a songwriter, because you are subjected to any number of outside influences seeping into your subconscious mind. As a youngster, I wrote a song that I later discovered copied Joe Jackson’s song “Got the Time” note-for-note, and certainly I never sat down and listened to that record before I wrote the song. At most, perhaps I heard it on a mix tape in a friend’s car on the way to school in the morning, or conceivably the cover version by Anthrax. I may have heard my metalhead junior high friends singing it amongst themselves. Not until my older brother sent me a copy of the song on a tape just a couple years ago did I realize how close a match the song was. In melody and rhythm, not quality, of course.

This time around, I found the series of notes bouncing around inside my brain. I thought long and hard and although they sounded familiar, I could not place them into the context of an entire song. I figured that the tune was from a trumpet warm-up book that I used in band class in junior high, and so resigned myself to not being able to think of the song that the tune was from.

A couple nights ago, however, the song revealed itself, on, strangely enough, the HBO series “Real Sex”. There was a segment detailing some town or other that had passed an ordinance barring nudity from non-theatrical performances, and a savvy strip club’s way around that rule by putting on performances of Shakespeare in the nude. I wasn’t watching too closely, because as a wholesome, clean-cut Christian with upstanding Christian morals and a cutting Christian wit, I’m not really into that type of thing, but suddenly I took notice of a song playing non-diagetically within the segment. It was THAT song!

And what was the song? “Freedom” from the musical Shenandoah. “Freedom ain’t a state like Maine or Virginia, freedom ain’t across some county line. Freedom is a flame that burns within ya, freedom is a state of mind!” The bit I remembered was only a small part of it, and over the years I had embellished it in my brain, adding rhythmic variations and intertwining harmonies, but it was no doubt THAT song. The question remained: why the hell did I know THAT song?

There are two possible answers: either I sang it in fourth grade chorus, or my younger brother sang it in fourth grade chorus. For some reason I have a better memory of the songs my younger brother sang in fourth grade chorus, including “One” from A Chorus Line, “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?”, “Where Is Home?”, and, of course, “We, the Children of America” (for which the sixth grade band provided musical accompaniment).

Don’t look at me like that.