First (Ha! pwnd myself)

This is going to be the MP3 arm of WritinWrong.

After 15 seconds of brainstormed deliberation I settled on the name Swing My Megaphone partly in homage to the excellent music blog Said the Gramaphone and partly in love (and theft) of the R.E.M. lyric from the song "Hairshirt" off of their Green album.

Because I'm a fool for context:

I am not the type of dog
That could keep you waiting
For no good reason
Run a carbon-black test on my jaw
And you will find it's all been said before

I can swing my megaphone and long arm the rest
It's easier and better
To just beat it from the chest
Of desire

I could walk into this room
And the waves of conversation are enough
To knock you down in the undertow
So alone so alone in my life
Feed me banks of light
And hang your hairshirt on the lowest rung
It's a beautiful life
And I can hang my hairshirt
Away up high in the attic of the wrong dog's life chest
Or bury it at sea
All my life I've searched for this

Here I am here I am in your life
It's a beautiful life
My life
It's a beautiful life
Your life

* * *

I'm actually quite pleased with the fortuitous presence of the word "wrong" in the second to last stanza. And of the extreme open-ended-ness of the lyrics. And the joy in it. Now let's see if I can actually post something (and live to tell the tale).

Insignificantly, I once watched a history of Britain documentary hosted by Simon Schama in which he went into gory detail about the hairshirt worn by Thomas Beckett. (The link actually mentions the R.E.M. song as well as the whole cilice thing in The Da Vinci Code, the borrowed copy of which, it occurs to me, I still need to return to Charlie Hamilton).