I’ve got this thing about bridges. I don’t mean the kind you drive over – I mean the kind you sing. For some reason, I discover that my cleverest moments end up being in the bridge. You need an example, you say? Well, coincidentally, I’ve got one right here.
I’ve just finished a brand new song – my first song in several months, actually. The beginning of this year has been a parade of minor health crises and sundry inconveniences, and frankly, I’ve just been coming home and watching sports on TV. So getting back to laboring in the lyric mines is a Big Deal. The song is inspired by last month’s abortive end of the world event, which resulted in, well, the world not ending, unless you believe the New York Post (headline, I kid you not: “World ends! Heaven looks exactly like New York City”). The song is called “Salvation”, and it’s everything you’d hope that a snarky dismissal of the Rapture would be, including this bridge:
At Starbuck’s you’ll be waitin’
Behind the spawn of Satan
And the playgrounds will be jammed
With the children of the damned
Your virtue will be tested
On the tiniest of trips
Stalled behind the minivans
Of the Apocalypse
Comedy gold, I tell you, comedy gold, as my brother-in-law would say. And it’s even better with the music.
But the thing about writing a bridge like that is that it’s a standard you can’t possibly rise to in the rest of the song. In the first place, it would probably take me the rest of the decade to write three minutes of something that clever; in the second place, the audience would be too busy ridiculing the overdensity of my cleverness to actually listen to the song. And we can’t have that. But on the other hand, it feels like, well, if I can write that, why can’t every line be a masterpiece?
The problem is, of course, that I am, after all, only mortal. I rise to moments of true inspiration only sporadically, like most of the rest of us mere mortals. We are all capable of genius, at moments, in our chosen medium, be it paint, music, the spoken word, baseball, scrimshaw, or those lunatic stunts by the cast of Jackass. But it seldom lasts. You’ll find yourself saying, “C’mon, anybody can do a double backflip into a puddle of sewage. But riding a motorized cactus in the Kentucky Derby? Now that’s inspired.” You’ll find yourself buying cut-rate movie tickets to Jackass IV and spending most of the movie complaining about how their earlier idiocy was better, before they went mainstream and got all commercial and stuff. And you know what? You’d be right.
So let’s take our inspiration where we find it. And if it’s only eight lines long, well, that’s eight more lines of genius than I produced yesterday.