Writing song lyrics is easier than writing non-fiction once you get used to the idea that your voice is not your own: you sing for somebody else, you’re playing a character who isn’t you. I suppose all writing that takes the form of narrative is more or less fictional because, as Hayden White insisted, real events don’t have the shape of stories, with beginnings, middles, and ends, or, what is the same thing, lessons derived from the luxury of retrospect. That insight holds for biography, memoir, even historical monographs, the quintessential non-fiction of the modern era, as well as novels, the signature fiction of the same period.**
Anyway, some years back I bought a canister of propane at a Home Depot in New Jersey right off Route 1, an early protoype of the Interstate Highway System that gave us I-95, which, like a railroad track running parallel to a once-busy canal, shadows its predecessor from Florida to Maine. For the obvious reason, I started humming Eric Clapton’s rendition of J. J. Cale’s “Cocaine,” and the story of a downsized suburban Dad quickly unfolded in my head, leading to this rewrite of the song from his pathetic standpoint. This morning, I had a canister delivered to my apartment in Harlem, in preparation for grilling on the balcony, which led to another rewrite. The chords are pretty easy, so I’ll give it a try at the next open mic, in mid-April.
If you want your revenge, want to see it all end, propane
If you want to get back, back at the corporate brats, propane
She can fry, she can fry, she can fry. . . propane
If you got the bad news, want to shake off them blues, propane
When your job is downsized, then you must realize, propane
She will fry, she will fry, she will fry . . . propane
If your job is all gone, but you want to ride on, propane
Don't forget this fun fact, it's a real hazmat, propane
She might fry, she might fry, she might fry . . . propane
If you want your revenge, turn the nozzle and then, propane
Put the can in the door, light a match, hear it roar, propane
They will fry, they will fry, they will fry . . . propane
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**See Metahistory (1973), and, more to the point, the essays collected in The Content of the Form (1987), particularly “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1980), pp. 1-25. White distanced his arguments from those found in Karl Lowith’s Meaning in History (1949), but except for the latter’s relentless reduction of narrative purpose to redemption at the end of days, I see them as complementary. At any rate I put them both to use in “What Is Called History at the End of Modernity?” at the S-USIH website. Another version of my historiographical argument is in Part IV of “Pragmatism: An Old Name for a New Kind of Nihilism?” here at Substack.