You know how it is. You’ve worked hard all week saving orphans from fires, framing condos, sewing up knife wounds, digging coal from deep caverns, painting interior walls and trim for senators, forging steel death machines, composing reams of prose that will probably win a Pulitzer – basically being industrious and brilliant, just like Mom always hoped you’d be – then Friday afternoon comes along and you’re exhausted. Depleted. Stupid. Just screwing the pooch until you can get to the bar.
When I run out of juice on Fridays I compose lists on the principle that it’s better to write something than nothing, even when that something serves no useful purpose in the world. Sometimes the list is nonsense. Sometimes it’s a ridiculous waste of time. But once in a while it will sort itself into a kind of poem. Here’s this week’s offering:
WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU GOOGLE “GOT MORE TROUBLES THAN”
“I got more troubles than there’s bubbles in champagne.”
– Ward Hayden, “Girls, Guns, and Glory”
“I got more troubles than a diamond’s got shine.”
– Sam Roberts, “The Pilgrim”
“I got more troubles than your eyes can see.”
– Fingercheese
“I already got more troubles than I need.”
– Delbert McClinton, “Honky Tonkin’ (I Guess I Done Me Some)”
“Got more troubles than you’ve ever had.”
– Phil Ochs, “Sing Along With Me”
“Got more troubles than I could ever use.”
– Thaddeus Dale Johnson, “Shitload of Blues”
“They got more troubles than a trailer park.”
– Dr. Phil, about the Republican Party
Jerry,
Love the idea of list-making based on google search on Fridays, and laughed really hard at your use of “screwing the pooch” — so I googled it. Here’s what I found:
Screwing the pooch…
to fuck things up royally; originally used by U.S. naval aviators to mean “crash one’s plane into the water” — Urban Dictionary
It came there from a Yale graduate named John Rawlings who helped design the astronauts’ space suits. The phrase is actually a bastardization of an earlier, more vulgar and direct term which was slang for doing something very much the wrong way, as in “you are fucking the dog!” — Wiktictionary
I think I’ll leave it at that.
Thank you, Gretel. Interesting. I learned the expression on the job when I was a construction worker, where it meant to slack off or to look busy while accomplishing nothing. The more vulgar and maybe more popular variation was “fucking the dog.” Worth noting that several guys I worked with were World War II veterans. It’s also worth noting that every crew I ever worked on included a guy or two who was highly accomplished at accomplishing nothing.
Jerry:
“Trouble” reminds me of a few lines from Merle Travis’s classic “Dark as a Dungeon.”
“…Where troubles are many and pleasures are few; where the rain never falls and the sun never shines, it’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mines.”
Norris