Go Retire Psychiatrist

Well, last night was Bob DeForest’s last Friday night bridging the path for the new Friday Blues guy, Uncle Ed English. He’ll be starting to spin the records on July 10, 2026. I really appreciate Bobby D’s great work and dedication for filling the time gap between Big Mo’s retirement and Uncle Ed’s arrival.

Last night for whatever reason, my inner wise guy reacted to the blues lineup. I found myself wondering about parodies of blues music. Is there such a thing? There must be.

I just came up with lines for blues songs that were so silly I couldn’t stop laughing. Parodies are one way of acknowledging and even honoring the stature of any genre of literature and other art forms.

One example from literature would be what James Thurber might have called Southern Gothic. Erskine Caldwell comes to mind, although I admit I’ve never read any of his novels or any other books of that type. I didn’t get the Southern dialect. It was hard to read and I would have been constantly mentally correcting the grammar.

One of Thurber’s best examples of parody is his short story “Bateman Comes Home,” published in the collection “The Thurber Carnival.” I think it’s a great parody of Southern Gothic. I get a big kick out of rereading it. He introduces the story with a dry comment: “Written after reading several recent novels about the deep south and confusing them a little—as the novelists themselves do—with “Tobacco Road” and “God’s Little Acre.”

Thurber concludes the story with a comment “If you keep on long enough it turns into a novel.”

Anyway, intrusive imaginary lines of non-existent blues songs led me to get the following “song” out of my system. It was difficult to get the title right. At first, I was torn between “Vacuum Cleaner Blues” and “Bowel Prep Blues” but that conflict was settled by finding a song on the web that already the title “Vacuum Cleaner Blues.” And then I found out that there are a number of songs about colonoscopies, believe it or not. Because I had my own colonoscopy sometime in my early 50s, it wasn’t that hard to come up with the lyrics. You have to know that GoLytely is the name of a common bowel prep solution. You have to drink a lot of it and it works.

All I’ve got are the lyrics. Maybe Uncle Ed could write some music for it.

Bowel Prep Blues

By Jim the Shrink

Lawdy, I want my vacuum cleaner back

Loaned it to my neighbor

But my carpet’s full of tracks

Gotta clean it now, not later

Cuz I saw my doctor

I saw my doctor Procto

Told me ‘bout his philosophy

On the art of colonoscopy

I need my vacuum cleaner back

Loaned it to my neighbor

But my carpet’s full of tracks

Gotta clean it now, not later

Cuz my carpet is unsightly

From all of that GoLytely

I gotta shout the news

I got the bowel prep blues!

Got to get my vacuum cleaner back

Loaned it to my neighbor

But my carpet got all these tracks

Cuz I ran out of toilet paper

Thank ya, thank ya very much.