And then, suddenly, I'll decide to do something creative. That will give the night purpose and worth. I'll write a story. So I launch WordPerfect, and start typing. But before I've finished a page, I'm too tired to continue. And by that point, I finally crawl off to bed.
There are variations. Sometimes it's computer games that I stay up playing.
In any case, I always find myself wondering, Why am I doing this to myself? I'm not particularly having fun, and I sure won't tomorrow, when I'm half dead with exhaustion! So I wrote about that. In "Stuck in a Rut", I took a similar approach to procrastination.
I still don't know why I do it, but, at least, I can sing a good song about it.
The chords are the true oddness here. This is a G piece, and the common chords for G are G, C, D, D7 and Emin. Occasionally, you'll hear a Bmin in a G song, sometimes an E. But "Overtired" has A7 and F, as well as the standard complement. Makes it sound neat. The F appears in the chorus, but when I made up the chorus, I used Emin. The F came later.
As I perform it, I pick (instead of strumming) the chords, all the way to the second chorus. As my dad notes, the words of the chorus sound like they should be sung loudly, while banging away on the chords. Then, between chorus and verse, I vamp a little, picking two chords and strumming the third. So it all builds up nicely to the second chorus, which I launch into strumming in full gear.
My favourite line is "As I slouch on soggy bones", but I also like "It's far too late for me". A play on words, since it means "far too late to be awake", not the melodramatic "It's too late for me, son" (cf Return of the Jedi). The stanzas of the verse have strange numbers of syllables. Take verse one: 7-11-7-10-7-8. I adhere to that pattern throughout, give or take a syllable.
Questions, comments or suggestions about this web site? Email me at aaron.bentley@utoronto.ca