A Mixed Bag of a Man

Johnny PayCheck once wrote a song, Pardon Me, I’ve Got Someone to Kill and lived to sing it. Johnny didn’t write the song using his real name; he wrote the song using his now recognizable pseudonym, pissed off at some injustice he thought had occurred, invoking hyperbole, no doubt, to justify a murderous act.

I once played along with hyperbole, then stopped playing. I had definite limitations, imposed on me by some legendary hyperbolist’s—songwriters, poets, men and women advertising executives, a Christian Science practitioner or three, an alcoholic basketball coach—and so retreated into the withering limelight of what might-have-been had I written a song as hyperbolic as Johnny PayCheck.

I was living then in the good old days of receiving real mail, often hearing the hand-written letters from back home drop to the floor from the slot in the front door of the family mansion, fresh from the hands of a friendly postman, the same postman, I once wondered, who’d delivered Basho’s advice to a neophyte, “avoid adjectives of scale if you wish to live a long life.”

Johnny Paycheck, aka Donald Eugene Lytle, didn’t write the song Take This Job and Shove It: I did.