The One Hundred

Welcome to a new feature on The One Hundred: Recycling. In an effort to keep all three of you entertained (Hi Mom!) we’re recycling old posts from past blog lives that maybe you didn’t read before or it’s been so long since, it’s new all over again. Recycling! We hope you don’t hate it immensely.

Original post date: February 19, 2007

Ever have one of those thoughts that you can’t get rid of? You’re sitting there minding your own business and suddenly – BAM! – you’re thinking about something that you can’t let go of. I get that all the time. Except for me – and I don’t know if I’m the weirdo here or not – it’s usually something from a ways back. It’s often something that I have no right to be thinking of in that moment but for some reason, the thought surfaces and it won’t go away.

So there I was, putting Aaron to bed, laying on my bed in the dark when Hagen Toeman stopped by for a visit.

Hagen Toeman is a fictitious character that me and three of my classmates wrote a song about during our Freshman year of high school (that would set the way-back machine to about 1987). Our English teacher, Mrs. Douglas had given us the assignment to write new lyrics to a pre-existing song. That’s just about all I can remember. I don’t think she gave us much more direction than that. Well, that and we had to perform it in front of the class.

So the four of us, me, Jon, Brett, and Stephen gathered together to craft this song. We some how decided on the Can-Can as our song of choice, possibly because it was an easy tune to remember, a lot of the details seem foggy to me now. We had the song. I can remember sitting in our class during one of the writing sessions, our four desks turned to face each other and we decided to write this song about this guy who had the worst luck ever and all the stuff that happened to him throughout his life.

OK, well not all of his life but I guess maybe some of the more memorable ones. I can say that I’m fairly certain that I didn’t contribute too much to this. I might have had some edits when verses were presented but I doubt that I had submitted anything. It was probably mostly Jon that did the lion’s share with Brett and Stephen picking up the slack. When the song was done and it was our turn to perform, we made the brilliant decision to try and do a little can-can while singing this song. Perhaps not the best decision in the world as we weren’t terribly coordinated and I think we decided to do this about 30 seconds before we went up there. Side note: Could we have been any more gay* here? Unless we were dressed as french showgirls or Carmen Miranda, probably not. I mean c’mon, the Can-Can? Really? End Side note. So we get up there and we flub the dancing within like two lines – ‘natch – and Brett nearly walks off mid-verse (diva). But we pull it off, our classmates laugh and we get a passing grade.

So here’s why this thought won’t leave me alone. I can’t get the song out of my head. And what’s worse is I don’t know all the lyrics. Worse than that, I know some. So I want to sing along and I can’t. Here’s what I can remember (the chorus of course):

Hagen Toeman was cursed
because he was the first
son of Clarence Toeman
and it was a real bad omen.

That’s all I know for sure. The only other verse than I can remember is something about him going somewhere and meeting someone and the last two lines of that verse are:

thought of a solution
but started a revolution

and that’s it.

It wasn’t a great song. None of them were. But I can’t get that friggin’ song out of my head. So, in an effort to maybe payback the guys who did all the heavy lifting back then or to just give myself some lyrics and possibly some closure, here now are my verses for Hagen Toeman (and only 20 years late):

Then he went to Sweden
love is what he is needin’
Likes girls from colder climates
He got one that was a primate

While he was down in Cuba
On tour with his tuba
one mojito too many
now he doesn’t have a penny

Finally his end in Moscow
the KGB he kowtowed
but it did not save him
unmarked grave is what he lays in

Well, that was a bit harder than I thought it was going to be. I can’t say if those are any better or worse than what we sang that day but now that I’ve written this down, maybe that thought will go away now.

Fly away thought, fly away.

*not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just not what we were aiming for that day. I think.

EDIT: As a special treat, here’s some recycled comments that appeared along with the original post.

Jon wrote:

how could you forget:

“he went to taiwan
where he met suzie wong
he ate her chinese food
and thought he was a real cool dude”

there was also a verse about him going to libya and breaking his tibia, but i don’t know how that ended

you know, after reading these i am not sure that i am comfortable with you saying i did the lions share of the writing…

John wrote:

Good Lord. Maybe there was a reason I wasn’t remembering these verses. eeesh. And how did going to Taiwan and meeting a girl and eating food fit into the structure of the song (go someplace, do something, something bad happens)? It’s a wonder we ever made it out of the 9th grade. It really is.

Jon wrote:

i just recall that verse because that is the one i did and i remember trying to do a funky little breakdown move to go with the “real…cool…dude” part and failing horribly – i think i ended up looking like bob saget up there…

good lord…

John Edge of Memory, Music, Recycling