Chalk the Day It Ends
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
Fog on the bar and the tide running thin
Chalk the day it ends!
No time to be guessing which locker she'd need
Chalk the day it ends!
So we threw every hatch and she cleared the bar clean
Chalk the day it ends!
Open her wide, but chalk the day it ends
First fair wind and the hatches shut again
"Later" is a hope with no hand upon the line
So chalk the day it ends, boys, every time
A hatch shut too tight will bang and will call
Chalk the day it ends!
A hatch left too wide makes no sound at all
Chalk the day it ends!
Six months on, the lockers stood open to the rain
Chalk the day it ends!
And the hand who unbarred them had gone off the main
Chalk the day it ends!
Lay the squeezebox down, give us boots on the boards
A stranger on the quay with the key to our stores
He walks like he's crew and he goes through the lot
So rig every hatch to slam shut if we forgot
Open her wide, but chalk the day it ends
First fair wind and the hatches shut again
"Later" is a hope with no hand upon the line
So chalk the day it ends, boys, every time
Bring the squeezebox back! First fair wind
Chalk the day it ends!
Read the log, bar what she never touched
Chalk the day it ends!
The band
The Long Haul
A work song. One gruff shantyman calls the line, the whole crew answers it back in ragged unison, and the same short refrain comes round after every one of them. Concertina, fiddle, boots on boards and nothing electric. Always we, never I - what it knows, it learned the hard way and a long way out.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post A Temporary Permission Needs An Expiry Date.
Granting broad access to prove a deployment path is sound practice, but only if the tightening is scheduled before the first success, not promised afterwards.