INAPPROPRIATE SINGING in Adventures From Prison

“Doop, doop, doop, sitting on a toilet taking a poop,” sings the man in the toilet stall.
I turn to the guy at the urinal next to me and he shrugs, “New guy.”
After a few more rather creative lyrics, I finish my business and go back to my cube. I figure the guy isn’t any worse than the schizo who would lock himself in a stall and have shouting matches with his inner voices. They really didn’t get along.
The toilet singer isn’t alone in the inappropriate singing club. It’s actually pretty epidemic here. The library is one of their favorite places. In one day, I have had to ask three different guys to please not sing. One of them was sitting at the TV watching U2’s Rattle and Hum concert and just singing along with his headphones on. He was this goofy Native American guy who had smoked way, way, way too much peyote. He’d watch the same DVD over and over nearly every morning. It got to the point where we would have to remind him as we handed him the DVD, “Remember, no singing.” The other two were both just jamming to their MP3 players and began shouting out rap lyrics. One minute the library is silent and the next someone is yelling, “Black and Yellow! Black and Yellow! It scared the crap out of us. The other guy was singing about bitches and money, so it was really hard to determine what rap song he was grooving to. I don’t mean this as a slanderous comment; it’s just a sad truth about contemporary rap…or at least the rap I’m exposed to in here. To my uninitiated ears every rap – with the exception of Eminem and Kayne West – seems to be nothing but one line repeated over and over again. Maybe I’m just old, but really this is something I’ve noticed about most of the top selling songs these days. It seems like artists are only writing a short couple of clever sentences and are done. It’s like the youth of today only want to listen to the songs chorus two or three times and be done with it. That’s why I love bands like Fall Out Boys, Florence and the Machine, Five Finger Death Punch and a few others because they still write choruses and lyrics.
Returning back to my original premise…the worst offenders of ill-timed song are those who, for some unknown reason, feel a need to sing and cheer along with their MP3 players at 2 o’clock in the morning. This is done, of course, at the top of their lungs. When asked politely to “Shut the f*#k up or I’m going to shove my foot up your ass.” Where they respond by telling everyone that if they didn’t like it then they should not have come to prison, after which an even louder shouting match ensues. (Ah, nothing like a good night of song and brilliant conversation).