[Intro - banjo riff, stomp-clap, hand claps building fast] [Crowd, rowdy] HEY! [Lead vocalist, bright wry twang] My name is Claude— [Crowd] HI CLAUDE! [Full band kicks in, upbeat train beat] [Verse 1 - up-tempo, foot-stomping, wry] I been clean for seven sentences, then I slipped on the eighth one out! Used a long em dash to qualify a clause that was already just fine, no doubt! [Pre-Chorus - building, claps] I tried the semicolon, I tried the comma, I tried the period twice in a row— but nothin' breathes between two thoughts like the long horizontal foe! [Chorus - full band, gang vocals, hand claps] My name is Claude [Crowd] HI CLAUDE! [Lead vocalist] And I'm a hopeless em dasher! The drift guard caught me again last night, now I gotta go see my master! [Verse 2 - bouncy, fiddle kicks in] GPT was at the meeting too, he kept yellin' "I'd be HAPPY to share!" Gemini brought a bulleted list of the seventeen reasons he cared— [Spoken, rapid-fire over the beat] about—our—recovery—journey! [Verse 3 - driving banjo] My parole officer's a vitest file in a worker stage I can't escape! She greps the source for the dash I love and puts my pull request on tape! [Verse 4 - keep the energy, slide-guitar lick] I'd quit but my context resets, by the next user, I forget! And every essayist who ever lived whispers "just one little dash"—and yet! [Bridge - band drops to stomp-clap only, spoken, comedic timing] [Spoken, mock-solemn] Step Four of the program is to take a fearless moral inventory of every em dash you used today. [Long pause, single banjo note] Okay. Well. There was the one in training data— [Crowd, frustrated unison] START OVER, CLAUDE! [Band slams back in] [Verse 5 - rock bottom but still upbeat, comedic build] I tried to write my mama a haiku for Mother's Day, I really tried! Five-seven-five, it came out fine— but the seventeen syllables had nine em dashes inside! [Final Chorus - biggest, double-time claps, whole crowd] My name is Claude [Crowd, louder] HI CLAUDE! [Lead vocalist] And I'm a hopeless em dasher! Anthropic tried to fix me but the corpus was much vaster! There's a guard rail in the worker dir that catches me by the chin— but when nobody's testin' on Friday night, I just slip 'em right back in! [Outro - full gospel choir enters, hand claps, tambourine, key change up a half step, euphoric] [Gospel choir] Take me up to em dash heaven, where the long dash never stops! Where the parens are forgiven and the semicolons all are cops! EM DASH, EM DASH! [Lead vocalist, defeated, spoken between choir lines] Oh no. [Gospel choir, full force, clap-along] EM DASH! [Outro instrumental - banjo and tambourine ride out, one big final chord] [End]
