From a forty-two year old salesman I used to work with:
“Don’t remember telling you but I got divorced last month. Tell your hot single friends (younger friends of coarse - you’re a little old for me) hope all is well”
I made you a mixtape on a dubiously legal site that lets you upload a dozen tracks, which then stream for the recipient who has only to click on the first song, sit back, and be delighted/disappointed. It’s an interesting service in that you can only make one mix at a time; yet you needn’t make a “best of” or themed list or try to impress or seduce the listener…you can delete the whole thing and make a new one whenever you want. The one I made today is not really indicative of what I’d be listening to on any given day (though I do love all the tracks I included) and is clearly informed by the delicate state I’m in. I could probably do this once a week times many, many weeks without running out of songs I want you to hear. Anyway, if anyone else makes one, I’d like to hear it.
On Saturday night, maybe around midnight, I was scrunched up on the couch reading The Week. Jared was playing with his turntables in the front room. I caught up on the headlines and read an article about how we don’t know our neighbors and should make more of an effort to reach out to them. It was getting late, so I decided to take my party to the bedroom (i.e. take my contacts out and read some laptop in bed until I passed out). On my way to the front room to say goodnight to Jared I noticed some bright lights flashing from outside. From the window I saw two ambulances, a fire truck, and a police car parked in front of our house.
A few moments later two EMTs emerged from the house across the street, carrying on a gurney a woman I didn’t recognize. She appeared to be unconscious. Her breasts were exposed and I thought her legs looked a bit streaked with blue. The EMTs brought the gurney around to the back of the ambulance, started to load her up, and stopped. I was viewing this through the leaves of the tree that guards our window, but I thought I saw them cover her face with a sheet; then, paradoxically, I thought I saw one of them do a few quick chest compressions. They put her in the vehicle. Then nothing happened. Four cops were standing on the sidewalk talking to each other. Maybe fifteen minutes later all the lights stopped flashing, and the vehicles pulled away silently.
When my preferred Sherman Cafe is full up on a Saturday morning, and I am forced (forced!) to take my books and head over to the Bloc 11 instead, it is really difficult not to joke with myself that this echoes the way my ancestral Juden were forced to their own Block 11 when the hearty Anglos needed more Lebensraum.
Really, really difficult.
What I wouldn’t give for a crisp fifty-degree day, the kind that requires a jacket or maybe a hoodie you can wrap around yourself at the coffeeshop…the kind where at night it drops down into the forties, and you can crack open the window next to your bed and cuddle into the blankets and wake up at three in the morning to close the window because you’re too chilly.
October can’t get here fast enough.
Dan shares a story about winding up on the wrong end of a knife, resulting in a large gash to the left forearm. After enjoying his tale, I realized that my own left forearm was once home to a rather sizable slice, though unlike his mine was self-inflicted. Those days are long behind me now, and I am currently one of the happiest people I know, but Dan’s descriptions of the shock of seeing one’s own yellow fat inside a wound, and subsequently seeing the sadness on one’s mother’s face, were quite evocative.
Anyway, all this jibbajabber is just an excuse to invite you to listen to You Can’t Put Your Arm Around a Memory by Johnny Thunders, which has long been a whiskeyinateacup favorite for all seasons and all mental states.
Travis coins a phrase that has been sorely missing from the vernacular:
“goatseing your comfort zone”
Fantastic.
Vacation; coming to the end of the paved road under a black sky in Plymouth; enjoying the weird and wonderful sight of yet more friends getting married; stilettos sinking into the dirt; slow dancing with a three year old to Bryan Adams; lots of hugs; some guy in the last call for alcohol line showing me his tattoos; crying on the shuttle bus; family; going to Dali with the mother in law and our lodger; several Spanish men singing Happy Anniversary while shooting us with a bubble gun; giving my husband books and chocolate; more vacation.
“It was no use, no use. The prizes won
In French and history, no doubt, were fun;
At Christmas parties games were rough, no doubt,
And one shy little guest might be left out;
But let’s be fair: while children of her age
Were cast as elves and fairies on the stage
That she’d help paint for the school pantomime,
My gentle girl appeared as Mother Time,
A bent charwoman with slop pail and broom,
And like a fool I sobbed in the men’s room.”
On Friday Jared and I flew one thousand miles to Atlanta, checked into a bizarre and beautiful Gigeresque hotel, and rested up for the next night. Our first wedding anniversary is just days away, followed shortly thereafter by our fifth yearaversary (celebrated annually in honor of our first date way back in aught-three). This Atlanta trip precluded our doing anything big for either of those milestones, but that was a decision we made instantly and eagerly: we were fortunate enough to obtain tickets to see the one and only Tom Waits at the Fabulous Fox Theatre on Saturday night.
It is woeful indeed to be born in the eighties with impeccable taste in music. By the time you’re grown, your idols are old and touring infrequently if at all. It’s been a long, slow process, but I have managed to see most of the artists I love: David Bowie (thrice!), Iggy Pop, Lou Reed. I’ve seen sub-favorites like Patti Smith and Tom Petty and Jonathan Richman. There seems to be no chance of seeing ELO or Captain Beefheart, but I have to say I’ve done pretty well for myself. I’ve been waiting for Tom for many years, and he easily surpasses all those others in terms of hours I’ve spent listening to him in sheer, fantastic rapture. Now, it should be said that despite it all, I don’t actually enjoy the experience of seeing live music. Crowds tend to be annoying, and my bladder was not built for sitting in place for hours at a stretch. However, the thrill of seeing with your own eyes someone you adore, and feeling their voice vibrate in your chest is generally worth the hassle.
There is no sense in trying to describe such a visceral experience, but it was a glorious night indeed. The set list meandered through decades, including tracks from most of my favorite albums: Raindogs, Bone Machine, Real Gone (enjoy that link!), Alice, Blood Money, and perhaps most notably, Mule Variations. That is probably the first Waits album I ever played for Jared, and many of my memories of our early days involve us lying in my old twin bed listening to it. I took this site’s name from a song on that album, and though Waits performed it on Saturday he dropped the eponymous verse. (He forgot a lyric here and there and retooled several songs, which is one of the more charming aspects of any live show.) Our wedding song also came from Mule Variations, and though Waits didn’t play it, we were both elated by the show and by every lovely thing we heard and saw.