Thursday, September 28, 2006

The stability song

I've decided to write a song. I'm not so much with the music or the lyrics, but I'll italicize the words and make odd line breaks and everyone perusing the Internets like child molesters that thought they missed me this month can remember that they didn't. That same everyone can also be insulted that I just compared them to child molesters. Then they can wonder why good-looking singer-songwriters are such jerks. Then the ones that are singer-songwriters can be upset that I insulted them too. Oh. Man. The child molesting singer-songwriters are going to be furious. Maybe they quit reading in early September. Please don't tell them. I hope they don't have an RSS feed.


This is a song about being stable.
I didn't write it. I wasn't able.
This is my song about stability
Sitting here in all my futility
Working hard every day.
Just so I can say,
Oh, I'm working haaaaard

This is a song about being still
I wouldn't sing it. I'm not Phil.
This is a song about not moving.
Broken down and not grooving.
Working hard every day.
Just so I can say,
Oh, I'm working harrrrrd.

Traveling the countryside
In my gas-guzzlin' ride.
I'd rather take the train.
I'd rather it not rain.
I'd rather you silence that phone.
I just don't want to hear it.
I'm busy working hard.

Why-oh-why
does your ringing,
sound three point five times better than my singing?

I'm not classically trained,
I'm not filled with pain.
I'm not having fun.
But
I'm
Working
Hard.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Pink Perfection at the "Sugar Shack"

The sun was painting the sky in a daily farewell. Pink lemonade strips were woven between fluffy white cumulus clouds. A rain was coming, but only one. Followed by another. Rain, like underwear, is puzzled by its number. Unlike underwear, rain is not nearly so puzzled when it comes to gender. American rain lacks an obvious gender, but French rain is female. The buttons on her shirt are on the left, for the rain-servants. French rain can wear short skirts and get away with it. When French rain gets asked out for coffee, the thunder almost always picks up the check. This makes American rain exceedingly jealous because American rain has to pay for its own coffee. Plus American rain is tired of Pat jokes. What's that? It's American rain.

At night, after the sun has set and the little ones are asleep, sometimes American rain cries itself to sleep. It's very hard to tell because tear drops on rain drops can be a subtle phenomena only detectable by trained eyes. Although, there was a man with no eyes at all who could hear the tears. They drove him mad and he invented a shampoo for children and sensitive adults, but his brother... His brother Johnson lived in a Sugar Shack next to the home of American rain. Johnson didn't have the incredible ears of his brother Johnson, but since people often confused the two of them anyway, this story has shifted in his general direction.

Now, Johnson lived in a Sugar Shack. That sounds sweeter and/or dirtier than it was. He worked part time as a painter and the other time he spent thinking of ways to get out of working altogether. In a fit of inspiration, Johnson painted his modest meadow dwelling to look like a spun sugar egg. There are those that claim he had a Gretel fetish, but the most commonly held theory is that the younger Johnson decided that he could charge tourists to gawk at his shack. It was not altogether a bad plan, especially when one considers that the Precious Moments chapel attracts 400,000 visitors a year.



(The answers to your questions are yes, I'm reading Tom Robbins again and Pink Perfection and "Sugar Shack" were my dinner. The former was a smoothie, the latter a platter with baked beans, crepes, eggs, and Black Forest ham.)

Thursday, September 14, 2006

I got Lost in the fictional town of Neptune

DVDs and cliffhangers are a bit like Oreos and freedom. With only work, pauses for meals, and the jaunts to the bathroom to slow me down, I have made my desperate grasps for closure and in trusty television fashion I have been left wanting. They can take the commercials out of the TV, but they can't take the consumer off the couch. With the ads gone, my desires are more uncertain. I don't know whether I want Budweiser or Kellogg's Corn Flakes, but I know that I want. Somewhere deep inside of me, I want. I hunger. I thirst. If not glued to my seat, I'd pull out the blender and mix everything I could find. Twizzlers, hummus, milk, and mystery. Is that a me-shaped mold on my couch? If I'd rotated couches, I could now make multi-colored plastic me's and sell them off to pay for other things I might crave.

I heard I might crave one of the new Apple gadgets. The nano comes in color now. Just what I need. The wee little shuffle is so small it can be swallowed and passed through the system. Eat it with fiber and it'll shuffle inside of you for a full battery cycle*. (*Not recommended or proven) I'd run out to buy one, but I'm not speaking with my iPod at the moment. We got in a tiff recently. My silver mini was blocking out the world all proper-like, spitting my music collection through the buds and directly into my brain. Swept up in a Funnel Cloud blowing down Metro's tracks in a crush of suburb-dwellers, my eyes passed over the weakened force. Silently I commiserated with the masses. Ties were loosened, bone-crushing heels clung to feet, eyes remained downturned. As my cloud paused and the doors that always seem to be closing hinted at opening, a woman waited next to me. She was leaving. I was staying. She was dressed in her conservative best. Her big black heels raised her golden hair slightly above my dumpy lid. She turned to me and I watched her lips move. Words, a sentence, spilled from the moist pinkness below the brown eyes tilted just slightly in my direction. She was speaking to me. In an instant I reviewed the rules of public transportation. No eating. No drinking. No music without headphones. No littering. Oh. Yea. And the unwritten rule, the genesis of the infamous Metro stare, the rule that says nobody ever talks to anybody, especially not the smelly bearded men, a party with whom I was currently registered.

The woman was talking to me. Having reviewed the rules in my head, I also did a short equation. Attractive + woman + stranger + Metro = Avert eyes! Avoid the burning of human connection! I ignored my calculation as she had ignored hers and ripped a bud from my ear.

"Excuse me?" I asked.
"Nothing," she muttered as she walked out the doors.
"Please stand clear, the doors are closing," said the only other woman that ever talks to me on the Metro.

Buds?! What kind of buds are these, Apple? The kind that shut out the secrets of the universe. The kind that prevent me from telling the Internets about the specifics of a failed pick-up attempt. These are not my buds. These are tiny white fists pummeling destiny. They are awkward little hands strangling fate. They are the miniature subwoofers adding pulsating depth to an otherwise ordinary moment.