A Small Request

Please, please, please, please, keep your fingers crossed for me tomorrow.

Not about all the ovary shit.  That will work itself out one way or another and if I have to carve that fucker out myself with my knife and wear it around my neck, it’ll go well with the testicles this ball-busting feminist keeps strung up.  Ha.  That’s a joke, fellas.

No, I mean about the house.  I know it’s unwise, after the disappointments of the summer, to fall completely an unabashedly in love with a place before the inspection, but I am completely in love with this place.  I want to marry it and have tiny red brick babies with tiny acre lots and tiny wells.  I just want this to work out.  I want to move into that house.

So, please, if you do anything woo-woo at all, do some of it tomorrow for me.

I’ll try to get back here to let you know how things went, but, if they go poorly, I’m sure you’ll hear me crying.

Shared Vocabulary

I have a friend who wrote for No Depression and I keep trying to check their blogs to see if he might pop up there but I have to admit, I can’t figure out how to navigate the site, so I was lucky enough to come across this entry by David Cantwell.

I’ve been thinking about it all day.

Well, actually, what I’ve been thinking about all day is growing another face on top of my face and slowly suffocating under another whole level of flesh that appeared to be me except for the tell-tale extra set of ears, chew on that psychoanalysts and send my bill to Cute Overload.

But when I haven’t been giving myself the willies, I’ve been thinking about this notion of a shared vocabulary.

I think I was born too late to know if that’s true, and I get nervous when ever we start talking shared canon–and it seems to me that talking about the core songs “everyone” knew is indeed talking about a shared canon, with all the fun and terrible fights that might elicit–but I suspect it’s true.

Because, I think that’s why, even on my tiny iPod that causes me to go through and cull any song that doesn’t earn its keep if I find something else to put on it, I have two and three different versions of a song and why, even though folks make fun of me for it, I want to talk about where these songs come from, originally, and even when we talk about “originally,” I want to make some gesture, like tossing salt over my shoulder, to the roots of that music that are lost to us because they weren’t recorded.

I don’t believe in the United States as a melting pot. I don’t want it to be a melting pot. I don’t want a bunch of different things to come together into something that removes all uniqueness. But at that same time, I want there to be some way, some way all us different people can share something in common and I cannot resist the urge to say “See, see, this music, this beat, this thing you love, pick it up like a string tied to you at the dark end of the labyrinth and follow it back to where you find it’s tied to me and to him and to her and so on. You come here and you put this stuff in your ears and that’s enough to make you ‘us’.”

It might not be true, that there’s one sound like that, but if there is, I suspect it’s syncopated.

You’ve Got to Love those Pro-Lifers

In a State like Tennessee, where the “pro-life” movement has all but won, there are some interesting things to be noted–one being that the very folks who are all about the babies actually hate that there are so many babies.

The very sign of the success of their movement is a cause for concern.

Odd.

Random Things that Are Going to Keep Me Up At Night

—It is weird that a story about bloggers doesn’t link to their blogs.

—Coble, I thought the same thing.  To me, it goes against everything Protestantism stands for to have one or two or three identifiable Protestant leaders to whom politicians can go and pay tribute to and have that stand for a candidate paying attention to Evangelicals and it’s gross that politicians do it, but shame on ministers for participating.

—If you don’t bring young people into the process, you won’t ever have anyone threatening the status quo.  Perhaps that’s the point.

—This game appeals to me on so many levels.  I spent all last night taking almost sick pleasure in eating the police.

–This is not Cute Overload!  This is Give Me Nightmares Overload!

—Spirals.

–There’s a dude with a rottweiler and an American bulldog in our neighborhood! So, dear reader, I married him.  No, I kid.  About the marriage.  Not about the dogs.

Edited to add: OMG!  As the kids say.  If that is where I think it is, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to eat at that McDonalds again.