WHAT?! This Retirement Thing is Throwing Me for a Loop

Mom and Dad come down on Christmas day.  This is a rule as old as time.

Tomorrow is not Christmas day.

That is all.

I Shake My Head

You know, sometimes you read something and you just get this sense that you’re seeing the contours of the sex scandal to come.

The True Treat of the New OA

I am slowly making my way through the magazine, hoping to find at least little tid-bits about why these songs (which reminds me, the guy who wrote the Fitzgerald piece is Walton Muyamba) and I was about to have to set fire to the magazine after reading Donn Cooper’s piece, which should live in infamy as exactly the kind of writing that drives me cracy about the OA Southern Music issues–you have here a song that you hear on the CD, “Divorce Decree,” which is a song about a woman who had a fine marriage which descended into shittiness and that shittiness is never going to accurately be reflected in this here piece of paper, but hallelujah, this here piece of paper is her freedom.

And you don’t hear many songs that can be summed up as “Hallelujah, I’m divorced.”

So, I was hoping that the article would at least touch on that, but no, instead it’s all about Cooper’s search for the singer–okay fine–and all on about how she made these terribly sad songs.  And I’m all like “Fine, except the song on the CD, which you have not talked about at all.”

Possibly, I want different things from music writing than music writers want to give me, but I’m hearing all this new stuff.  Help me through it.  Tell me why you love this artist, this song.

Anyway, this is just a long tangent to say that what I found at the end of Cooper’s article delighted me so much I about can’t stand it–a couple of poems by Patricia Spears Jones.  From “My Angel #1”–“He’s a ‘he’ which I find ironic/ but then, to be spiritual in an age of religious/ fanaticism is to be ironical.”  I’ll be thinking about that all day.

Maybe I just need poetry more than usual, with those big pauses like the quiet after a too-large meal in which you let your body work.

But to me those two poems about angels said more about what we need writing and music for than anything I’ve read all week.

Feel Good Friday is Listening for Your Footsteps and Your Knock upon the Door

This is my all-time favorite Monkees’ song ever, ever, ever.  When I was little I used to watch repeats of The Monkees like they were going out of style–which, I guess they were.  My cousin M. and I used to sit in my parents’ trailer and play like we were married to The Monkees.  When I was little, I loved Davy Jones the best, of course, but as I got older, my appreciation for Mike, Micky, and Pete grew.

The Professor has this friend who looks just like Micky Dolenz from back in the day and I just don’t know how she can stand it.  If I weren’t throwing myself at him all the time, I’d be running up behind him singing this song.

A Riddle of Catly Weirdness

So, the Butcher was out in the yard with the dog and the tiny cat, just horsing around and watching the tiny cat rub all up on the dog as is her way.  This is not what’s weird.  What’s weird is that the tiny cat was, simultaneously, in the bathroom watching me poop.

Which means that either the tiny cat can break the laws of physics and literally be in two places at the same time OR, and frankly this is more baffling to me, there’s another cat in the neighborhood that looks just like our tiny cat (plausible) who is very friendly (plausible) and who likes to hang out in our back yard (again, plausible) and who has discerned that the dog is cat friendly.

How would that happen?  How did our dog befriend a strange cat to the point where, when the dog comes outside, the strange cat comes running over to her and rubs all up on her in a greeting?

I find it easier to believe that the imposter is the one in the bathroom watching me poop.

But consider the real weirdness of the situation.  We have an orange cat and we have the tiny cat and we have the tiny cat imposter.  There is a good chance, with as friendly as the tiny cat imposter seems to be, that the tiny cat imposter has probably come in and out of our house a number of times and eaten our cat food and carried on as if she were our cat.  In fact, she is so comfortable with us that she either loves our dog or wants to watch us poop.

Do we have two cats or three?