Courtesy

“D, world destruction
Over and overture
N, do I need
Apostrophe T, need this torture?”

-- They Might Be Giants, "Don't Let's Start"

--

Continuing the music binge. They Might Be Giants’ 1986 self-titled album has some awesome nerd rock. “Youth Culture Killed My Dog” and “Number Three” geek me out. Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief. I do most of my listening in my head, between earphones, tethered to the laptop by a frail, black wire. is all right, too, along with the Wallflowers’ Breach.

--

Got a rough one-third packed and ready to go to the New Place. Soon I will rediscover the torture of stairs, the agony of a heavy-laden step. But I welcome the change, the upward shift. With the christening of the New Place, an overnight trip tonight, a triple-show day tomorrow, this weekend looms with the promise of headache. And next weekend is just as stacked: seeing friends in a show at a closing theatre, watching the Reds play poor baseball (in a private box with co-workers), driving to Hillsdale for graduation (and my birthday), driving back for my girlfriend’s birthday and parties into the pre-dawn of the weekend--and back to the grind on Monday.

--

The in-between days are fuzzy. Schools whiz by, the faces of children lost in the haze; outside the box, confusion mixes with splendor as clouds freeload above the river valley to drop majestic rain. Muddy footprints on sidewalks wash and dry into thick scars of dirt as the sun emerges.

As I stop and signal, black teenagers glare at me through the windshield as they cross the street, me in my glasses and spiky Asian hair, me and my courteous wave. Don’t worry, I think to myself; I’m just a lazy pilgrim, passing through at everyone else’s convenience.

--

I am beginning to lose faith in the idea of professionalism--at least, in theatre. Or maybe I am gaining faith, storing up hopes, investing in expectations.

Maybe it's just that I haven't worked long enough yet--or haven't met those who survive the first trying years of an acting career to emerge humble and sans swagger--but I feel floored by how un-professional so many theatre folks are. I guess it's the young ones that always get you down; I don't know; we're all supposed to be young at heart but old in mind and word. At least, that's what I've always thought.

All I know is that work does not have to be a constant battle. Art might, though.

Or maybe it's the other way around.

These derisive snickers exist everywhere, I suppose. Secretaries sneer at the backs of bosses just as teachers sigh and sob in the lounge, just as actors backstab backstage, where the lights are dim, the curtains drawn. I mean, I bitched about directors in college. How is this any different?

I guess if you do it to someone who remains ignorant of your disdain, you don't have to answer for your opinions or misplaced self-righteousness. If your poison works its way through the veins, though, the brain finds out eventually. The killing might be done by that point, anyway. The only thing for it is to be an antidote, darning the dope, high above the mucky-muck.

There is hope in the reminder that it is also a job--work, slaving, activity within boundaries. If it is only fun, all else fails.

Dandelions

"Tomorrow night, will you remember what you said tonight?
Tomorrow night, will all the thrill be gone?
...
Tomorrow night, will you be with me when the moon is bright?
And will you say all the lovely things you said tonight?"

-- B. B. King, "Tomorrow Night," from One Kind Favor

--

Readers of this blog may remember the guy at the coloring party who spoke of his hometown's unusual name, Washington Court House, OH. Well, today, I went there. Teachers taped crafts and joked with each other in the back of the multi-purpose room while I played a turtle and a bunny; murals covered both walls with cartoonish spaceships and children dreaming (in a space shuttle's window you could clearly see Cartman from "South Park" peering into the void, which was odd); the principal gave up her parking space for our van. The folks there are nice, and the town seemed on the "okay" side of tiny.

On the way back, I played B.B. King's 2008 album, "One Kind Favor." I wonder if it's his goodbye to the blues and life, what with the tracks "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," "How Many More Years," and "Tomorrow Night." A lot of hope, and a lot of realism--I mean, the guy's been on the brink of death for years. The album art tends toward the stuff of legend, mostly of King's back, guitar neck peeking above his shoulder, as he views an empty landscape.

It's good stuff, just the blues that made him famous, with the age that makes him wise. This album is to King what The Tempest is to Shakespeare.

(I think.)

--

As I drove south to Cincinnati, I saw to the east what looked like a dandelion farm: a field full of yellow, spotted with the green of stems and competing grass, within a sort of ridiculous white-posted fence that trapped the wild weeds, leading like the Yellow Brick Road to a run-down blue farm house. Softly encroached the green, but the dandelions won on their home turf.

I asked the van, "Is that a dandelion farm?"

It was.

--

All forms of rain attacked us on the road: the clouds dripped, jetted, sprinkled and tinkled by turns, shifting weather with the weight of somber shadow. It has been the kind of day that simply removes your motivation to do anything without replacing it. It is a gray thief, a Druid trickster.

But through the clouds flashed sunlight, and for mere seconds at a time, the mist torn from the wet streets behind passing cars and trucks transformed from sickly white to brilliant silver, vapored vipers chasing tires. They hissed in the rain.

--

I must pack everything I own in the next two days and heft/drive/heft it into the loft apartment in Covington. Perhaps prematurely, I have amassed more furniture and clutter in the last two weeks than I have in the last eight months. My ratio of space to possessions continues to change, and the tiny path through it all dwindles, blocked at almost every potential turn.

But there is solitude and calm at the end of this labor (roughly translated, "an entrance code for a security system and a kitchen"). In a week's time, with my high windows staring over rooftops, what will I see when I wake up?

Dandelion farms, hundreds of them, stacked neatly in city blocks and floating in the river. And seeds and petals will fall at my feet, spreading, like wallpaper unrolling on the sidewalk.

One kind favor, please: See that my old room is kept clean. I'm leaving tomorrow night.

Wool

"I took a plane
I took a train
Ah, who cares--you always end up in the city..."

-- The New Pornographers, "Myriad Harbour"

--

There is a building near my block that used to be a museum, built like a miniature castle. It now houses a local television news station. Its powerful satellites atop the tower scramble radio signals within a quarter-mile in every direction. Commercials, music and news disappear in an audible haze, like steel wool in the ears, as you pass through the complicated intersection nearby, and as you reemerge on the other side, the ellipses lift and the advertising, singing and reporting continues.

--

When the temperature changes drastically in Cincinnati, the famous fog settles on the river, a thick white block that devours the bridges that straddle the Ohio River, a foot in the city, a foot in Kentucky. You drive through that mist on early mornings if you commute between states.

Soon, my commute will become comical: I will live in Kentucky, work in Cincinnati, but meet up with the van back in Kentucky. I will make an isosceles triangle, every day, until the end of May.

And with summer's arid air in daylight and spring's chilly nighttime mist, fog will make that triangle a capped trapezoid.

--

The end of May seems at once close and far away. The end of the tour comes with the end of the month: The culmination of nine months of contracted acting.

My feelings are not as mixed as my sense of time, though. I am ready to move out, in and on. I'm eager to return to an office space, a chair removed from rocking, an offstage gig to balance the onstage weight. I want a phone and a new email address, three walls of four, one size to fit all my workplace flair. I also just want to feel like the last nine months of gruel have led to an entree, some red meat, ready for the tasting, for my salivating and savoring.

I am a dog, sitting, obedient, watching a dangled piece of bologna, twitching at the first sign of release, ready and waiting for the fall.

--

In the Book of Revelations, the narrator writes, "You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. Therefore, I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see."

Am I blind at the moment, seeing only what is to come and blinking past the present? Am I deaf, listening to self-help tapes in the car and not hearing the ambulance doo-wopping behind me?

Am I gold to be refined, or just naked silver, to be scrubbed with the steel wool?

--

The transition is what I feel approaching. The impending shift makes me itch, like a donkey scratching its tell-tale hoof and settling under shelter, like a full man feeling a delightful crap inching its way along through his entrails. But it is not a gradual thing, not like weather or digestion, not as I see it. I anticipate its suddenness every day, storing hopes in it like a believer awaiting Eastern trumpets. That's the distinction: a drum roll before panache on cymbals.

Like I said, it's not gradual, a slow feeling. It is a long time in the waiting room before a quick surgery. I know where the TV station will cancel out the radio, and I see the bridge posts suspended in waiting fog; in the meantime, I drive, trying to enjoy the sights and sounds. Steel wool is coming, and soft cotton awaits on the other side.

Scavenger

"I'll have what she's having."

-- Rob Reiner's mother as a random cafe patron in When Harry Met Sally

--

Part of why I don't like movies that were filmed in New York is that there are so many of them. I forget where I heard it, but someone said that every New Yorker thinks there's no place better than the Big Apple. And many New Yorkers work in film, or at least worked in theatre or television before making the leap, or they are writers, producers and directors.

Well, I've been to New York a few times, and it's loud and dirty. Like a big, wet fart. Or a prize pig. Every place is what you make it, and everyone's fart smells good to the perpetrator. And every county's fair is the best; every pig is some pig.

Watched When Harry Met Sally tonight with Teresa. The first time I've seen it in years. And not on TLC or something. Sadly enough, I kept thinking about mimetic theory, the desire of love you see but don't have. Not that--no, that's not what I meant--but I just found it interesting that every time Harry or Sally balked at romance, they killed time strolling the streets of New York, looking at couples hugging on the next corner and smooching to welcome in the New Year.

New Year's in New York: Another reason New York just doesn't really impress me. A large group of people always fails to impress me. (Part of why I remain suspicious of pop culture, Obama, and...I don't know...yoga, or something.)

--

The other big reason I don't so much care for the NY films is that whenever I watch them with people who have been to New York, it feels like a scavenger hunt to which I was invited but in which I can't really participate.

"That scene we just watched--I've been there. In that cafe."

"Oh."

"It's a lot bigger than it looks in the movie."

"Really?"

"Yeah. They cleared out some of the tables so it would look smaller."

"Oh."

And so on.

--

Don't get me wrong: Good movies have been made in New York. I like them.

And I'm sure that if I ever see a flick made in Edinburgh or the Philippines, I'll do the same.

"That street the drunk Scotsman just ran down? I've been on that street."

"Oh."

"Yeah, there's a Facebook picture of me and that statue. The one with the dog."

"Really?"

"Yeah. It had a lot more bird doo on it in real life."

"Oh."

And so on.

--

Side notes:

- Dropped over $100 today in next-apartment purchases: A blue recliner with automann, two swanky lamps, a small skillet (new), and two end tables painted to look ancient. These came from thrift stores, and I paid no more than $13 for any single item.

- Got a five-buck haircut, the best I've had in months, for the lowest price (I think) ever. My receipt came with a coupon which promises three dollars off my next one, and so, if I time it right, I could get a two-buck chop.

- Checked out some good tunes from the library: Gordon Lightfoot, Big in Japan, the big Duke E., and a collection simply and amply named, "Paris." All new additions to the iTunes library--from their library to mine.

- Life of Pi just got really good. The ship sank. The tiger made it to the boat. The narrator despairs on the ocean, alone.

--

I constantly desire that which I don't have. In that way, I am a perfect consumer cog in the machine of industry, and now, with job security and the promise of better pay and pad within weeks, I'm dropping dollars like a careless Rockefeller.

Which I'm not. In any way, shape or form.

Sometimes, it's best to refrain from the scavenger hunt. Hyenas laugh most, but lions have pride.

Quickening

"Working all day for a mean little man
With a clip-on tie and a rub-on tan
He's got me running 'round the office
Like a dog around a track
But when I get back home
You're always there to rub my back."

-- Fountains of Wayne, "Hey Julie"

--

"Finished with this one," she says, slamming the book shut. She is sitting in the front seat, and I can see, above the bumpy blue title printed and embossed on the front cover, the words, "National Bestseller."

This is the second NB I've seen her finish, with similar ceremony and casual pride. Completing the reading of a book is as ordinary as finishing a day of work or class. When the book is done, so is the meal, but there is little to no digestion. She reads like little children eat candy: With speed, with ease, with greedy grins and shallow delight.

This is good taste, the tasting of what already tastes good.

--

I tell her I like to savor words, sometimes reading a single page and shutting the book, and my remark is followed by an awkward silence, as if I've said I like books about baby genitals.

Everyone else says they like to speed-read. Two of them boast having read the entirety of the Harry Potter series several times over, which is the page-number equivalent of breezing through the Bible--twice.

"But I have to read with a piece of paper under each line, because I catch myself going so fast that I just skip over whole paragraphs just to get to the good parts. I look for dialogue."

Good parts. The sum of which can declare the whole good.

(And of course, selling lots of copies makes a book good, too.)

--

A quick digression:

The used car my parents just bought in my stead (it is in Nebraska, away from my eyes and hands) needs several repairs to make it roadtrip-ready. They will drive it across the country in a few weeks when they come to visit, and they want it in tip-top shape. My dad told me today that the mechanic thought he had fixed the clunking near the forward wheels, but upon hearing more noises, they took it back and he found something else wrong. The motor mounts were failing and the motor, the center within the frame, was jostling too freely in the engine chamber.

"Either Dodge just installed bad mounts, or someone, at some point, put this car through some really rough stuff," my dad said. "Bad parts, I guess. But once those are taken care of, the car should be solid."

Bad parts, and yet the whole is good.

--

Now for some pretentious contrast. I was serious about how I read: The last book I consciously sped-read was John Grisham's A Time to Kill, which I blew through in tenth grade in one night. I reread it two years later and was appalled at what I had missed, entire sections of story that were lost in the muddy haze of four in the morning. With bleary eyes, I had continued to read, blind.

I have refused to speed-read ever since. And even when it came to classes, I found it more honest not to read something than to scan for buzz parts and pass it off as knowledge of the book. Thoughtful, guilty silence beats preened, proud words, any day. For me, books that are meant to be read quickly are not really meant to be read at all, not if your definition of the word is to look past what the author says to what he/she whispers. If your definition of reading is mere comprehension of words and a disregard of subtlety, I wonder how much you've read.

When was the last time you read a passage that begged for a rereading? that halted your mere interest in story and wrung your soul to sob in your chest? that seemed the opposite of a "passage," and instead blocked you from moving on?

I'm not saying that every book has to be clunky and difficult. Such books often become bestsellers because they boggle critics.

Still, reading should be a challenge, not a cinch.

--

She has read two books in the time it has taken me to get through one-third of mine. And when pressed as to the quality of her quantity of text, she quickly (oh, so sad, a person for whom all things must pass quickly!) answers, "Oh, it's so good."

The question comes back to me. Well, what do I say? That the book I'm reading comes with (re)commendations from almost a dozen close friends, most whose good taste includes the unsavory and complex, and now, ninety pages and two weeks in, I can't decide whether it's good or not? That I mistrust my own enjoyment? That I appreciate its philosophies but find the arguments a bit prosaic, its logic sensible but expected, its structure competent but a little too familiar?

I remember why books breed worms.

Splurges

"Well, tha's somethin' we shall have to remedy, i'n't it?"

-- Braveheart

--

Yes, I'm quoting Braveheart. Just watched it tonight with my girlfriend, christening the new DVDs. Between the double-clearance deals at a Target in Mason, OH, and a forgotten Blockbuster off I-471 in northern KY, I have almost doubled my personal movie collection.

New to the family are: Smart People, Apollo 13, Braveheart, Crash, Traffic, Cast Away, No Country for Old Men, and Road to Perdition. Many movies I like have one-word titles--oddly enough, that goes for plays, too. This brings my total to twenty-three films on my shelf, not counting TV show collections or my two-disc Led Zeppelin concert edition. It's a modest collection, not nearly as stacked or buff as I'd like, but it has some good stuff. (Don't know what I was thinking when I nabbed About Julia and Atonement at Big Lots, but at least I have American Psycho, the South Park movie, and Raging Bull. Gotta have your bull.) I could easily make a list for the next ten or so I'll buy, but you can imagine that I want many, many more; hence, my decision to limit next month's DVD purchases to pre-2000 films.

That means Jurassic Park, always in my top three when I'm asked the question, is ripe for the picking. (No one since has captured better dinosaurs on screen, despite sixteen years of Hollywood indulging its CGI fantasy fetish.)

--

It's something that happens to me in bookshops and movie stores: I splurge. I could give fewer shits about clothes shopping or scanning shelves for shampoo, but when it comes to books and movies, I become an instant shopaholic, grabbing whatever merchandise the signs are pointing at. I wander aisles, gasping at titles like a twelve-year-old gasps at new Nintendo games, and before I know it, I'm standing at the cash register with new media filling the crook of my arm.

I am always simultaneously reassured and worried at the response these purchases merit. Today, a ditsy bip booped the DVDs past the laser reader and set them in a plastic bag, and when she saw Crash, she exclaimed: "Oh wow, this is such a good movie. I, like, cried."

And then, when the co-workers who obsess over Twilight, "American Idol" and the new Britney Spears album peer at my new stack with approval, something inside me wants to run back to the store's returns table, screaming about regrets.

--

But I don't. Instead, I keep quiet about the movies I like until I get home, and I watch them with awe. I wonder sometimes whether the Hollywood movers and shakers think more about the initial rush of chuckleheads who see the thing five times in theatres, or about the geeks who watch it on laptops, film nerds reclining in their hovels.

There's a difference between the person who has to see a movie three times to be satisfied, and the person who is only satisfied by one out of every three movies they see.

For that matter, there's a huge gap between the movies you can easily handle three times over, and the ones you can only stomach once every three years.

Tunes

"I hope tomorrow is like today."

-- Guster, "I Hope Tomorrow Is Like Today"

--

Had a good time with the cast today. Sometimes the best grip, loosened, is better.

I made a Guster mix (began with Ganging Up on the Sun, then pulled from Lost and Gone Forever and Keep It Together) and they liked it. Played some Mae after that, and rounded out a long day--seven hours total in that rickety, squeakety white van--with some Alison Krauss.

--

Krauss, I have learned, is the winningest female in Grammy history, with a total of twenty-six. (She is third overall.) Though her band, Union Station, has been around for two decades, she likes to say that musically, they are just beginning. That they have not yet begun to play, in other words.

In bluegrass, work and life, everything starts today.

--

There is something unsettling about a band who only makes songs you like. At once it is a feeling of hearing music made for you, and then it is a realization that it is you, not the music, that has been conditioned to be liked.

A high-school friend once said that he loved the Rolling Stones, except for some of their songs. "I don't know what the fuck they were doing," he told me. "I think they just made some shit up to sell some vinyl. But they're still my favorite."

"Why?"

"Well, you can't say a band is your favorite unless you hate at least one of their songs."

True. And that sinking feeling is love, when you hear a different sound from the same band. Love is what you feel when you realize, without saying it aloud, that your favorite guys (or gals) have sold out.

--

A note about tune and tone, briefly:

Both are nouns and verbs. And you can tone a tune as well as you can tune a tone, but an atonal tune will be tuned out by more people than an untuned tone.

Or, as the symphony hall of dreams would beckon: Play it, and they will hear.

--

Now, this doesn't go to say that Krauss is the best female musician in history (dame Aretha cringes), or that atonal music is bad. What it does say is, music is really beyond me to comprehend in any pliable sense; that is, I seem to lack the knack to do it myself, aside from singing in the shower, or worse, on a stage. Keys, strings and stops are out of my throat and out of my talent range--but I like what I like. It is the one performance art with which I can only barely identify, but which I still consider part of my identity.

I think I like "good music," but then again, there is some boring shit in my iTunes.

My girlfriend once said of a popular song, "I like it, but I feel like I'm supposed to like it, like someone in a studio was like, 'This song needs to be liked,' and then made a song that was likable but didn't say or do anything. That's why I don't like it: I feel like I've been engineered to like it."

Poppy trillers and acoustic nasal singers take note: You are as numberless as the records you sell, but the underground knows the truth, and it forgets you in the thud of stampeding feet and ca-chinging registers at the record shop. The most popular radio stations are afraid of silence.

It is silence that makes the music necessary, the thinking that begs for artistic noise.

--

It is the same with the stage.

Hands

"The presence of God is the finest of rewards."

-- Yann Martel, Life of Pi

--

After taking an evening doo, I went into my bathroom to wash my hands. As I pumped the little green head on the little green bottle, I saw that the soap level was low. I would have to replace it soon, but since I'm moving apartments in two weeks, it seems like a petty purchase. The soap dispenser has lasted since I moved here in August.

An image of my time in this room: a soap dispenser, slowly dispensing, slowly emptying.

My girlfriend was in the other part of the room, sitting on the bed. I called to her, "Guess what? This--" I came in, holding the soap bottle "--has lasted since August. Isn't that crazy?"

Without giving the bottle a second glance, she said, "You don't wash your hands enough."

That made me think. I tried to remember a time when I didn't wash my hands after using the toilet, and of course no such instance came to mind. On the contrary, I went through a hand-washing kick about two months back, manically sudsing up my fingers and palms every time I had the chance. It seems odd that the single bottle has lasted so long, and even more that my girlfriend thinks I don't wash my hands enough.

--

I'm reading Life of Pi, and the narrator has just described his first encounter with a real-life Muslim. They are sitting in the man's shop, eating unleavened wheels of bread, when the call to prayer plays. The old man excuses himself, rises, goes to another room for a prayer mat, unrolls it, stands on it, and performs a bizarre yet unmistakable ritual of Islam: the thumbs on the lobes of the ears, listening to the Divine Voice; the repetitive kneeling and rising; the right-left check of the head, a silent homage to the Eastern city; the incessant, inaudible mumbling.

The narrator is intrigued, even convicted for not displaying his own zeal.

He recalls two moments in which he feels connected to God, after this event. In one of them, he is riding a bicycle, and in the other, he is walking in the woods after a snowstorm in Canada and he sees the Virgin Mary in a white and blue cloak, superimposed on Nature herself.

--

The Roman ruler turns his back on the crowd, confiding as cowards do with criminals, muttering his disgust, hiding his ambivalence. Disappointed, he turns his face to the crowd, and symbolically washes his hands.

--

I see that my hands are clean, but there are many hands I leave unwashed in my life. I don't fold all my clothes after I do laundry, and shirts crinkle in baskets filled with socks. I don't take out the garbage near the door as often as I should, and now, the spent Kleenexes following a week of sickness burst from the plastic can like clouds from a well. I don't clean my room when it is dirty, opting instead to shift around messes, swapping scatterplots for piles and stacks for heaps. I have ironed one shirt in the last nine months, and it doesn't even belong to me.

I call my sisters when I want to bitch about work. I call my parents when something has gone magnificently wrong or right, and never to ask about how the day feels eleven hours away. It usually just comes up, the right things at the wrong time. Like plants in sidewalk cracks, insects in paninis, or prayer in school.

I find myself too angry in the evenings to think about God. Work has become a chore and a bore, the silver talents waxing dull in my clumsy--but clean--hands.

Images of my time here: Soap slowly leaving, snotted Kleenex multiplying in a corner, coins gathering moss.

--

I do not have a direct pipeline to God, a pump to fuel the soul, but I ought at least to drill.

Sprints

"who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish..."

-- Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"

--

New find from the tour: Bo Burnham, 18-year-old comedy musician, wordsmith extraordinaire. His "Love Is..." is obscene genius, like "South Park." He's Ben Folds, Jason Mraz, and Robin Williams on Broadway combined.

--

Today, we performed in a rich school and everyone got the jokes no one has laughed at for weeks. We return on Thursday, expecting to be flabbergasted again.

Audiences perform for us almost as much as we perform for them. All stage actors love to talk about "the give and take" with the audience, the sort of verbal tickle fight wherein joke feeds on laughter feeds on joke, but I've found that only when you tour--when you do the same show over and over for drastically different groups--can you see how most easily to manipulate them. Some bits have their own punch, and others need a stomp, a take, a grin, a cackle, an extra bit of beat.

--

It occurred to me today, while waiting for a Bacon Turkey Bravo sandwich from Panera, that acting in the theatre is much like cooking. You practice a recipe in the same way you rehearse: by doing, by creating, by getting critiques. Cooking is also similar to theatre in that it requires a combination of elements, mixed in perfect proportions, to produce an ideal sampling. Some dishes are tiny, concentrated servings of flavor; in the same way some plays are short vignettes, condensed human experience on the black platter of stage.

But it is the seeming futility of it all that binds the two most. Just like a kid who asks why he has to make the bed in the morning if he's only going to mess it up again that night, a cook or actor must satisfy the question, Why create what I am about to create if it is not going to last?

The meals are devoured and digested; the plays occur, and are gone. All this precision, all this effort, all this ado, and the end result is a satisfied--or miffed--patron rising from a seat, mumbling something to a companion, and leaving the building.

--

My cell phone is dying. When I flip it open, the screen stays blank, a small dead television atop a numeric pad, staring and being stared at, an image-creator turned image-reflector.

So I bid on an eBay phone, a real steal of a deal, and the "new" thing arrives in a few days. It had to be a Sprint phone, purchased on the run, a qualifying sprint before a marathon run.

--

Went to Hillsdale, saw folks I wanted to see, saw folks I didn't want to see, didn't see folks I wanted to see (some read this blog, and I wondered where you were), and didn't give a shit that I didn't see folks I didn't want to see (none of them read this blog, I bet).

Actually, a secret part of me sometimes likes to see people I loathe. Or maybe it's all the time. And maybe a public part of me. There is a judge and jury within us all.

--

Visits, too, are like phones, are like plays, are like food. A lot of preparation, the plunge into action, a steady or sudden decline, the epilogue of thought and feeling, the memory unpurged by events.

Booms

"You like boom
And I like boom
Enough small boom let's boom the boom-ah..."

-- "She's So Hot--Boom," by the Flight of the Conchords

--

Three notable things happened tonight as I left my girlfriend's apartment in Over the Rhine (the Cincy ghetto--if you watch that vid, check out 513pridgebottomboy's comment, the one that starts, "dats good we nice but..."). OTR, as the area is called by locals, has a bad rap as far as neighborhoods go, so housing is very cheap. And sketchy.

And a bit weird.

Cases in point:

--

1.) As we said goodnight at the doorway, someone fired a gun not more than a block away. "Quick," she said, "go home. That was a gunshot." I ran to the car.

2.) I turned on the radio as soon as I got out of OTR. I didn't want to listen to "American Woman" on the classic rock station, so I hit a preset button and it went to the classical station, 91.7. The selection at first sounded like a musical saw concerto with a piano (or something), but I came to realize that the instrument was not a saw, but a softly-cradled electric guitar. I continued listening for the next five minutes, during which time the piece turned into an Irish-sounding lullaby, complete with Aeolian pipes. I have no idea as to the composer or work, but it was beautiful. As I drove under the streetlights and hugged the car against the railing on the Reading Road entrance ramp, I felt like I was in an indie movie--the bittersweet, human kind. The best kind of indie film to feel like your life is.

3.) All the lights were green. Half of them are supposed to blink yellow or red after 10pm on Friday nights.