I’m Still not Gonna Put Up a Country Song

Enough of these dreary liberal dirges! My conservative credibility is hanging in the balance here, and if I post one more melancholy bong hit soundtrack, I’m gonna have to turn in my gas guzzling 6-speed, defend Islam, and refer to my status dogs as my children. Or, if many of the giant REPUBLICAN doomsayers are to be believed, refer to the dogs as my partners and demand marriage equality. Gives whole new meaning to the term “service animals.”

In staying true to my greed-loving elitist pursuits and values, I give you a song that only 1% of you will like, while 99% of you will dismiss out of hand as something that just sort of like, you know, feels like you shouldn’t approve of.

I guess that some days I’m just not sure who to insult. Days like that, I try to hit everybody.

Staying Single for Swedish Chicks

Here’s another song I bought all by its lonesome. The conservative people writing all the very bestest websites tell me I’m not supposed to like folk music. I think it was even one of the things in the meme video “Shit Liberals Say.” “I like folk music.” Bwahaha, sappy liberal pansy!

Is it ok if it’s Swedish chicks?

Now, about multiples. I’m going to go about putting tags on some of my older posts – keep track of the knee saga, etc. I have noticed in the past when I do this retroactively, and then click the update button, WordPress throws them back into RSS feeds (google reader, at least) as if they are new posts. I’ll see if I can find a way to avoid that, but if not, you can expect to start seeing some repeat posts in your reader feeds. It’s cool. Read them again. They’re mostly pretty good.

About the knee? It’s getting old and I am tired of it, but surgery is in just under two weeks. I am eschewing the brace for longer and longer stretches, and I noticed last night while doing my skateboard PT (seriously. I have skateboard, and the therapist said I should use it.) that I’m able to bend it more than I have in a long time. I don’t have an angle finder to measure it out, but it’s a good feeling. I’m getting up the stairs that much faster because of it. Down is still a slow process, 6 weeks in, always one step at a time. I’ll be spending the rest of today without my brace on, see how it goes.

Oh, and as far as things showing up again in your reader feeds, you can expect to see last night’s post (Mutely to the Coast) out there again. I always put up the good stuff on the weekends to limited viewership (more limited than usual, anyway), and I would like for that post to have a solid Monday in the sun.

Tags: First Aid Kit, Music, The Knee

Mutely to the Coast

My God I want to get some good music that makes me feel like I’m ten different kinds of victory and loss, trading off and making life as giant, shaky, and indefinite as insomnia. I want the kind of music that makes me look at you like a movie, that slows you down and makes me a little bit scared of all the love we can’t seem to get our fingers into. Oh, but those fingers… I want the kind of music that plays when slapping a woman is justified, you know, because sometimes ya gotta hit one, if it’s a movie. And the kind of music that says yeah, she hit him again ‘cuz hittin’ ‘im is what he lives to have done. Hittin ‘im’s how he knows he done it again, so it’s how he know he kin start over. Hittin ‘im’s how he knows this love’s about a 40 minute screw from bein’ over, and a 40 mile drive from startin’ over.

I want some good music that makes fast forward the same as slow motion so that when we’re in this thing it’s like a window down and a mute highway and the sound of the engine is only something we think we’ve heard because the engine is us, and it’s revving towards a bed in the desert like a dog growling at a bone you’re holding a few inches from his nose. Sit. Stay. It’s a tease. The speed is a tease, all six speeds are a tease. But it’s in with the air, out with the exhaust, and a tense, mute highway. This ain’t a movie, we’re not on the run, we didn’t rob nobody but our ancestors for the cache of birthright that we’re abusing out here on the 80, West past Green River and on, knowing the Salt Lake is just another thing we’re gonna leave behind. Bonneville a heathen lure, Vegas a comma.

Yeah, we got a Merc and a thin story, a goal set for the ocean but an unwhispered knowing that a little breakdown in the desert is where our literate romance wants us, but we’re still scared of anything that isn’t home. We haven’t fought anyone for real. I’ve never been stabbed. The cops never heard of us. But I still want the music that makes us both shut up for at least the space between rest areas so that I can go a half hour on the road without saying or hearing anything out loud about how spectacular the country really is – I’ll get sick if I have to hear anything that sounds like tourism. The country will get spectacular enough if we can do something better than graduate from college, and so far that’s all we got. The loudest noise we made so far is just the one when we tried to sound the same as all the rest – what if we got quiet.

Quiet like a window down and a mute highway, with the tires humming and the cabin, the windshield seals getting tested by pressure at about 85 miles per hour, right where the suspension starts to feel like it’s doing what it was made for, like it’s finally giving the chassis that bedding down that they were made to do together. The windows down and the tires on the road and so much God Damned white noise that you know you’re being told to shut up by something that man and God did together and it’s the kind of music you begged for, and that’s why at that last motel just past Battle Mountain, you shot the clerk.

And so mutely to the coast we drive.

Tags: Fiction, Flash Fiction

The Travis Bickle Diet

Mama came home. We celebrated by leaving the kids with grandma for a quick hour while we headed down the street for some sushi. I know people who still rebel against sushi as some kind of yuppie trend. I don’t know about that. Sushi has been cool since long before I could afford it, and it has kind of normaled itself off. Calling sushi a trend at this point is kind of like shouting “conformist!” at someone for driving a car to work and drinking coffee when he gets there. Let this one go, people. Let. It. Go.

As always, I had too damn much sushi because I love it. It’s one of those rare foods that has never left me feeling like I should have stopped a few bites short of where I did. No overstuffed feeling, no discomfort. It always leaves me feeling somewhat healthy and light. And light in the wallet, which is how I know I had too much.

But too much is par for the course anymore, as I am eating like a pig and getting no exercise. People keep telling me I am losing weight. It must be the natural deterioration of the invalid, though I don’t think a diet of everything with an exercise regimen of nothing is going to get anyone thin. But it’s my face, they say, and the gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes are always the sign of a sort of Travis Bickle fitness-by-heroin-and-insomnia program. So I guess I don’t know what is going on, except that the extra effort involved in heaving a mostly useless leg around must be burning a lot of calories. Or, I am some version of sick. Some other kind of sick that I…not…usually…am. I guess I’ll say it like that.

But losing weight? I guess it must look like I am in some way, but I’m not buying it. It defies logic. I should be gaining weight, the way things are going, and I just know I am. Hell, I even feel heavy, so while I’ve been avoiding the scale like a woman does as Spring turns to Summer, it snuck up on me yesterday. I had to weigh the boy so I could figure out how much medicine to give him, which meant weighing myself, and then weighing myself with him in my arms. One foot on the scale and I got that “oh crap I trapped myself and now I’m going to know how fat I’ve gotten on my doughnut-to-couch diet.”

Wait. That can’t be right.

199 lbs. Or, in Spanish: One hundred ninety-nine pounds (All I really remember from school, despite accidental demonstrations to the contrary, is that you don’t say “one hundred and ninety-nine.” So I don’t. That, and Civil War amputations, ha,ha.). 199 is a good few pounds lighter than I expected to see – had I been completely naked and mostly bled out. As it was, this was 199 fully clothed, with shoes and a mammoth knee brace of foam and metal. I really am losing weight, and quite handily. Mayhap it’s just my shrinking left leg. But I wonder if weight loss is the first result of total physical disinterest. It would explain all that obesity. You start sitting around a lot, eating whatever the hell you feel like eating, and what’s this? You’re losing weight? Sweet! Change nothing! Keep at it! And then your family has left you and your corpse is being forklifted out of your house.

I think you’re better off with sushi and heroin.

The Reluctant Kings of the Endless Day

They always get sick when she leaves us. Snot, coughing, and airways that sputter enough to sound like a whole day’s work being forced through a clogged shower head. The poor kids fall apart without her. All three of them.

Even when the life is a good life of love and provision, the absence of mama makes it a balefully long saga in which we mark time by measuring how much of it we spend in hoping she don’t stay gone too long. I really don’t know how else to know what we’ve put behind us in miles or minutes. I don’t think the calendar knows enough about our children or our love to tell us how old any of those are, and the clock is far too eager about setting limits on how much of the day can be spent in a dream. But when she is gone we are sudden watchmakers and astronomers, intimate with every frigid, syrupy minute that won’t seem to pass. When she is gone we are the reluctant Kings of the Endless Day, sitting on our dubious thrones and reigning over the incredibly tortuous attrition of hours through nothing but wishing they would go away. Mama, come home.

And at length we are sick from it.

Mama, come home.

I used to post this poem when she left me:

Mama go away sometimes,
And it do hurt us much.
She go, and with her go that Mama’s touch;
Leavin’ us children behind.

Mama, don’t stay gone too long.
I can feed this thing alright.
But don’t stay gone another night,
‘Cause I cant sing your song.

Mama go away sometimes,
And it do hurt us much.
Come back, and bring that Mama’s touch;
Show us how to get on fine.

I think I can do better with it than that, and I’ve actually tried a lot of tweaks. Nothing fits so far, nothing keeps the tone without losing the heart, or keeps the heart without losing the song, or keeps the song without losing the proper sense of pleading. Which means that the poem is exactly like trying to get through a week without her, and I should recognize that wishing it were better is as good as it’s going to get.

And don’t forget that it takes a Mother.

Tags: Family, It Takes a Mother, Mama