Little Dog, Big Snow

Blissed

And then, true to the cat code, he proves me wrong.
A sleeping shot that might just work for next year’s calendar.
. . .
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You may need to clear your cache in order to see the change and have it not be weird.
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Eli Doesn’t Pose

Many have wondered why Eli, King Kitten, is not in the Farmily calendar. It’s because he doesn’t deign to be. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been out and about with Eli and see him in exquisite light, or against a beautiful and unusual backdrop, and turn to get my camera, and by the time I turn back to Eli – sometimes a mere split-second later – he has vanished. EVERY TIME.

The only photos I have of Eli from the past two years are of him sleeping. Sleeping in a basket. Sleeping on a log. Sleeping next to Rue. Half-sleeping in my chair. And these sneaky sleeping snapshots are always done with my little pocket camera in poor light, and just aren’t good enough to enlarge for a calendar.

Speaking of… calendars are en route, flying to everyone who has ordered, as of Monday morning. I only have about 50 of each calendar left, so if you want one, order soon – it’s a limited edition press run this year, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. You’ve been warned!

Fire Just Waiting

I bought a new car recently (it’s ten years old; new to me) and it’s the first car I’ve had with a CD player. I’m too lazy to play CDs on my computer – you slide it in, wait for it to load, play a song, change your mind, eject, find another, put it in, play that one for a while, eject again, etc, etc. But, remember tapes? I have such vivid picture-memories of old rooms and old apartments, the stereo or boom box surrounded by stacks of tapes with dozens more scattered across the floor. It was different with tapes.

Anyway. My CDs have sat in boxes gathering dust while I was lazy, streaming KEXP on my computer, until I got this car. This morning, as I relaxed into the heated seat (heated seats – what a revelation!) and flipped through a dusty box of disks, I spotted one I’d not listened to in…. a decade? One year, in the late 90s, I was addicted to Little Plastic Castle – I heard a piece of myself in every single song. This morning, I put it in for the 40 minute drive to town, and remembered the lyrics to all the songs, thanks to the freaky muscle memory of the mind. The first track hit me with nostalgia, but I found myself, again, in the second song.

Fuel:
They were digging a new foundation in Manhattan
And they discovered a slave cemetery there
May their souls rest easy
Now that lynching is frowned upon
We’ve moved on to the electric chair
And I wonder who’s gonna be president, tweedle dum or tweedle dumber?
And who’s gonna have the big blockbuster box office this summer?
How ’bout we put up a wall between houses and the highway
And then you can go your way, and I can go my way.

Except all the radios agree with all the TVs
And all the magazines agree with all the radios
And I keep hearing that same damn song everywhere I go
Maybe I should put a bucket over my head
And a marshmallow in each ear
And stumble around for another dumb-numb week
For another humdrum hit song to appear.

People used to make records
As in a record of an event
The event of people playing music in a room
Now everything is cross-marketing
It’s about sunglasses and shoes
Or guns and drugs
You choose.

We got it rehashed
We got it half-assed
We’re digging up all the graves
And we’re spitting on the past
And we can choose between the colors
Of the lipstick on the whores
Because we know the difference
Between the font of “20% More!”
And the font of “Teriyaki”
You tell me
How does it make you feel?
You tell me what’s real.

And they say that alcoholics are always alcoholics
Even when they’re as dry as my lips for years
Even when they’re stranded on a small desert island
With no place in 2,000 miles to buy beer
And I wonder Is he different?
Is he different?
Has he changed what’s he about?
Or is he just a liar with nothing to lie about?

Am I headed for the same brick wall
Is there anything I can do about
Anything at all?
Except go back to that corner in Manhattan
And dig deeper, dig deeper this time
Down beneath the impossible pain of our history
Beneath unknown bones
Beneath the bedrock of the mystery
Beneath the sewage system and the PATH train
Beneath the cobblestones and the water main
Beneath the traffic of friendships and street deals
Beneath the screeching of kamikaze cab wheels
Beneath everything I can think of to think about
Beneath it all, beneath all get out
Beneath the good and the kind and the stupid and the cruel
There’s a fire that’s just waiting for fuel.

It put into words how I’ve been feeling about blogging. Lately, I’ve felt confronted by so much commercialism and mimicry, and money being the goal rather than a happy byproduct of unfettered creativity. And this is why I’ve kind of faded out from blogging here – I think about it a fair amount, and feel guilt at times, but my drives have been elsewhere, and I think that’s OK and important for the kind of evolution I want for myself.

And, of course, the solution is in the song, too. I listened to the biography of Steve Jobs on my drive home from California this summer, and a particular quote struck me hard – I was driving through Utah and when I got home, remembered enough of it to google the whole quote: “The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, ‘Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.’ And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.”