By and by
Two—count ‘em, TWO—days in a row I’ve heard In the Sweet By and By, and twice I’ve had to fight back tears. Well, only one did I actually fight them because the first time was Friday at the Folklife Festival (sung by some wonderful Irish singers) and the second was here in my own home at the end of A Prairie Home Companion. I’ll cry in my own home over a piece of music, but doing so in public is risky since people tend to assume you’re having a nervous breakdown or just stubbed your toe.
It’s Saturday and the band is playing
Why didn’t I go see A Prairie Home Companion when it was in the theater? Oh, I know. Because I would have sung along with just about all the songs and laughed a little too loud and cried most obnoxiously.
What a terrific movie.
I’ve listened to the radio program for as long as I can remember and attending a taping several years ago. It’s great fun.
I hear that old piano from down the Avenue.
I smell the pine trees; I look around for you.
Oh, my sweet, sweet, sweet old someone coming through the door.
It’s Saturday and the band is playing.
Honey, could we ask for more?
Pre-travel ritual
Before I go on a trip (this time to the mountains for a week or so) I have to clean and organize the whole apartment. The last thing I want to do is come home to dirty clothes, dust (although that is a daily battle around here), general clutter, and dirty dishes. I think it is also therapeutic for me to clean and organize like this. In fact, I know it is. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and relaxes my mind. I cannot relax amid clutter and disarray.
Today I will re-pot some plants, do laundry, clean the floors, put away the 200 pairs of sandals strewn about the apartment, replace the kitty litter, wash any stray dishes, carry out any garbage/boxes/bags, etc. that are lying around, and do anything else that I think needs doing. And then I will walk around the place with a smug satisfaction the cats believe only they can ever rightly feel.
Have I mentioned how much I love it when people send me books?
Thanks, amigo.
P.S. What’s with all the squirrels?
Code name: BTRATHPLWB (updated)
To be Mailed Friday, June 29, no thanks to the postal elves Grumpy, Stupid, and Litigious, who were alternately hateful, pedantic and inconveniently invisible. Apparently, one is exasperated by humanity1, one cannot life anything that weighs more that 8 ounces, and one doesn’t want to do any transactions at all, at least not during office hours:
You know who you are.
The Bucktoothed Rope-Armed Troll-Haired Pantsless Wood Bear2 (a.k.a., BTRATHPLWB, which is pronounced Bitwrathploob) is being shipped off to Slovenia and along with it are several types of camera equipment (which all together delineate a clear pathology, although I’m not sure which one yet), and various things for the whole Isoglossia family. I cannot simply send something to someone, especially when I have to wait for various things to arrive on my doorstep to go in said box. I must pack the box with whimsy, and so I do. And so I have. It’s a substantial, but lightweight, box. The original purpose was to send the BTRATHPLWB on as part of the IWUS World Tour, but it grew into a shipping favor for sgazzetti (since some things cannot get to Slovenia from the rest of the planet), and then it grew into an attempt on my part to clutter their home.
So I will mail it tomorrow, and sgazzetti will wonder what on Earth could be in the box, and I will thoroughly enjoy the family reaction to the stuff, whatever that reaction turns out to be.
Speaking of IWUS, have you seen this handy How-to post?
1. Yes, yes, yes I know that could be a description of me but I at least have enough self-control to not telegraph my contempt if my job involves working with the great unwashed masses.
2. Once again, thanks go to Tina and Marigoldie for mailing it to me. They say they don’t hate me but I don’t know about that….
More self awareness than I ever gave her credit for
I generally despise talking about politics because it causes people to go straight to their veins-bulging, hyperbolic, shrill worst, but I do have something to say about the Ann Coulter/Elizabeth Edwards confrontation, and it is this:
It was unfortunate for Ann Coulter to try to spin this as Elizabeth Edwards asking her to stop talking because she didn’t ask her to do that; she asked her to “stop the personal attacks.” But Coulter does perhaps betray an unexpected amount of self-awareness when you consider that if she (Coulter) did stop making personal attacks, she would, in fact, stop talking all together because as far as I can tell, she doesn’t have anything else to say.
Like a sack of potatoes
The other night, Figaro was sprawled out sound asleep on the arm of the sofa basking in the warm lamplight when he suddenly fell off. It took him a few seconds to wake up and discover that he was now lying on his side wedged between the sofa arm and my hip, and when he finally looked at me it was to convey the message that he meant to do that.
We always do it nice and rough
I need more of this in my life. Specifically, I need the dancers. Imagine how they would improve even the most mundane of tasks.
Pilgrimage
“A twelfth-century guidebook lists all the hazards. Mosquitoes infest marshy plains south of Bordeaux, where the pilgrim who strays from the road sinks up to his knees in mud. No food is to be had in this region and he who would cross it must carry three days’ supply. At Sorde, near the foot of the Pyrenees, pilgrims are ferried across the river on hollowed-out tree trunks, in peril of drowning. After a step 8-mile climb to a pass through the mountains, they meet extortionists who exact an illegal toll with whips. Spanish food should be avoided by the unaccustomed, ‘and if anyone can eat their fish without feeling sick, then he must have a stronger constitution than most of us.’ By a salt stream on the far side of the mountains, the tanners live entirely on the profits of the hides of horses poisoned by the water. In Rioja, the natives pour poison into the streams to increase sales of their wine. Traveling companions, unavoidable on popular routes (the myth of the ’standard route’ is a vulgar error), should be chosen with care, as a common ploy of robbers is to attach themselves to the unwary in pilgrim disguise. Whenever the roads pass through uninhabited tracts, professional beggars exploit the pilgrims’ obligations to give alms, bloodying their limbs, simulating leprosy, and waving Jericho palms. The sensitive pilgrim—whom the guide writer assumes to be French—may find foreign habits disgusting, especially among the Navarrese. The mountains and forest house misplaced exotics, whose unnatural lusts–sodomy and bestiality—license pornography. When the guide writer describes the Basques, he clearly recognizes them as primitives, alluding to them in terms generally applied to peoples called ‘barbarian’ and classified by the science of the time as outside the natural law and civilized life.”
-Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration, Felipe Fernández-Armesto
