Annotations

This song can be used as a flotation device. How are you, is it still summer where you are.

Summer 2016: back to short hair and beard, mostly by accident rather than design. I tried to trim my own hair and ruined it, a pitiably rookie move since the last time I regularly cut my own hair was more than a decade ago at age 21. So I had to have a professional correct my mistakes, and short was the only way forward. And the beard happened cause I stopped stopping it from happening. We'll see how it goes. This is now a fashion blog. I like how the light in this picture brings out my need to keep taking selfies. How about you, you good?

I haven't been finding/making enough time for writing recently, but I have been writing jokes cause a friend and I thought it would be fun to get on stage and try our hands at standup. I tried it once years ago. It was pretty fun. Also, I recently got a non-academic, full-time job as a technical writer and the oncoming financial security makes me feel disbelief, amazement. Still unsure what feelings to have other than relief. I'm typing this on my phone in the park, and certain birds keep diving and disappearing under the surface of the lake only to reappear across the way. I love reappearing across the way. It's one of the best methods of reappearance.

Today at the Humane Society there are two Angora rabbits, one named Joan Jett and the other named Stevie Nicks. There is also a cat named Johnny Rotten. It is an unusual alignment of rock stars. In a different category, there is a cat named Xerxes, who is partly shaven and had to have corrective eyelid surgery. The lower part of his eyelids was turning inward, scratching his corneas. Finally, there is a cat named Atticus. He meows quite a lot. These names are in lieu of pictures. This is a new version of the internet.

No one is safe in the anthropocene. Or, everyone is "safe" in the anthropocene. It's all about who's in charge of recognizing injuries. Look at me, I'm rambling again. I love this cat.

It's been many years since I did so, but I haven't gotten my hair cut in months. I trimmed the back myself a few days ago to evade some buildup that was tending mullet-wise. Other than that, I am really enjoying long(er) hair. And what is the point of a blog if you can't occasionally declare to relative strangers your deeply vain enjoyment of growing your hair out? It's not that I think it looks incredible. It's that it looks almost exactly the way I'd like it to look. I'll grant you that the distinction I'm drawing here may be so academic that it's a little silly and evasive. But no one told me to be serious. No one told me not to evade. I do tend to have tall hair. Last semester I caught one of my students doodling a picture of my head in his notebook and seeing how he chose to depict my hair was revealing. It wasn't quite a caricature, though. It was real. Just not something you'd ever see in the mirror or a photograph. Hello there, I thought when looking at the picture, I should get a haircut or just keep going.

Finally, think of everything as a zero-sum game. One of the more powerful tools that helps to keep things light and fun is the belief that your light and fun life openly saps the possibility of lightness and fun from other people’s lives. If you feel light and fun and you see others looking dim and dismal, then you can make the reasonable assumption that lightness and fun have happened to you. If this assumption feels unreasonable, then perhaps the light and fun has already been drained from your life by forces unknown, working against a backdrop of vague menace that propelled you toward the panicky pursuit of lightness and fun in the first place. Really it’s not so bad. I had a good weekend and maybe you did, too.

My parents’ new cat, Grady Blue, likes to hide in boxes. If you are familiar with domestic cats, this fact won’t surprise you. What may surprise you is that this morning, when I woke up at my parents’ house, the power was out. More surprising still is that at some point later, my dad came downstairs and handed out small packages containing space blankets–the crinkly foil type–to me, my brother, and sister-in-law. He encouraged us to use them and stay warm. The most surprising thing of all, however, was that I then I went up to my parents’ bedroom and my mom was in bed with a space blanket already draped over her, obscuring her almost completely in tinfoil. I’m sad to be leaving these crazy people in just a couple hours when I begin my journey back to the Midwest. Both moms and cats like to hide underneath things to feel safe. The parallelism of these two pictures will stick with me forever.  

This song has shaken me so deeply over the past fourteen hours that I cannot express coherently how wonderfully perfect it is. The drum track is incredible, Lee Moses’s voice is capable of being torqued all over the fucking horn section, the horn section is screeching, and the little guitar licks are trebled all to hell. I’ll take it. I’ll take a thousand of it. Why had I not heard this before? I hope the end of 2015 is as good as it seems like it might be. I’ll be in NYC for three days starting on Sunday and then heading into the Pennsylvania wilds to see my tired, loving parents. I hope I can play this song on the car ride. I’ll leave part of my heart here in the Midwest, though, so I can pick back up where I left off.

I’d dance with you to this.

Chillin' with this killer on my lap.

I danced to this song alone and then with a friend last night. And I think I will do so again today. I turned 33 recently, too. What a strange, quick year it’s been. I want to hear this song on New Year’s Eve and welcome 2016 with a touch of sad swagger (as all years ought to be greeted).