#coconuttygrey

Certainly not ME.  Unless it’s really bad chocolate.

Solomon scrapes the garbage surrounding him closer, for warmth.

“You are assuming the two are mutually exclusive,” he says, before setting the trash pile on actual fire.

Writing prompt; Thane.

I remember being eight years old, watching coyote and roadrunner cartoons on Saturday morning with my mom.

I would be on the floor, leaned against her, with a bowl of cereal in my lap.  She would lie behind me, usually gnawing on something, stopping occasionally to lick me on the neck or behind the ear.  When I was done I would give her the bowl of sweet milk and she’d drink it.  Loudly.  While I laughed.  It would get on her face, white milk in her black fur.  She’d pin me down and we would play for a while.  She’d drag me around on the kitchen floor or let me climb on her back.  Clinging to her thick black fur.

I remember other times too.  Having bad days like kids do.  Nothing serious.  Maybe someone made fun of me, maybe a teacher was mean.  Kid things.  And she would lie with me and i would listen to stories on tape and burrow into her fur.  She would kiss and kiss me patiently, and I would run my hands through her ruff, through the soft fur behind her ears.  Feel her massive jaw muscles, her thick neck.

And I would ask if I really would be like her someday.  Not just the wolf thing, I mean, that’s what I was asking about but what I really wanted to know is if I’d be strong and not afraid of anything.  Somebody no-one disrespected, ever.

Sebastian says:

I respect geese but don’t really want them in my town.  It’s not much of a thing anymore, but when I grew up geese were food.  And I’m pretty sure that any sort of supernatural goose prince would probably be able to tell I’ve eaten geese just from looking at me.  I’d wind up on its bad side, there’d be chaos in the streets, half the town would burn down.  

Again.

Not to mention that, while guests in our fair town like ducks (and we have a roving flock to satisfy all their duckish needs), they don’t like geese.  Geese are intimidating, especially to pets and children.  So geese are bad for tourism.  Giving the geese a monarchy wouldn’t help.

Sebastian says:

Not many people would argue with rain and how soothing the sound is.  It’s offset, though, by how inconvenient rain is.  Walking in it is unpleasant and dreary.  Contractors can’t work in the rain, and I almost always have some renovation/restoration project underway somewhere in town.  It makes all the access tunnels that run under downtown dank and clammy and there are a couple of areas that flood on a regular basis that I’ve yet to get pumps into, due to not owning or never having owned the buildings just above.  So rain is probably the prettiest sound, and it’s certainly beautiful aboveground on the streets of downtown or in my garden, but for me it’s associated with annoyance.

No, the nicest sound is the rumble inside of a train car.  Used to take the train from Chicago to Boston on a regular basis and it was wonderful, especially in the fall.  The gentle rocking, the heartbeat-like bumping, the heavy sound of the wheels on the steel rails, it’s a wonderful way to travel.  There’s always been something magical about railroads, the insides of trains, the energy of the stations, to me.  They are very alive.

A few minutes outside of town there’s still a small late ‘90s engine with several restored cars that runs on an isolated stretch of historical rail, and a couple of times a year I’ll take a turn on it.  Mostly in the spring when the locust trees are all blooming, or in fall when the leaves are all golden.

Sebastian says:

You live a while, you acquire a lot of hobbies.

Most modern and perhaps most ridiculous: I adapt favorite musical pieces for the piano.

Sometimes this means a piano adaptation of the score from The Last of the Mohicans.  Sometimes it’s me spending two hours hammering away at the Pacific Rim main theme just for fun.  And sometimes it’s me tweaking a friend’s tail by adapting their favorite pop song into or out of a minor key.

Music exists to be experienced, to be engaged, changed, adapted, played.  That means played with.  People perceive music as this thing with inherent integrity, a thing that should not be changed, a thing that it is possible to perform perfectly, to refine completely, a thing that can be diminished or destroyed through adaptation or alteration.

It’s very gratifying to flick that notion in the eyeball every once in a while, roll out the barrelhouse piano and see how long it takes your audience to realize you’re batting around a Taylor Swift song.  Nothing destroys the joy of music like the search for perfection.  Nothing is less organic and fulfilling.

I would rather wildly screw up an attempt to cover Nicki Minaj - Starships than play Für Elise perfectly yet again.

You can perform or you can play.  I’m only here for the latter.