Success!
Gem attempts to snatch treat from the air; fails.*
*That’s it in front of her chin.
Comic Sans: because someone in charge of signage at the local Jewel-Osco looked at the single-serve wine bin and said “This is a fucking depressing corner of the universe to be sure, but can we make it soul-crushingly depressing?”
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“County Line,” Cass McCombs
Steady killing me today, this song.
High Windows
by Philip Larkin
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Dirty Beaches, “True Blue”
Perhaps you, like me, have slept on Dirty Beaches owing to the first part of their name, thinking that Dave Longstreth & co. should rightfully have some kind of lockdown on that particular adjective. OR, perhaps, like me, you have also fixated on the second part of their name, thinking “beaches” signified some more low-fi glo-core shiz. Well I (we) have been wrong! Dirty Beaches are some kind of genius David Lynch prom music scenario, and then something sinister happens, maybe at a racetrack, or a hotel, and the ghost of Elvis as played by Suicide’s Alan Vega haunts your ass, and it’s all great.
Zero score and thirteen nights ago, having grown weary of the process of balding in slow motion, I took up arms against my scalp with a safety razor and accelerated things along. Having had two weeks to live with my newly shorn self, I’m still not sure what to make of it (him). In the main, I’m happy my head is a reasonably ovoid and normal shape. In the main, I’m cold a lot. (It’s no joke about heat escaping from your dome.) In the main, I’m still sneaking up on myself in mirrors, surprised at what I find there.
P.S. Someday I’ll learn to have my picture taken without pulling “serious face.”
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“Slow Education,” The Silver Jews
Oh oh ohhhhh, I’m lightning
Oh oh ohhhhh, I’m rain
If there were one word I could convincingly wield with devastating and unquestionable authority, it would have to be…
…shitbird. “Move, shitbirds!” Man, imagine how those no-goodniks would scram.
