DOG FARTS. Oh my god, the dog farts.
That is all.
ONE OF THE HAZARDS OF WORKING FROM HOME
IT SHOULD BE LIKE A HALF AN HOUR VOLUME 8 : YOU SAIL AWAY FROM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD ON THIS TRIP BABY
But you will pay…. you gonna pay tomorrow; you will pay tomorrow….
Ha! Maybe this is indicative of where I am in my life, but this song popped into my head about a week ago, and I cannot get enough of it. It is playing in the house constantly.
Today Dave woke me up to go running, which I think makes him a great guy, because when you move across the country there is a lot of fast food involved, not to mention that I have, really, two food obsessions only, Mack Mancos’ pizza (now called Manco and Manco after a bitter family feud, but for me it will always be Mack Mancos, and the bitter feud just makes it that much tastier. Delicious pizza made by questionable people… what could be better?), but that is in New Jersey, far far away, and my other food obsession is In-N-Out Burger, which happens to be never farther than five miles away at the moment. My daughter has a new friend who recently immigrated from China, and she does not have good English yet, but she knows how to say “double-double,” and she would eat there eight days a week if she could, and I’m not that far behind her, though my greed is limited to one cheeseburger, no spread, ketchup and mustard, raw onion, extra pickles. Man am I hungry! So, suffice it to say I was glad Dave woke me up to go running. But, I had trouble really waking up, and I lay on my side looking at him, eyes fluttering open and closed, and I thought, “preview to dying, here you go, it’ll be just like this, fluttering in and out until you flutter out. It won’t be so bad.” Ha! I’m not a dark person. Of course, Dave could always go first, in which case I’d be lonely, and I’d have to buy a Roomba.
“No! Save me, save me from tomorrow. I don’t want to sail with this ship of fools, no no.”
The singer, Karl Wallinger, also wrote the song, and the lyrics are just amazing, IMHO.
“Avarice and greed, gonna drive you over the endless sea.” What drives us all, except the desire to live better than we are currently living? And it keeps us going and going in an endless march of carrot and stick. If you’re not marching your either rich enough to stop, or you’ve given up.
Last night was my second night tutoring online for a new company, and it was a cluster fuck of experiences, beginning when the platform wouldn’t load and I literally had to delete it from my computer and re-download and install. Technology could not work if we weren’t all way more tech savvy than we give ourselves credit for; we’re all tech support now. But that’s Vanilla Sky, and we’re on World Party, not Paul McCartney. Every time I finished feverishly typing with one student a pop-up would appear advising me that there was another student and I had 14 seconds to prove I was there and accept the student. I imagine being the person on the other end of any chat service is like that, like when you chat with Amazon people, and I have a lot more empathy for them. I plan to be a lot less demanding in the future, which I think Karl Wallinger would probably be down with. It’s a rat race, driving me over the endless sea on a ship of fools I don’t want to be fucking sailing with. Karl, save me from tomorrow. I keep telling myself it’s only temporary, and I don’t have to show up if I don’t want to. But I’m gonna do it, “Drawn by the promise of the joker and the fool, by the light of the crosses that burned… you will pay tomorrow”
“Oh oh oh oh
Save me
Save me from tomorrow”
Which of us hasn’t had that sentiment?
“I don’t want to sail with this ship of fools”
It helps that Karl sounds like Mick Jagger on this track, and I love the way he smiles through the whole video like he’s having a great time prophesying my doom. And my doom is so damn catchy! This is an easy one to get stuck in your head over and over, but I don’t mind it being an ear worm, not at all. I can hear it in the shower, I can hum it to myself in the dark night, I can sing it while I pour the morning into the cup, dark, sugary, enticing me to keep rolling on the ship of fools.
Trust me on this one… get on board.
FAREWELL QUEEN ELIZABETH
Above is one of the many photos of the young Queen Elizabeth.
Below is a photo of my Aunt Sara, probably when she was a bit older than the above photo of the Queen, but it’s the only one I could find of her easily (without groping through shoeboxes full of photos).
In my family we always felt like they could have been sisters. And both were, I believe, very dutiful and correct ladies in their lives.
It’s most certainly the end of an era, and I feel that these two women, both gone now, would have had much in common and been good friends, had they ever had the opportunity to meet.
My Aunt Sara was, I think, a sensitive creative person who was married to the wrong man, a man who was extra intelligent, and extra devoted to rules and duty, and not very loving to a creative and soft-hearted woman who did not manage to remain that way during their marriage.
My aunt was a gifted water-color painter, and sewer. She could make complicated clothing like lined suit jackets and silk scarves with rolled edges.
My aunt once told me that, in the year or so before Marilyn Monroe passed away, she had often thought of inviting her to dinner, because she looked, in the news, to be sad, and tired, and she thought she could use a place to take a break from her life. When Marilyn passed away, my aunt was sad but not surprised, she’d said. I tell this story because I always felt it was perceptive of my aunt, to clue into another woman’s pain, and I think it would have been lovely if that dinner offer had been sent and accepted.
In many ways, the Queen, because she had wealth and privilege, probably had an easy life, and in other ways, for those same reasons, it was probably hard.
My aunt was married to an incredibly smart, respected, and talented doctor, who was also very critical of her and unkind. My aunt had a lot of money, children who had little to nothing to do with her, a lot of time alone on her hands, and a sensitive artist side that was largely unfulfilled. She was, I believe, also deeply in love with the wrong man.
Prince Philip seems to have been a strong and controlling person, dominant, and I wonder, had Elizabeth not become queen, with all eyes upon them, if he would have been loving, kind, and faithful for life. My uncle certainly took pride in being faithful, but it was like it was a chore he shouldered with little complaint, when in fact he complained a lot, and often, and embarrassingly publicly. Many times my aunt spoke in front of me of how she wanted to leave him, but she was, I think, too in love to ever go.
Queen Elizabeth had her problems and missteps like all of us, but she was who she was, it seems to me, unfailingly, when I am certain there were times she would have liked to have been different than what was expected of her. I think she did a lot to bolster morale and, in general, help her beloved country through the challenges all developed nations have. In any case, she seems to have done more than a good job at it, and I hope she’s enjoying a cocktail now with her beloved spouse, and all their former corgis.
And I think it would be more than lovely if she could, now, in the beyond places whatever and wherever they are, get to meet her doppelgänger, my aunt, Sara.
IT SHOULD BE LIKE A HALF AN HOUR VOLUME 7
“Grumpy Old Man” (by Remi Wolf).
Remi Wolf, you delightful youngster, I wish you lived next door to me.
I hope, if you read this post, you will take a listen to her song, and even try a few more by her.
This starts out with a little funk thing going on, bass guitar and maybe some upright bass too? What do I know? It sounds like it. When I hear that, I immediately want to get up and start moving.
Then you get these odd little bells dropping in at the end of a section, like someone’s rung the doorbell, or like the bell before an announcement in a 1960s department store, “Ladies shoes on special this week in our shoe department, floor three.”
“Bo Diddly buy baby a diamond ring, do do do, dodo dodo” wild little flourish there that seems to have nothing to do with the theme of the song lyrics except in the general “don’t take my stuff” vibe at the end.
And the video. Weird, Delightful. Odd. Funny. It looks like she made the video with her cousin Jeffrey and her neighbor Mr. Mackinaw. She definitely thrifted her awkward blue raincoat and her Devo energy dome hat from the 1970s, and she’s wearing a pair of glasses you could have taken off of Rhoda’s face.
I first heard Miss Remi on NPR.
Okay, let’s pause here and thank His Noodly Wonderfulness for NPR. Are you listening to NPR? OMGosh, I could write a whole thing about that. It’s the best, especially if you’re a poor adjunct and you have to commute to hell-and-gone to make a few bucks.
Anywho, I first heard Miss Remi on NPR, as well of a host of other music I just love, and will give a shout-out to Lily Allen, who was also brought to me by NPR. And I don’t think that Lily and Remi are anything alike, but they are both fresh crisp singers with a sense of humor, which I love, since I, myself, me, am also hysterical. I am. Come hang-out and see. And how do I know that both of these ladies are on fleek? Sophie likes them both too, and she doesn’t like anything musically that I like. No jazz, no Amy Winehouse, no Beatles, no Stones, no Split Ends. But, she does love Cake and Weezer… so go figure. Because they’re hysterical too, maybe, like her mom. 😉
I heard this song, by Remi Wolf, when I was driving, and when I got home I immediately started asking my Alexa to play it. Then I looked up the video, and I was hooked, and I started doing her “pull the horn on the big truck” dance around the kitchen. I even kinda want that awkward blue coat.
I’m in my 50s, so, to Remi Wolf, sadly, I’m definitely an old lady, and probably not her desired fan base, but I love this woman. And I love, from what I can see from when I became aware of things that were “cool” in the 70s, to now, how society has really shifted, at least in terms of musicians and people we like on YouTube videos, influencers, whatever, to allow for so much more diversity. Wikipedia says that Wolf is bisexual, Russian, Persian, and Italian, so that’s a little diverse, and she’s not some “perfect doll” looking singer either. She’s funky and fun, and creative with her persona and her look. I just moved back to Los Angeles so that my daughter could go to this relatively new arts charter school, which is in collaboration with the public school in the area, and is awesome, and I see, there, though the principals of the combined schools still wear business formal, that the kids are really free, so free, and so imaginative, and so creative, and so accepting of each other’s weirdness, or lack of weirdness. My daughter gravitates toward funny people, as she would, having been raised by a mom who’s hysterical, but aside from that, she really doesn’t care, and everyone (only about 1/3 of the kids have opted-in to the art part of the school) is cool with each other. Anyone can eat lunch with anyone. My daughter hangs with all girls at the moment, opposite from elementary school when she hung with mostly boys, but some of them speak barely any English, some are of mixed heritage, some are probably not straight, but they may be too young to know, some are fancy dressers, some are punks, my daughter is a hoodies and sweats person currently (which is amusing because the little girl who hung with the boys was 100% dresses and glitter), some of the kids have hair color from the Crayola box, others have perfectly boring hair. If one of them hopped up from the lunch table and started doing a Remi Wolf sort of thing, I believe the rest of them would be delighted, and the more outgoing would join in and the more ingoing would enjoy the show. There is this freedom, with many school-age kids, that I don’t think we had when I was a kid, though I certainly had more than my parents had. My brother was 9 years older than me, and I am 8 years older than my sister, so a pretty big span, and I am going to say the acceptance for weirdness did not progress during that time. I was fairly openly weird t school, and my classmates thought I was fairly weird. It wasn’t a “that’s just her vibe; she’s okay” kinda thing. I’d even venture to say the 90s got more buckled down, and that may have stretched over the aughts too. But now things are loosening up.
And, in my view, Remi Wolf is a perfect example of the feeling I feel out here among the kids my daughter hangs with now. Everything is flowing, and free-to-be-you-and-me in a way Marlo Thomas could never have imagined. I know it’s not like that everywhere; it certainly wasn’t like that in Milton; those parents seemed to want their kids to be happy, as long as they weren’t too happy, and as long as that didn’t involve any tastes or interests different than family had always had. And you gotta love sports. Sports. And it seemed to come with a threat of losing your family if you were not in-step. Out here the kids I’ve met seem to flow, like seaweed in the Sargasso Sea, and their parents are there as home base, but not to make the rules. It’s cool. It reminds me of everything I feel in this song, free flow, but okay to be odd, have silly fears, wear clothing that is an awkward shade of blue and a ridiculous hat, and just go, feel the sun, feel the beat, feel the joy of being who and what you are. And the sports kids hang with the band kids who hang with the no-extra-stuff kids who hang with the autistic kid who flutters from group to group hugging everyone and no one minds or says, “This ain’t your group.”
So, yeah, I could hear this song all day. And, looking up Remi for this piece, I see it may have been used in a macaroni and cheese ad, and why not? Macaroni and cheese is delicious.
Remi Wolf is delicious. Rock-on Woman! I adore you.
