Every Pile is Atomic

Never mind metals, this is an atomic pile, capable of splitting into fragments that release hundreds of millions of energy volts:

The tallest one in the back row would be Max.

A sweeter pile since taking it all at this past long, hot weekend's soccer tournament (yes, for this is why the Suburban Soliloquist packed--whilst sipping a glass of white with KW). Their energy, though nearly exhausted at the final, earned them the championship. And it was, overall, you might say, I high voltage weekend.

This is another atomic pile:

An atom-smashing force. But in case you are not familiar with the muse, a secret: she is one combustible chain reaction of I-don't-know-whats mingled with when-to-expects?, and often the encounters are altogether foreign, alien (except in controlled environments having limited variables and distinct parameters--or is it perimeters?). Nevertheless, she's highly efficient.

It could be said that most teams, most relationships, no matter the sort, are atomic piles if carefully built and efficient in the maintenance, control and expenditure of energy.

Spent is how the Suburban Soliloquist felt upon returning from the dramatic collection and subsequent fission of boys in colorful uniforms skirring across the turf fields of central Connecticut. Which is why she appears here, today, with little news other than that of piles. Laundry, dishes, bills, emails, appointments, etc., all of which are slowly being dismantled or dispersed, or, um, better yet, delegated.

And here—not to be outdone by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, atomic piles expert extraordinaire—is John Hodgman, the marshmallow wrapped in hugs (aha, that's an atomic pile), sharing some universal truths.

On atomic piles and alien encounters...
(It's well worth the eighteen minutes of energy you are about to expend.)

Make of that what you will, but take note of alien encounters and piling atoms about you.

"Friday Night Frolic" — Pretty Little Lamb(chop)

Look, with an album named Mr. M, cryptic lyrics hidden therein, boys slinking about their own island, scratching and whispering, mocking emotion, well, it seems this evening calls for the proper attire—though, the Suburban Soliloquist is having difficulty locating her black Ray-Bans. (Maybe that's because she doesn't own black Ray-Bans.)

But she's got the T-shirt and she's guessing the geeky Kurt Wagner wouldn't mind her slipping it on. Not at all. Especially if she were pouring him a glass of white. Which she is. He will arrive, Wagner, yes, this very night (tell her traveling hubby and she will deny it), but she can't tell you when or how, or else...

And because the Suburban Soliloquist is in the midst of packing (of which she can't, or won't?, again elaborate), and feels at this moment that she can say it no better, she will permit the Village Voice—which does not hide, scratch or whisper—to speak for her. But first, she'll tell you this: Lambchop is a band. True. Lambchop is  also a...

...vanishingly rare band allowed to exist over several geologic eras of pop-culture time, pursuing a singular, demented muse. Lambchop is an island, removed from the squalor of everyday world, so terrifically inscrutable that you even start looking for significance in their name: not pork chop, but lamb chop. Surely that must mean something. 

Mr. M is, at once, one of the band’s most open-hearted and acidic records. It opens with a flourish of strings that invoke memories of Frank Sinatra’s great, gloomy indigo-jazz records with string arranger Nelson Riddle. The clothes are old ones, slightly threadbare, and they are ones Lambchop have a winking relationship with, dating back at least to 2001′sNixon. You can smell the used-record-sleeve on them. And so, apparently, can Wagner, something he’s quick to draw your attention to. When he enters the song, he appears to be both commenting ironically on its motion and somehow directing its action: “Grandpa’s coughing in the kitchen/ But the strings sound good/ Maybe add some flutes/ And how do get the cups out from over there?”

  Lambchop - If Not I'll Just Die by MergeRecords

*   *   * 

And now, she's pouring him that glass of white...

  Lambchop - Gone Tomorrow by City Slang

The wine tasted like sunshine in the basement.  (For some peculiar reason, this little nugget nudges the Suburban Soliloquist to reach for her 1960s flashcards.)

What were they doing in the basement? Hmm...

Wagner, and his pretty, pretty Lambchop. How they do it they'll never tell.


Listen to more Lambchop here. Lambchop visits Jimmy Fallon, late night, tonight.

(To be honest, er, um, the Suburban Soliloquist has no secret information, she's not even sure who wrote this post.)

(But, the wine did taste like sunshine in the basement.)

On Nudging and Scrapping the Superfluous

Speaking of lost baubles, this is the the fate to which one pearl could have been called: A sweeping Dyson-on-steroids; which may be, in fact, the fate of many a bibelot. I wonder what trifles fall from its colossal canister at the end of the day. Rings, bracelets, wallets, cuff links, homework instructions, sling-shots, super balls, mouth guards, coins, keys, whistles and perhaps, even, a phone or two.

I think it's the time of year.

I am being nudged.

Springtime, it seems, not only summons our inherent need to clean house, to rid ourselves of overflow and redundancy, to make everything sparkle anew, but also rouses a more nuanced, or unconscious, impulse to shed layers of constraint, free ourselves of ties and responsibility. Scrap the superfluous.

Like cell phones.

What I'm hoping won't trend: Left atop his fathers car, Max's cell phone was lost to a zephyr. (Or was it to absentmindedness?) Though, to his credit, he'd trained his phone to be as blithe as he—refusing to part with its view from the rooftop, the LG Cosmos succumbed to great forces only after its mile-long joy ride down the highway.

If I could only say with more certainty what happened to mine. I know only that this past Sunday, while out with Lulu, miPhone was lost somewhere between the myrtle fields bordering the pebbly coastline of southern Rhode Island and the high tension tar-carpeted strip of commerce somewhere in the middle of the state, an area of which I have little familiarity. A frenzied hour of backtracking, mad dashes through mall stores, phone calls to coffee and dress shops, proved futile. (I blame this unusual circumstance on a poor night's sleep and a too early lacrosse game.)

So...

... unlike my pearl experience...

...turns out this family is not good at hunting down phones.

I am being nudged.

The same Sunday, along the same tar-carpeted strip somewhere in the middle of the state, a well-trained and darling girl at the Verizon store took me for a dizzying walk through my options. I don't remember how we arrived from one place to the other, but when we finally came to a pause by the hardware, the girl, having placed a series of phones across the counter, waited for my response. And all I could think, my mind a pasty white of garbled thought—my schedule, my contacts, my music, my photos, my flashlight, my whole life, everything, encrypted into this vanished phone—all I could think was: What did the fortune say? It had been sitting on the windowsill above the kitchen sink for the past week. What did it say? When the moment comes, take the last one from the left. I had pondered this ordinance all week. Scrubbing pots, loading, unloading the dishwasher... take the last one from the left.

How does one know when the moment comes that it's the right moment? What does the last one from the left mean? Does it mean not the last one on the left, but the one to the right of the last one on the left? (This is why I hadn't aspired to Let's Make a Deal stardom.)

Well? the girl nudged me.

I took the pricier one on the left. It came with a personal assistant known as Siri, and I thought, at this juncture, it would be wise to keep a PA in my pocket. Lu and I left the store, returned to the parking lot along the tar-carpeted strip somewhere in the middle of the state, and having no GPS but a new PA, we consulted with the well-paid Siri before backing out onto the road. Lu, asking: Siri, how do we get home from here?

And Siri, in her monotone chest voice, answering: I don't know where your home is. In fact, I don't know anything about you.

(I think, maybe, I misinterpreted take the last one from the left.)

This week, Siri and I are getting acquainted. I'm learning about iClouds and syncing and the gravity of a little sham known as phone insurance. The thing to which we must all submit, for if we fail to do so, if Siri—my bibelot—is sucked into a black hole by the vacuous crazed brush of a Dyson-on-steriods, and she is entirely uninsured, her replacement cost will be more than three times as much as her retail cost.

What happened to the days of plain paper maps?

And wood-framed, phone-cradling, glass boxes on the side of the road?

I am being nudged...

Perhaps what I should do is leave the last one from the left.

*   *   *

This week, and last, I've been nudged into a series of events that are keeping me from communicating with many of you. My map's in hand, though, I'm navigating through the snarl, and will hopefully find a return to the normal (?) within the next week.

Thanks to the sharp-eyed Rubye of Rubye Jack, and to David, one of my favorite Brits in the USA, for gifting to me the Kreativ Blogger Award. I've affixed it, with much appreciation, to the sidebar. :)

Friday Night Frolic — Enumerating Story

[Source]

1.  To begin: Flaws. One of my many, is that I've never been able to calculate. Calculus, trigonometry, even algebra, simple logarithmic functions, escape me. In high school, Geometry was the only category of mathematics that I was somewhat able to grasp. That's because it included doodling. (Well, didn't it?) I've often wondered if this failing was solely because I could not understand mathematical relations or if I simply refused to try, refused to to understand. Or. Refused to accept that anything could be answered with such certainty. One plus one, yes, two. But even that simple equation never seemed so simple to me. And this suspicion was confirmed after my second child was born, when in the haze of endless nights punctuated by frightening infant caterwauls and toddler walkabouts it became clear that the idea of one plus one equalling two was nothing more than an algorithmic farce.

I wonder if my inability to calculate bears any connection to a cognitive deficit known as dyscalculia, which Wiki describes as an "innate difficulty in learning or comprehending arithmetic." The reason, though, is more likely disinterest. In any event, I've no compulsion to further explore what I've accepted as a lifelong inadequacy and limitation. I surrender all calculations to the accountants. After all, not everyone can be a mathematician.

2.  Some of us have to write.

3.  Some of us have to tell stories.

4.  And some of us, well, all of us, should listen...

5.  To this...

A short short film that I came across the other day while visiting one of my favorite magical depositories on the internet, Brain Pickings. Brain Pickings is, in the words its remarkable curator, Maria Popova, "a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are." 

Ken Burns, on story:



Stories as acceptable and sincere manipulation. Waking the dead. Building emotional truth. Keeping wolves from the door. Continuing ourselves. Reminding us that it's just Ok.

At about 4:20 Burns illustrates the how and why in which he conveys story. It's a powerful and vulnerable moment that offers us insight into to his success. Moreover, he shares my suspicion that one plus one does not always equal two.

6.  (Now, there's something called story algorithm, but I don't want to go there just yet.)

7. As a sort of book club experiment, I've been reading Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes along with Lu who is currently reading the book for her English class. Other than Zen in the Art of Writing, it had been a long time since I'd read Bradbury, since I'd read Something Wicked, and as I flip the pages of his book, I'm reminded of why I adored his stories as a young girl. The grand collector of metaphors set out to have a helluva lot of fun. He stuffed his head with anything he could from every imaginable field. He went to carnivals and cinemas and read comic books and nearly everything else he could collect from the library—short stories, essays and poetry. Only the greats, nothing modern. He likes to say that he practically lived in the library.

The world in which Bradbury lived as a child is very much alive in his works, and it's hard for me to believe that a man who extols the virtues of writing only for the pure joy and fun of writing ever had a moment in which he feared he'd waste time writing something that might not be very good. Even so, by the age of thirty he had his first novel published. And what followed was awfully good.

At the library, from Something Wicked:

Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast, marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mangolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes. Way down the third book corridor, and oldish man whispered his broom along in the dark, mounding the fallen spices...

Something Wicked has instantly transported me back to the world of Will and Jim, and Mr. Dark and the salesman toting the curious lightening rod—back to the eclipse of morning's first hours when a flashlight under the bed covers lit fantastical words ablaze. It's been difficult to fight the temptation to read ahead of Lu and her class, but I'm holding back, filling my time with other stories, considering what and how I will write, collecting ideas, piecing words together in such a way, reminding myself that it's just Ok. These are the kinds of calculations I can do in my head. And it's a helluva lot a fun.

*  *  *
8.

Dead Combo is the ten year old band of friends Tó Trips and Pedro Gonçalves, of Portugal. They began their partnership after they recorded together, for the first time, a contribution to the tribute album to the late Portuguese guitarist, Carlos Paredes.

Together, Trips and Gonçalves have created their own story as well as their own incarnate personae whom they describe as "characters that could have come from a dark comic book: a caretaker and a gangster." They have recorded together, as well as with the Royal Orquestra das Caveiras (Royal Skulls Orchestra), with whom they released a live DVD in 2010. 

Story can be told many ways. You can find more of Dead Combo's story music here.

Chasing Pearls

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

~Frederico Fellini

Tiniest of tiny pearls found in a Chesapeake Bay oyster.

More than a half century ago, Father, while in Japan, where he'd been on leave at the close of the Korean War, bought Mother a lustrous, round, classical pearl, perhaps a half inch in diameter—set in a simple four pronged gold ring—which he took home to Mother after completing two years of overseas service.

As a young girl, I was in love with the pearl. It was perfect. It was what I called Grace-Kelly-pearl-perfect. Elegant and royal. What kept me entranced, though, was that the shimmery, cream-tinged pearl was loosely caged by its prongs so that I could gently flick it with my finger and watch it shake in its crown. My magnanimous mother let me wear it on occasion, and I wore it often enough that it became, unofficially, a part of my jewelry collection which, at that time, was comprised entirely of cheap mixed metals, glass, rope and plastic.

On a pretty autumn day after school let out, against my parents wishes, and with pearl ring slipped on finger, I went for a ride on a motorcycle with my then boyfriend. The sun, brilliant, the afternoon, T-shirt-warm and breezy—a perfect day for an Easy Rider freedom spin. We rumbled down the street, circled around the block, and as we reached the midway point back to the old colonial a crazed white dog lunged at the bike, bringing us down against a curb.  Then boyfriend was uninjured, as I recall, but my left hand was mangled and bloody. I still have the scars, literally, to prove it.

Back at home, where Mother tended to my wounds, I noticed that the gold ring's pearl had got loose entirely. So, of course, did Mother. Long lectures and the gallows ensued. Father came home and immediately went out in search of the pearl, which, he anticipated, had either been confiscated or lost to the storm drains.

But he found it. Without a blemish, beneath leaves and gravel in the gutter.

Along the Chesapeake Bay last month, Hubby uncovered a tiny, luminous pearl, smaller than the size of the sugar pearls that adorn wedding cakes, in an oyster he was about to consume. We wrapped the pearl in paper towel scrap and brought it home where it was deposited into a small, lopsided, three-footed clay vessel made by Max—in his elementary school days.

This morning, during the little pearl's outdoor photo shoot, I inadvertently knocked the pearl from the black-velvet-swathed teak table on which it sat. Rolling beneath the table and along the deck flooring, it quickly found its escape between the narrow spacing of the decking boards, falling one story to the muddy, mossy, pebble-covered ground below.

Lost.

Thirty minutes later I had done the impossible: rooted it out.

It turns out, my family is good at hunting down pearls.

The pearl—calcium carbonate-layered grime, slipped between the oyster's mantle and shell—so it is said, has powers such as love, protection and good fortune. It symbolizes purity, wisdom and spiritual transformation. It represents triumph over adversity through transcendence. I'm not sure about that. In my experience, it seems the pearl has been a source of stress. (Or could it be my mishandling of the pearl?) An iridescent souvenir that fights captivity!

Then again, it appears to be more: a reminder to handle with care and consideration those things precious. What can be maimed and scarred when neglected. What we hold close to the mantle.  Our gems. Flesh or stone.

Chasing Pearls

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

~Frederico Fellini

Tiniest of tiny pearls found in a Chesapeake Bay oyster.

More than a half century ago, Father, while in Japan, where he'd been on leave at the close of the Korean War, bought Mother a lustrous, round, classical pearl, perhaps a half inch in diameter—set in a simple four pronged gold ring—which he took home to Mother after completing two years of overseas service.

As a young girl, I was in love with the pearl. It was perfect. It was what I called Grace-Kelly-pearl-perfect. Elegant and royal. What kept me entranced, though, was that the shimmery, cream-tinged pearl was loosely caged by its prongs so that I could gently flick it with my finger and watch it shake in its crown. My magnanimous mother let me wear it on occasion, and I wore it often enough that it became, unofficially, a part of my jewelry collection which, at that time, was comprised entirely of cheap mixed metals, glass, rope and plastic.

On a pretty autumn day after school let out, against my parents wishes, and with pearl ring slipped on finger, I went for a ride on a motorcycle with my then boyfriend. The sun, brilliant, the afternoon, T-shirt-warm and breezy—a perfect day for an Easy Rider freedom spin. We rumbled down the street, circled around the block, and as we reached the midway point back to the old colonial a crazed white dog lunged at the bike, bringing us down against a curb.  Then boyfriend was uninjured, as I recall, but my left hand was mangled and bloody. I still have the scars, literally, to prove it.

Back at home, where Mother tended to my wounds, I noticed that the gold ring's pearl had got loose entirely. So, of course, did Mother. Long lectures and the gallows ensued. Father came home and immediately went out in search of the pearl, which, he anticipated, had either been confiscated or lost to the storm drains.

But he found it. Without a blemish, beneath leaves and gravel in the gutter.

Along the Chesapeake Bay last month, Hubby uncovered a tiny, luminous pearl, smaller than the size of the sugar pearls that adorn wedding cakes, in an oyster he was about to consume. We wrapped the pearl in paper towel scrap and brought it home where it was deposited into a small, lopsided, three-footed clay vessel made by Max—in his elementary school days.

This morning, during the little pearl's outdoor photo shoot, I inadvertently knocked the pearl from the black-velvet-swathed teak table on which it sat. Rolling beneath the table and along the deck flooring, it quickly found its escape between the narrow spacing of the decking boards, falling one story to the muddy, mossy, pebble-covered ground below.

Lost.

Thirty minutes later I had done the impossible: rooted it out.

It turns out, my family is good at hunting down pearls.

The pearl—calcium carbonate-layered grime, slipped between the oyster's mantle and shell—so it is said, has powers such as love, protection and good fortune. It symbolizes purity, wisdom and spiritual transformation. It represents triumph over adversity through transcendence. I'm not sure about that. In my experience, it seems the pearl has been a source of stress. (Or could it be my mishandling of the pearl?) An iridescent souvenir that fights captivity!

Then again, it appears to be more: a reminder to handle with care and consideration those things precious. What can be maimed and scarred when neglected. What we hold close to the mantle.  Our gems. Flesh or stone.

We the People — A Departure

Perverted law causes conflict.

~Frédéric Bastiat

[Much thanks to the The Valley Breeze for publishing this essay on May 9, 2012. The Valley Breeze is a northern Rhode Island newspaper servicing eleven towns, distributing 62,500 community newspapers in 5 distinct, weekly local editions. Minor edits made in this version do not modify content as it was published in TVB.] 

*   *   *

A story unfolds in the city of Woonsocket, RI, a city on the brink of bankruptcy, a story that is as much about the body politic as it is about religious beliefs, the Constitution of the United States of America, freedoms granted under such Constitution, and forces that endeavor to ensure those freedoms.

A story, too, about a just, rational and moral society, and a small parcel of real estate in Woonsocket which, for the most part, has gone unnoticed by its residents, save for a group of firefighters, and bloodlines of those for whom it was erected. The real estate: a corroding concrete monument topped with a white cross. Constructed in 1921 by a family honoring their beloved William Jolicoeur—a Christian, a WWI soldier, and one of the 53,000 plus members of the American Expeditionary Forces that were killed upon Europe's battlefields—the once nearly forgotten monument is now garnering national attention, and as such, is about to be improved, at no cost other than time, muscle ache and sweat, by those people who believe in a just, rational and moral society, and the preservation of such society, as fractured as it may be.

What has become a heated dispute on the streets and in the papers raises a simple question: Can a plain white cross on a ninety-one year old war monument in a forsaken parking lot in Woonsocket, RI survive the political left, atheistic scrutiny of those it offends?

Deep beneath the surface of this story lies another story, an uncomfortable truth about our just, rational and moral society, the state of our national psyche, human nature itself. But to fully understand the scope of the dispute, one must understand the history behind the monument topped with a white cross; a history that dates back to the signing of the Constitution, to the moment the monument was unveiled, to the day down-on-its-luck Woonsocket became unwittingly entangled, like many others, in a long-standing, freethinkers' crusade.

In 1921, when the monument was erected in Woonsocket on a center medium slab of Cumberland Hill Road, above the dark, thundering waters of the Blackstone River, a river of which powered the many textile mills scattered throughout the city, before the closings of those mills and long before the industrious city fell to hard times, the city thrummed with activity and commerce. It flourished with a healthy population of Catholic, French-Canadian immigrants who were drawn there, mainly, to work in the mills that lined both sides of the snaking River. For both the elite and working class people, social life centered around Woonsocket's churches; they were God-fearing, law-abiding citizens, proud of their heritage and adopted homeland.

When the cross-topped monument was rededicated in May of 1953 to three brothers from Woonsocket who lost their lives in the battles of World War II, a new plaque was placed upon the grey stone base, honoring the veterans of both wars. After the floods of 1954, Cumberland Hill Road was reconfigured, setting it back further from the river, and the unaltered monument would find itself situate still upon the medium, but in what became the northern end of the parking lot of Woonsocket's Fire Station No. 2.

Before the crumbling monument amassed national attention and two days prior to the monument's dedication by a decorated French Marshall, President Harding, in an elaborate ceremony in Washington, D.C. on November 11, 1921 (America's first Armistice Day) paid tribute to the Unknown Soldier with a poignant speech, and a symbolic, pale tomb at Arlington National Cemetery. The tomb: a white marble sarcophagus resting on the grave in which remains of unknown soldiers are buried. At the front elevation of the tomb, as the same was augmented in 1931, encased by the relief of an open laurel wreath are the words "The Unknown Soldier." Inscribed on the Tomb of the Unknowns are wreaths representing major battles of the First World War, and the words: 

HERE RESTS IN

HONORED GLORY

AN AMERICAN

SOLDIER

KNOWN BUT TO GOD

Harding's speech was no less than a beautifully crafted, emotional work of art. In it, he stated, among other things, "In the death gloom of gas, the bursting of shells and rain of bullets, men face more intimately the great God over all, their souls are aflame, and consciousness expands and hearts are searched. With the din of battle, the glow of conflict, and the supreme trial of courage, come involuntarily the hurried appraisal of life and the contemplation of death’s great mystery. On the threshold of eternity, many a soldier, I can well believe, wondered how his ebbing blood would color the stream of human life, flowing on after his sacrifice…”

Two days later, a Sunday evening, in Woonsocket, at the same monument in the center of the road—to be named that day as Place Jolicoeur (meaning "Place of Happy Hearts")—and after an extravagant parade where thousands of people stood in unbroken line across its route, mills brilliantly illuminated and whistles blowing, the French Marshall Ferdinand Foch and his party descended upon Place Jolicoeur. The band struck up France's national anthem, La Marseillaise, the crowd joined in singing, and Marshal Foch dedicated the rose and chrysanthemum embellished monument, a post at the time, as the spot that would mark a fitting tribute to the fallen soldier.

Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander of all Allied forces in the Great War, the First World War, the war that would end empires, had been beckoned to Woonsocket by its leaders. Foch was the man who led the Allied armies to victory in France's battlefields. He was to tour the nation in the fall of 1921, and his presence in Woonsocket would effectively make the monument an historic relic, regarded as a hard-set  portal to Europe's allies.    

Speak Into The Microphone

A long time ago, when this blog was in its infancy—drooling, whining, and sticking anything within reach into its mouth—I wrote a little story about a big fish. In it I described how I had once asked a Burger King employee if he knew what kind of fish was in their fish sandwich. And Hubby, bewildered, said, Who asks what kind of fish is in a Burger King fish sandwich?

Sheesh! I know, Ok, I'm odd. I just like to know what I'm eating. I would think most people like to know what they're eating. Or at least if they're going to need a bib.

Weeeeell, over at analytics the other day, scrolling down pages of interesting and curious key word searches, such as "what's my purpose" and "postcards from Disney Florida" and "puddles the u of o duck" and "ms Voodoo Valentine naked" (I can imagine the disappointment at being directed to my posts), I stumbled upon this:

Yes, that! (McDonalds/Burger King. Same thing.)

That, that query above, demonstrates the benefits of keeping a blog. Evidence clearly indicating that if you write about every little thing on your mind, doubts, worries, relationships, children, work, spring cleaning, the market's produce section, every banal thing in your life (wait, that's reserved for Facebook), especially about things for which you've been mocked, sooner or later someone, some lonely or confused or desperate soul sitting at a computer in a dimly lit room, fog settling along the horizon, stubbing out a cigarette in a stolen hotel ashtray is going to ask the great gods of the internet a question like: What kind of fish is used in a Burger King/McDonalds fish sandwich?

And the gods will answer.

What's that you say, darling?

Just a little louder please.

Speak into the microphone!

Oh, you take back what you said? About me being the only person who would ask what kind of fish is in a Burger King fish sandwich?

Ha! Thank you.

Now I can rest easy knowing that I am NORMAL. I think.

Friday Night Frolic – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Shaving

We've reached a milestone here. And isn't he a sport to have permitted his mother to capture the whole ceremonious first slice of silver across the creamy, pale skin of his face? She won't, however, post the video.

This Friday's Frolic is going to be highly abridged as the Suburban Soliloquist has been strapped to her chair all week, working on a feature article (what is that anyway?) which she may or may not post on this blog, depending upon how it all unravels. (At the moment, it is way too long for a blog post.) For some reason, as apolitical as she is, she's been inexplicably drawn to a major controversy that has cast national attention on the city in which she grew up. And it's not the fact that the city is near bankrupt.

In any event, she hasn't been on the internet much, other than for research reasons, but hopes to return early next week for a proper posting and jaunt around the blogging community.

In the meantime, a little video sent by friend-of-the-shut-in:

For more information on the talented harpist Frédéric Yonnet visit his website, or listen to his interview over at NPR.

Have a beautiful weekend. Maybe the sun will come out tomorrow?

(Is that really her baby?)

Art by Max