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. :)

Accepting the Challenge

Never try to arrange things. Objects and poems are irreconcilable. 

~ Francis Ponge

It is the last day of winter, the young, well-dressed neurologist says, looking up from the folder.

Mmm, yes it is, though it wasn't much of a winter, she replies mournfully. In any event, you'll be happy to know that your magnesium/B2 cocktail has taken the edge off the migraines. I haven't spent a full day in bed, dodging light, for two months now.

He's pleased by this news, though not surprised. His patients find relief. This, he knows. He seems to know a lot for his young years. Though she wonders if he, who’s never felt a migraine’s crippling blows—the rapid-fire constriction of nerves and vessels (in her case a three or four-day, often monthly, basal ganglia guerilla warfare, in which she is the only casualty, shut-off, shut down, from family, words, writing, lifeblood)—could ever truly empathize. Nevertheless, what he certainly cannot know is that in less than two hours she'll be sitting in a greyed and splintered teak chair by the table on her deck, in her skinny jeans and black cardigan, kicking off her black flats, unwinding the scarf from around her neck, lunching on last night's leftovers of salad and grilled salmon, debating the tense and POV in which to write this piece, and staring down a pretty, yellow daffodil plant that Mother brought to dinner the previous night. (She had thought to begin with: Mother brought daffodils to dinner last night.) He is confident, but cannot know this. She did not know that the day would progress as such herself. She, nor he, did not know that she'd find Francis Ponge at Symposium Books downtown. Ponge, Celine, Paz, Toussaint, all at steep discount. But she knows that when she leaves, he'll be sitting in his office with his next patient, reading his or her chart, peering up from under his wire-framed glasses and saying, It is the last day of winter.

Tomorrow is the first day of spring, the doctor's receptionist, says, as she hands her her stamped parking ticket and receipt.

Mmm, yes it is, she replies. Spring is such a pretty word.

Oh, it is. Very pretty, a welcome word, the receptionist smiles.

Goodbye my anemic winter, she thinks. Outside, the world is warming. As she walks down the street to the parking garage, she thinks about the daffodils, the color yellow, not like the walls of her kitchen which are tinted the yellow of Provence--a baby mustard--but the yellow of the sun at noontime when, during days that ululate spring, she sits on her deck for lunch and watches the glinting sun center itself above the teak table, much like she'll do today.

"Accept the challenge things offer to language," Ponge says.

(Ponge, who wrote of the wasp [or bee]: A little itinerant siphon, a little distillery on wheels and wings, like the ones that go about from farm to farm through the countryside in certain seasons; a little airborne kitchen, a little public sanitation truck...  [they] carry out an intimate activity that's generally quite mysterious... What we call having an inner life.)

Where was she now? Yes, she's left downtown's brick streets and is back home. She's on the deck. Vital fluids flowing. Taking notes: they are Tête-à-Têtes, their heads gently brushing against one another, and they need beaucoup de lumière. So she sets the daffodils out on the weathered teak table for a dose of vitamin D. They are delicate, yet hardy things. Their outer petals are lemony and frosty like a Matisse star. The rippled center cup,  trumpeting spring (she can almost hear the music), is slightly darker. The tips of the rubbery, bright green stems are curved upwards in a gothic arch--like the petals--and spliced open where the flowers, in clusters of three, have burst from their casing like electrical wiring freed from insulation. Fireworks!

Her daughter is home from school, now, sitting next to her at the table, gnawing at a slice of watermelon.

Mom, don't you ever get lonely at home? she asks.

No, never. She leans her head back against the top of the chair, And it's so good not have to hide from the light any longer.

(She wonders if Ponge ever wrote about daffodils.)

The next day, it is spring. The sun shining all over again. Daffodils singing their songs and challenging.

Does not everything have an inner life?

Friday Night Frolic — Killjoy Rides the Current

Well, I have to be honest. I'm not up to tricks today. The damn migraine is back and and the double doses of magnesium and vitamin B-2 aren't worth the space--never mind the clamor--in which they digest. I should demand a damage deposit from them, but, as it is, they're never on time with the rent.

I'm hitting the hard stuff. And the lights will be out any moment now, so, please forgive my lazy self, but there's nothing novel here today. Nothing.

I'm just going to reroute you to this original piece (go ahead, click there or here) to give you a more, um, poetic sense of how I really feel.

And while I'm drifting along this turbid visceral stream of consciousness I might as well mention that nasal lavage is highly overrated, the new Facebook timeline profile gives me vertigo (do not attempt opening when stricken with cephalalgia), and, so I hear, creative writing is "therapy for the disaffected masses." Having taken many creative writing workshops I admit that I agree with Shivani's (who is this guy, anyway?) assessment of the workshop as a mild form of hazing. (Especially the grad school sort. Ouch.) Reading the greats might prove more instructive.

Aren't I a regular killjoy?

But wait, isn't all writing therapy in one form or another? How can anyone write, or read for that matter, anything without attaining even the smallest measure of growth, awareness and insight?

Seems I'm no longer drifting. No, I'm beating back the biting currents of this stream. (And once again resorting to alliteration to do so.)  I must be listening to...

*drumroll*

The great improvisors, straight from Beantown and better yet, a string band! (you forget, Berklee is also in Beantown), the incomparable, the virtuosic, the crazy-crazy talented...

Joy Kills Sorrow:
(and killer mandolin riffs)

Joy Kills Sorrow band members met through the folk music scene in Boston, all having lived there at one time or another. They are classically trained musicians who create intricate and beautiful arrangements.

Emma Beaton's take-charge melodious pipes seem to transcend vocal genre. Bluegrass, roots, rock, country, pop, blues, jazz--it seems the girl could sing it all brilliantly. In 2008, at the age of 18, Ms. Beaton won “Young Performer of the Year” at the Canadian Folk Music Awards. And JKS's latest release, This Unknown Science, is a testament to her vocal facilities. 

This young band's hybrid music illustrates their mastery of genre melding. Bassist and Brooklyn resident, Bridget Kearney, who double majored at The New England Conservatory of Music and Tufts University, wrote all of the eleven songs on This Unknown Science, and has garnered much acclaim, having won the John Lennon Songwriting contest in 2006 for two songs she penned. Guitarist Matt Arcara, banjoist Wesley Corebett, and mandolin player Jacob Jollif (a Berklee College of Music grad, highlighted--as first mandolinist--in this Berklee performance) have all been honored in the music world.  More in JKS's bio here. And lots more from YouTube here.

Stay with this heart-tug of a song until the end--it's worth it:

Oh, I believe the stream has slowed to a pleasant ripple. I think I might even take out my banjo.

Fair winds my friends!

Friday Night Frolic — Intimate Arrangements

Do you know this man? Hang on to your hats...  you're about to meet him. [source]

While the Suburban Soliloquist is away negotiating real estate agreements and finance arrangements (yes, she too, nearly forgot about that laborious and evidently not-so-captivating-dot-i-cross-t job where she redlines paragraphs packed with polysyllabic words such as herinafters and notwhithstanding-the-forgoings concurrently with vainly attempting to ward off the one-hundred-thousand-word migraine) she has made very special arrangements for you to see a very rare show in a tiny and somewhat cluttered but acoustically pleasant venue where very exciting things happen on a daily basis (which, to the best of her knowledge, do not include real estate or legal matters, at least—at the very least—not on all-songs-considered day) that sometimes have the effect of giving her...

...goosebumps.

Are you dressed and ready to go? Well, fine, don't dress. Dress is optional.

Alright then, here are your TICKETS (click, click) for the show. You'll need them to get in. Now go. Seriously, go now. And Enjoy! (Oh, and take a look at the program, too.)

When it's over, please feel free to come back and let the Suburban Soliloquist know what you thought of it.  She likes hearing from you.

This is how the Suburban Soliloquist feels about the man in the show:



You can find the man's lastest CD and preview all songs here.

Disclaimer: The Suburban Soliloquist shall not be liable for any claims, accidents, damages or expenses of whatever nature arising directly or indirectly from any accident, injury or damage to any person or persons or property caused, in part or wholly, by swooning audience, nor shall she be responsible for the consequence of any actions--per se, swooning--of those attending the show, nor for disturbing her readers with redundant disclaimers.

(The Suburban Soliloquist likes her blogger job a whole lot better, unfortunately, that gig is pro bono. She will, though, endeavor to keep it.)

"Friday Night Frolic" - The Liquidation of Lamebrains

The Neurologist by Jose Perez (Oil on Canvas)

A Summons for Cephalalgia

You sneak in during the middle of the night
thinking I might not notice or mind
like you've got carte blanche
to walk in unexpected, uninvited

You bastard

I've got your number
I've been held by the grip of your vice
countless times
hostage to your beastly manner

I ignore you
You bastard

You hum, warble in my ear
as I search for the dagger and venom
sharp elixir and vapor
with which I might slay you

For you are a mere illusion
that hurts
You bastard

I see you laugh under your breath

as you slowly turn the crank, Screw you

Forcing me to retract the insouciance I feint

as I lose control of the ship

Spiraling among white beams 

and bubbly charcoal floaters

In a lugubrious, colorless, merciless sea 

to the throbbing beat of your pulse

Fuck you

You bastard

The last time you slipped away
I'd hoped it was for good
Otherwise, there'd be a call

For something more effective
(than the ENT's feckless aresenal of pills)
Like a restraining order
Or a hit man

Contracts being my specialty
I'd scribe one immediately
if I could keep the light for a spell
to faintly see where you might sign

The agreement, including, but not limited to
conditions precedent
like prodrome and aura
so I might have fair warning

That my mind is in imminent danger
of being hijacked
by your suffocating hand, your persistent drone,
your deeply encoded paroxysms of pain

You bastard
Your time will come.

AND now, a love song...



John Darnielle, a former psychiatric nurse, writes some of my favorite short stories. And then he sets his revealing, expressive narratives to music, and sings them with The Mountain Goats (or solo). His sometimes morose, but always witty and snarly lyrics prompt smiles and reflection, with no shortage of eye winking.

All Eternals Deck (2011) is the band's latest release. 





And from Get Lonely (2006):




You can find more on Darnielle here.  Now, about that phone call...

(In the event you are wondering... No, the Friday Night Frolic will not become a forum for scrubby, lamebrained, habitual poetry—though I do enjoy serious and not so serious poems. The fragmented stanzas of poetry, in  my case, lends itself to fits of cephalalgia, whereas the narrative is an arduous prospect during bouts of lamebrainitis. )

The Vuvuzela: As an Instrument of Torture, More Effective than Sensory Deprivation

photo courtesy interwebs

Seriously, as an instrument of torture— and the polar opposite of Sensory Deprivation—I think the vuvuzela is pretty efficient. It would break me in about five seconds. It does. Only five seconds of exposure to that blasting, b-flat monotone buzz of bees gone mad and I’ll be singing. I’ll tell you anything you want.


So why is South Africa doing this to us? Perhaps they want to be known, they want to be heard; and how they are. Hey, every country deserves the right to be recognized for its own unique experience and culture (and South Africa, undeniably, is most deserved of this), but is this the mark—or the blare— that South Africa really wants to leave on the world? According to www.South Africa.info the vuvuzela is “South Africa football’s beautiful noise.” In case you’ve been living in a hole for the past few weeks, you can listen to it here, and judge its beauty for yourself:


THE VUVUZELA!


These days, the root cause of my night terrors (ok, so I exaggerate a little—but definitely the source of a recent migraine).


And I’ll bet the beehive that, for those people who’ve ever suffered a severe reaction to a bee sting, the relentless buzzing drone of the vuvuzela has been the source of much panic. I sure wanted to run for an EpiPen when I first heard the swarm, and I’m not even allergic to bees.


I get that this annoying noisemaker has been part of the South African football experience for some twenty years; I get its significant origins, modeled after the Kudu horn—an African instrument made from the horn of antelope which was used to summon villagers; and I get its symbolism as renewed pride, unity and hope; but today’s cheap (manufactured in China at .03 cents a pop—sold for $6.00/piece on the internet) simulacre of this ancient horn that all of South Africa is blowing—sometimes at up to 120 deafening decibels, this South African football music (using that term loosely) tradition, is going to create an entire generation of hearing-impaired football/soccer fans. And as much as I love to watch my husband and son bond over the World Cup games, I can’t help but worry about this, and wonder, marvel, at how they can sit on the couch with their chips and drinks for hours, entranced, seemingly oblivious to the relentless hum, without breaking. Not once. Perhaps it has something to do with Sensory Overload?


And if for some twisted reason you can't get enough of this noise, YouTube now offers the vuvuzela button. Simply click on the soccer ball icon in the lower right hand corner of any video, and you can let it croon to you all day long.


Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.