Monthly Archives: March 2015

A Cruel Price to Pay

15 Sunday Mar 2015

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Right now my newest Pandora station (“Motown Sounds”) is playing the Four Tops, and that’s swell; just moved on to K.C. & the Sunshine Band, uh huh, uh huh. I’ve got it in a browser tab so I can supervise it–gotta make sure the doo-wop gets moved to the a capella station where it belongs. (That station morphed from Peter Gabriel into Da Vinci’s Notebook and Penn Masala one looooong artworking night. Every so often Peter pops up and it confuses me for a second.) But it ain’t gonna stay that way long, because my brain.

See, “Good Golly, Miss Molly” came on, and I had to couch dance for a while, which is good for the cardiovascular system but not so much for the blogging. I mean, I love you guys, but I LOVE Little Richard! So we just changed to the ambient station, which (despite the current dose of Daft Punk doing Tron) usually plays what Garry Trudeau once so memorably had Boopsie call “Air Pudding.” See? Right now it’s . . . raining. Or fountaining, or something, while every once in a while a flute tweets.

Why? Because besides being distracted into getting mah funk on every so often, I have something minor “wrong” with my brain: I can’t process two different verbal things at the same time. It’s so bad that the minor confusion of just briefly having “Kingdom in the Sky” play while I got y’all that YouTube link made me blank on the word “verbal” itself for a second while I thought something like, “Duhhh, wordy? Word-stuff? damnitIknowthere’sawordforthat!!!” (800 on the GREs, folks.)

What this has meant in the past is that my GPA jumped a whole point the semester I just gave up on taking notes and listened while knitting or drawing. (This drove some instructors crazy, so YMMV.) What it means now is that I can’t listen to half the music I love most of the time. Because I’m a writer, duh. Or a reader–besides recreational stuff, I style eval on the side. It’s not fair.

I suspect there’s some learning disability type of thing going on here–please comment if you know its name–but then again I wonder if it’s actually related to my hyperverbosity: Does my brain just shriek “I know that one!” every time a word comes near my ears?

Luckily, there’s a ton of music out there without words (Gregorian chant falls into that category because pretty soon I stop trying to translate it with my lousy Latin) and I have really broad taste. But some of what I love best can only be enjoyed while exercising.

Which leads me to the inescapable logical conclusion that maybe this is God’s way of telling me I’m too fat. Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!

 

In Words of One Syllable

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

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Cat was a small dark man of spare flesh; his long black hair fell to his waist.

“Keys Made Here,” said the sign on the door. Cat could beat a lock or a safe in a trice; rust and age meant not a bit. But those who knew Cat best knew the keys were the thing. For the odd man off the street, the small brass toys would be clean and smooth, from the first time to the last. But for those with the right word and right wink, Cat’s keys could fit in the lock of Time.

It took more than just the key, of course. A square in chalk, a stalk of grass, a stuffed mouse made from felt–and the Eight Great Words. Cat would stand back in the dark, a grim smile on his face, as the poor fools took their first steps into a When that was not Now.

“Y’all come back now, hear?” Cat would drawl. But he knew that they would not, for his keys were one-way, just that.

He kept the mice for his cat (who was named Man), and rubbed out the chalk. He left the grass for the wind, and went on his way home to Man and his wife.