#57 - Bird Sounds on Repeat

The Wisdom of Sorting; Bird Sounds on Repeat; Flash Fiction: Overpass

Hello, my friends,

Happy spring! And it truly is coming in. I’ve noticed more bugs around, Michael asked why it was light outside when we picked up his sister from school (discussion about the equinoxes ensued), stone fruit trees are blossoming (see below), and I’m back to basking in the warm sun during my afternoon breaks. Right now, I’m reading Yasunari Kawabata’s The Old Capital (1962) and it is spring in the book as well! Spring in Kyoto! It’s been 11 years since Ashley and I saw the cherry blossoms in that city. Yesterday, I photographed the tree directly outside of our front door:

Plum blossom? Almond blossom? You tell me.

The Wisdom of Sorting

In our house there are chores that each of us typically do. For instance, most of the time Ashley sorts the laundry. Last week, however, there was a monstrous amount of sorting to do. I had the day off and was in the mood for a rote, peaceful activity so I spent what ended up being over an hour listening to an audiobook (then music) and folding laundry. Fairly quickly I realized that if I was going to get the task done before lunch, I would need to prioritize. Clearly, working from a mountainous pile wasn’t ideal so I broke it down by person.

Once I had it by person, I sorted by type of item — pants, shirts, socks, etc. I figured that too much thinking would slow me down and working in easily identifiable categories was simple. Now I had a lot of little, and a few big, piles! This was when I changed my audiobook to fast music that I could knod my head to. I was getting hungry and need to mop up these piles. But as I started working on them, I came to a realization: Not everything required the same level of attention!

If an article of clothing was going to be hung, it could just stay in a pile until I got the hangers. Other articles were just thrown into a drawer willy-nilly so they also could remain wild. Socks, on the other hand, required more concentrated effort — Ashley likes her socks folded into little balls, I fold my pairs in half, Michael’s socks have been a roaming free in his sock/underwear drawer. Giving a speck of thought to the way to treat each item freed me up not to spend so much time on them.

Life is not so different. Some activities at home and at work don’t actually require as much time or attentiveness; they needn’t be perfect. Are there things in your life that you’re overthinking? Are they like paperclips that can just be thrown into the front of a desk drawer? That little pile of clips is just fine in disarray. When you need one, you’ll reach in and easily find the perfect one for the occasion.

“Sorting Laundry” (1927) by Stanley Spencer

Bird Sounds on Repeat

Two weeks ago, I was listening to Norwegian electronic group Röyksopp’s album Senior (2010) for the first time and was bowled over by “The Alcoholic”, a hypnotic song with a steady drumming supporting several beautiful melodies (and bird sounds). Figuratively speaking, it is a combination of Satie after eating half of a pot brownie and the feeling of leaving the house to go meet a good friend for a long lunch. I have been listening to it on repeat since I first hearing it. Soon after that, I learned that there was actually a contest to give this song a music video. The winning video is stunningly eerie. I recommend listening to the song by itself first before watching the video below (the runner-up is very good too, but you might cry if you watch it):

If any of you music-minded people have some time, can someone transcribe the melody that starts at around 1:59 and ends at roughly 2:19 for me, please? My real question is if it can be adequately transposed to a ukulele…

“Red Haired Man on a Chair” (1962-63) by Lucian Freud

Flash Fiction: Overpass

It was late afternoon at the freeway overpass, the wind was gusty. Actually, everything about it was loud -- wind, the cars on the freeway below, even the nearly imperceptible rumble of the bridge added to the fugue of urban overwhelm. 

There was a person at the apex of the overpass dressed in tight corduroy pants with a stain and a jacket with a faded fur-lined neck. Their hands, burrowed deep in their pockets, held a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

They'd been waiting for this moment all day. All their life, maybe. Right there, in the middle of the overpass, what came before and what would come after melted away with the traffic coming and going, The midpoint, the center of the circle, they were it. They took a deep breath noting that their pants were not warm enough for this wind.

Removing the pack from their pocket they knocked the top against a palm. No thought was involved in each individual action of this ritual:  Removing a single cigarette, they placed it between their lips, tasting the paper as it gently stuck to them. It took three tries to light the thing, but that first drag. Heaven! A surge of warmth inside their now uninhabited body -- first the chest, arms, legs. 

"Disgusting habit!" they heard in their mind. 

Disgusting habit -- what their mother repeated like a parrot. Mother Superior, their friend Donna cracked, Patron Saint of Criticism. Disgusting habit, disgusting, disgusting, disgusting! They took another drag. When repeated like a mantra, a word either dissolved into pure sound or permeated every aspect of existence. Disgusting. What had their mother called disgusting? Their piercings? Their haircut? Their friends? Their personal decisions? Geez, what was it that poet wrote… "...the whole sick drama of my childhood on display"? Disgusting. They looked down, ashing their cigarette. Cars coming, cars going. The ash went instantly with the wind.

An old lady was pushing a shopping cart over the freeway, it's metal jingling and jangling with each bump of the jagged sidewalk. They consciously kept their eyes down, not wanting to make eye contact or think at all. A moment later, the lady had passed and the rattle of the cart was descending on the other side and away. God, this cigarette was good. For some reason the word glory sounded in their head, but more like gl-o-o-o-ry, all stretched out as if it had arrived and was being proclaimed. 

They palmed the top of their head noting the difference in temperature between their head and their palm, it felt almost as if it was someone else's hand. The twisted face of the man from the 7-11 entered their mind. "What are you?" He jeered. They closed their eyes and opened them again. The sky was gray. They took another drag of their cigarette and focused on the man's squint, his lips bending themselves into a scowl, a smirk, his nose wrinkled as if he smelled a skunk. His mottled forehead and bald, bullet head too small for his gangly body. A toddler in an over-sized plaid shirt and skinny jeans. What…Wha…Waaa…Waaa. His little face now contorted in fear, not anger. They shook their head to clear it. Behind them traffic halted and moved, like a never-ending worm.

The cigarette was getting short. They examined the fire at it's tip, slowly eating itself away. Was their something poetic about this? Did their need to be something poetic about every moment of life? Rumi might say yes, maybe Tagore, too. Celebrate the shit out of every bit of it, like a Python coiled around it's pray squeezes and squeezes. Feel the nectar of gratitude drip onto the dirt where tomorrow their might appear a fully-formed Chrysanthemum. The problem was that they felt exhausted, bone-dry of whatever neurotransmitter generated sentimentality. All potential beauty turned to irony and burned down like their cancer stick. Just like that. They were so, so exhausted.

Their doldrums were interrupted by their phone's vibration. They fished it from their back pocket and saw the smiling face of a friend. What a smile! A savior's embrace! But no, not now. They tapped the red circle. Their would be time enough to talk later on. Suddenly, they felt cozy inside their jacket. The took a final drag of their cigarette and stubbed it out. They thought: What did the cars passing below see of me? An outline of a person standing in the middle of the overpass, smoking a cigarette. That's it, isn't it? A photographic still imprinted at 70 miles per hour. 

They felt like it was that time, time to go. But they did not move.

“Researchers of the Depths” (1990) by Oleg Holosiy

Time Machine

Here’s what I wrote about in HMF a year ago:

• It Started With a Wish: Michael made his first wish before blowing on a dandelion. There have been many since!

• A Good Reference: I received a chance to provide a good reference to one of my wonderful former staff members who was moving into management.

• Money on My Mind: A little tid-bit about personal finance.

“Highway” (1979) by Clarence Holbrook Carter