Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Honestly I Have Nothing To Complain About
I realize that things have been a bit quiet lately. It means nothing, I assure you. Actually, I’m loaded up with stuff to transcribe but I am short on patience. Let’s see if a beautiful day completely off to myself helps me deal with this at all. Bless you, Honest Abe.
I’ve had a number of upticks in the domestic comfort index lately. A quick recap would include some key basic indicators that are bellweathers of far-reaching repercussions, such as:
* New Slippers. I’ve been wearing heavy rubber garden clogs around the house since my dog-owning days. They were well-suited to my needs when those needs included taking Cosmo out for relief breaks at the greenbelt across the street, where mud was often the cleanest thing in which I’d step. For some years now, though, that’s been a superfluous functionality for my lounge-related footwear. The garden clogs never went outside anymore, and indoors they weren’t much fun. They were cold when I put them on, and slow to warm up; they were noisy as I clumped around the house and they looked, well, like crotty old garden clogs.
My problem was exacerbated by my constitutional disinclination to replace anything till it’s irreparably damaged, or otherwise utterly unsuitable for further use; those clogs were not really what I wanted but were capable of withstanding a nuculur blast. They were like the twinkies of slippers. I’d never wear them out. I was in a quandry.
Last month I de-quandrified myself for less than a Hamilton and a quick ride on the bus. I got some actual slippers, yo. Cloth-covered, fleece-lined, soft-soled and budget-priced, buying them felt almost subversive when I had “a perfectly good pair waiting at home.” But once I got them home and slid my tired pods into their cushioned cloisters, all doubt faded from my mind. Such comfort I had not felt for far too long. I am getting used to it, slowly but surely, but I still feel a delicious illicit twinge every time I put them on.
* New Cup. I don’t think I’m alone in my practice of keeping a drinking cup on the side of the bathroom sink. Sometimes I like a bit of an after-brushing wash-out, ya know what I mean? Sometimes I like something to drink with my nocturnal Vytorin or before I head out the door in the morning. I have employed the services of a series of such cups over the course of my august career of washroom usage, some of which still have a favored place in my memory. But they’re gone now, and lately I’ve not been too enthusiastic about the incumbent in that position.
My bathroom cup: It was water-tight, of course, plastic and translucent - all key qualities I’ve traditionally sought in a sink-side tumbler. My problem was, and I don’t complain about this too often, excessive size. The damn thing was huge - like Czech beer huge, 24 ounces or so. I can’t drink 24 ounces of anything on a bathroom-utilization basis. It had about 16 or so ounces of absolutely excess hydrocapacity. I had to gauge how high to fill the damn thing so I didn’t pour more water than I needed so there less left over to pour back down the sink. Still, it always felt a little lame to leave my cup three-quarters empty every time I used it. Also, if I happened to visit the sink in the dark of night for a little rehydration therapy, it was entirely too easy for me to send it crashing to the tile floor as my blind and clumsy hands groped for the faucet but encountered instead its gargantuan mass.
Of course, I was reluctant to replace it, because it was nowhere near the end of its useful life. But eventually I came to a realization: I detested my bathroom drinking cup, and if its useful life was measured by its ability to satisfy my criteria for beverage containment, it has never had a useful life at all. There was no reason to subject msyelf to it any further. I resolved to replace it.
That was literally months ago, and lord love me I could not find a suitable replacement till just a couple of weeks back. It seemed that every place I visited carried cups that were somehow wrong - dinky or opaque or glass or garishly colored with unsuitable appliqués.... When I came around an aisle at Tartget and actually saw a 12-ounce translucent plastic tumbler, I goggled in disbelief - briefly, and then I snagged one and brought it back home with me.
It’s been on the sink counter ever since. I haven’t accidentally knocked it over, or overfilled it, or anything. It’s meeting my needs and goes no further. It surprises me how satisfying that is. It’s a small improvement, but one that replenishes me the first thing every morning and the last thing every night.
* New Music. The holidays always bring a big load of great music to my household, and this year was no exception. The Trey-Santana concert completely shreds, the Knitters are blowing me away, and the New Mastersounds regularly cause me to embarrass myself on the bus with the sheer power of B3 funk. There are others, too - too numerous to list… but there is one single song that is in a class by itself.
I’ve written before about music and musicians who have made a lasting impression on me, and there have been quite a few of them. I’d have to say that one of the very most significant of those for me was Jethro Tull. Maybe all you know of their work are the heavy hits that got all the radio play back in the day, but early Tull is some of the sweetest, most rhapsodic and lyrical music of the mid-seventies.
Though I missed hearing any of those almbums at the time of their original release, I sure listed the hell of the them once I found out about them, about a decade later. I memorized them. I immersed myself in them. They became, effectively, my internal soundtrack, and colored in the blank spaces between the black outlines of my life (to put it in terms I’d have found irresistible at the time).
I can finally, publically admit this intense relationship because in many important ways I’ve moved significantly forrward since then. I listen plentifully to other music, and my life is a brocade of a much richer fabric. I’d like to think that I’ve matured, so I can look back to my days as an unrepentant Tullhead with indulgent condescension. Anyway, that’s how I felt about it till recently.
I told my dear friend the VHMaleJew, with whom I’d seen my first rock concert (Tull, Long Beach 1979) and shared my Tull crush in high school, that I’d just reacquired several classic old JT albums I’d lost for many years, and how nice it was to listen to the old throwback music again. It felt to me like revisiting a favorite old nook in a beloved but long-neglected woods - a heartwarming auditory nostalgia, to be appreciated as a quaint keepsake of a less-sophisticated era.
VH got back to me with a new track he’d recently acquired in his omniverous musical foraging. More Tull, but nothing I’d ever heard before. It could have been on any of my two or three favorite old albums and would probably have been one of my favorite songs on any of them. I won’t bore you with how it sounded, that sort of writing never makes any sense. But I can tell you that the soaring harmonies and the melancholy lyrics, Martin’s plectrum and Ian’s voice unravaged by time’s indignities, all worked togeher like I’d forgotten they ever had or could.
There were no memories to confound my appreciation of the music; there was no dulling of its genius through excessive familiarity. I listened to those three minutes of music over and over again, but the feeling has yet to fade. Turns out, I’d never gotten over that high school crush - I’d just gotten used to it. Maybe I wasn’t as callow way back in high school as I’d thought I’d been. It seems that I actually had pretty good taste about some things.
Up next: probably some complaints.
