Thursday, January 29
A sinus headache is quietly undermining my sanity.
Elvis Presley's first 45 RPM single was a blues number called "That's Alright", played without drums on upright bass, electric lead, and Presley's own acoustic guitar. When it came time to record a B-side, he chose a song called "Blue Moon of Kentucky". A song by Bill Monroe.
Other people already knew this, of course, but for me it was one of those everything I know about music is wrong moments.
Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennet from Rilo Kiley are playing an acoustic show tonight at Duffy's. I expect good things.
+
it's 2:34 in the afternoon
fat flakes are still falling,
the snow piled up all night
long and on through the morning
classes at the university
canceled and here i am in
my basement, nursing a cold
and trying to capture that
old sense of childhood's satisfaction
in solitude
like anywhere i dwell very long,
this place is a mess
books everywhere
some of which i've even read
in the next room, 37 empty beer
bottles and the glass remnants of a
former occupant's cheap liquor collection
i meant to recycle all that stuff.
the first bit of the blank slate
has served to convince me that i'm
not an empiricist in the lockean
sense — obviously the human mind
has structure, the brain a physical shape
which can't just arise from stuff
recorded on a blank substrate and
forming these neat, somehow functional
networks of pure associations between
raw data
granted that would be pretty cool.
late the day we went through grandma's stuff
i went for a walk with joshua.
we played on the swings and
looked at bugs and dried up worms
on the margins of a shallow concrete
drainage channel with some
mud in the center
there were a spider, a two segmented
beetle, and a centipede (or is that
kind a millipede?) all moving sluggish
from the cold. the centipede looked
out of sync, jittery - but it must have been
60 degrees out, which is why i guess
you could see bugs at all
"i found something", josh said every time.
later after i explained it would be
kind of mean to stomp all the bugs and got
him moving the other direction, we sat on this
concrete slope - kind of a spillway for the
drain system i guess - and joshua made
rocket noises; i think we were on a saturn V
making for escape velocity.
more: notebooks