Thursday, May 15, 2008

Don't bother playing dead
Another day, another dollar.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

There is a house in New Orleans they call the rising sun
Much to the consternation of me and the rest of the viewing audience, bug-eyed and giddy on too many cups of coffee at eight am, Tim Drawbridge had a nervous breakdown during the morning weather segment. The weather maps showed gray gloom on the Doppler radar system, stretching out into infinity, when he began weeping and they had to cut to commercial break. Whether L. Trela was watching this same “weathercast” will remain one of the great historical mysteries, but one week earlier I had watched her have a similar breakdown as I took in a movie marathon on TV. What was wrong with these people, I had no idea. There were alien emotions welling up in people, wide and sweeping, and those emotions were overflowing onto horizontal surfaces everywhere, collecting into little puddles, and dispensing into saltwater oceans somewhere. Or that was my guess anyway, all conjecture formulated during five minute commercial breaks on TV.

It was a nice weekend, weather-wise. I spent the duration of Saturday shambling around the springtime festival with a bottle of Berkshire Mountain Spring Water which I filled with a turpentine blend of whiskey that threatened to eat away at the plastic container if I didn’t drink it fast enough. When people became unnerved with the current state of water pollution in the Berkshire Mountains, I assured them with a lurid grin that it was “all good,” and that the Berkshire Spring Water Co had just come up with a new marketing concept, to both shock consumers with trendy “green ethos” lifestyle ideology and indoctrinate young children, bored with drinking traditional-colored water. Why such a lengthy explanation was needed probably had something to do with the stained shirt I was wearing, or my own bad hair, sticking up every which way. Or any number of things, actually. Mostly, though, I think I was trying to distract myself from my current surroundings, which were currently filled with spurious life forms everywhere, fraternity brothers with coolers and their questionable companions, people who had the highest interest in bong vendors and tie-died shirts, prone to sad cultural acquiescence and failure. There was an entire aggregate who was apparently really into these things, and who were also really into the band the Spin Doctors. The only person offering me some respite from this point of view—that I was an alien inhabiting an alien planet—was BF and her bizarre friends, their quirks sprouting up like some insane bonsai stretching up and into the sky, grounded by the strange but familiar flora and fauna of this town. “You’re not unlike them,” she laughed, invoking her friends, as we discussed the insane foliage on a walk to the burrito place. I guess there were worse ways to be.

In line waiting for a burrito, we are having one more laugh at the fact that someone actually had the social gall to book the band the Spin Doctors. The kid in front of us in line catches wind of this, having no idea that his favorite group is in fact taking the stage as we speak. “The Spin Doctors are playing??” he asks us, overhearing. “—uh, yeah,” I let him know. There is a moment where it becomes unclear if he thinks that we’re sincerely talking about the Spin Doctors and he is making fun of us for this lowly reference, or if, to our own chagrin, he is expressing a genuine interest in the collective oeuvre of this musical group (a catalogue which includes two songs, I’m pretty much sure, the galaxy beyond which only people with weird facial tics and odd hang ups are well acquainted—a demographic which would seem to include myself but which I have somehow averted due in part to some apparent cult deprogramming seminar I attended somewhere along the line). This point is then made clear when he loses his place in line and sprints in the direction of the main stage, out-alienating even us. Clearly the mother ship had departed, and in the process had left me behind, standing there stupidly, with a tulip some girl had given me earlier in the day, and a similarly-tentacled counterpart, who was whooping it up completely, despite our lame surroundings.
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Another day, the Central Hannaford palatial and awe-inducing from my approach in the parking lot. Inside there were rows and rows of foods, garishly-labeled bottles of spring water for my choosing as American consumer of fine mountain spring water products—which I would later fill with turpentine-like liquids, to alienate myself completely, and distract myself from the oft-espoused point of view that the mother ship had left me behind. Somewhere someone was dying.

Greeting me as I walked inside was the pleasant tinkle of the Muzak music system, which was currently in the process of segueing into a new song selection. The Muzak music player, trusty foe to offices and conduit to suicides everywhere, had never ceased to amaze me. It was clearly programmed to confound you completely, keeping you guessing for five minutes, with all the lyrics sucked out. The main idea of this system, it was clear to me, was to keep you confused and guessing about the song choice for long enough that you hung out around the store that much longer, and bought that many more things. I was at the check out when I recognized the song that was playing. It was the Spin Doctors, doing one of their hit songs. Amazing, I thought to myself. There's just no escaping it, it seems. This was then followed by a ripping version of “House of the Rising Sun”, appropriately enough. Clearly some hilarious diety was in the DJ booth, and she was cracking me up completely.

Back outside the weather was noncommital and gray. I wondered if Tim Drawbridge was feeling better. I found out what he was so sad about: He was leaving the news station and moving to a new city. What he was so upset for, I’m not sure. But when it came down to it, I couldn't help but feel that Tim Drawbridge was kind of a disappointment to me, personally. And furthermore, I couldn’t help but imagine that his iPod wasn’t too good.