Reading: Biographer's Tale

Moving: 30', 3.2 miles

Listening: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I'm finally on the last tape

Watching: Sixth Sense (again) on Starz. What's the point of the scene where Anna sells the Burmese sapphire (?) ring?

4 October 2000: Saddle shoes

I was thinking about tapirs and saddle shoes. I said my favorite tapir was black and white like a saddle shoe. I am wrong. My favorite tapir has black ends and white middle. Saddle shoes have white ends and a black middle. I remembered the scene in Jeannie and Johnny where, one Saturday morning, Jeannie doesn't want to clean her saddle shoes as is her usual weekly habit because she danced with Johnny last night and she likes to look at the scuff marks.

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This has got to change before I singlehandedly topple Denver from its braggart's status of being the fittest city in the country, but I figure I'll enjoy it for just a little bit. I am such a potato.

I discovered a while ago that, seated at my computer, I can see about 2/3 of the television screen, reflected in the glass of a photo collage. I think if I hang a mirror and angle it correctly, I can see around the archway that blocks the other third.

The problem with watching television from this point was that I couldn't mute.

RDC and I are big muters. We mute commercials. This befuddles our acquainti. I don't remember which of us started it. I like to think it was me and that he quickly saw the wisdom of my ways before I had to hit him with a shovel. I don't want to listen to commercials. I don't mind seeing them in as much of my peripheral vision as I need to be aware of when the show comes back on, but I don't listen to commercials.

This is a reason I stopped listening to radio as well. I got to college and lived with people who owned music. I did not, not much. I discovered the wonder of bringing blank tapes, which I did buy, to babysitting venues and taping after the children were put down (to sleep! no, wait, that's still a bad euphemism)(well, no one died under my watch anyway). This was great for albums like Hotel California and Steely Dan's Greatest Hits, if it didn't exactly keep me up to date, and is also why for years I had a tape with James Taylor's greatest hits on one side and Dark Side of the Moon on the other. (And I thought it was strangely fitting, too, because one of the songs ("Walking Man"?) has a line "Still I'm on the dark side of the moon..." Many of my blank tapes were used to record off the radio, when my sound system consisted of a Caldor house brand radio and a separate tape recorder. I wish I'd written down what I taped before ditching those ohsoditchable tapes with INXS and Dennis DeYoung and Journey all interspersed with ambient hiss and my mistaken rustling and the dog scratching her ear and my mother beckoning me.

Radio! Yes. This is why I stopped listening to the radio as well. People in college had new, current music and I could dub off them. And then commercial radio wasn't hip enough for me, the ultrahip. Then I was out of college and had no new sources of music, driving cars (my Omni Fugly then Terrapin the Tercel) that had no radios on whose passenger seats I kept a box, some tapes, and Banzai. Now I'm thoroughly unhip and driving a better car and listening to KBCO, which aside from having a K in its call letters (which after five years still looks fucked-up to me) offers the sort of thing I like. Mostly. And when it goes from a ten-song set into commercial, I switch to something else or turn the thing. Because I hate commercials.

Hating commercials was my point, way back then.

So the other day I decided what the hell, I'll give it a try. Or I still had the remote in my hand when I went into the study to turn Fiver on and automatically pressed the button when I heard a commercial. At any rate, from my desk I can do anything, except see the whole screen. This could be really bad.