Straight off the track. Dizzy.

Reading: Go Tell It on the Mountain and Crooked Little Heart

Moving: 32', 3.8 miles

Watching: ER

Listening: Pearl Jam

4 January 2001: Bizarro

My heavy people are some weird folks. I wouldn't have them any other way. Now, I figured that Dora doesn't talk like she's from down east, but she's just confessed she sounds like a hick valley girl. She's from Louisiana; so maybe that's not too weird. Haitch has her football thing (she won, as I was careful to ascertain through CNN before writing her today with either congratulations or condolences). And Nisou likes malt in her chocolate milkshakes, and SEM goes dog-sledding in remotest Minnesota on purpose and for pleasure. Then there's MCB, who cannot be explained or even described.

"I mean we're all a little bizarre."

But PLT, now, he's the loopiest of them all.

Email this morning:

I realized this morning that Sinead O'Connor's rendition of "Nothing Compares 2 U" fits with "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."

I sang "Nothing Compares" in a real redneck voice, then some lines from "The Devil", and then the obligatory fiddle solo. When both parts are sung at the same speed...

It's been seven hours and fifteen days --
fire on the mountain, run boys run (o-oh-oh-ohhh)
since you took your love away --
the devil's in the house of the risin' sun

I go out every night and sleep all day
Since you took your love away --
chicken in the bread pan pickin' out dough --
Granny does your dog bite? no child no-o-ohh

'Cause nothing compares, nothing compares 2 U
All the flowers that you planted, mama, in the backyard
all died when you went away --
a band of demons joined in --

and it sounded something like this

[fiddle solo]

I'm not sure which is more bizarre--that this is so true, that it occurred to him, or that he knew the line after "Chicken in the Bread Pan" which song title I've been trying to figure out for 20 years.

Now, this is funny. (Perhaps I could get Dora to sing it for me? Cf. Bridget Jones in the Thai prison singing "Like a Virgin.") He continued revising it in another email and used the following closing:

No no. First a little background. In the my pantheon of music stand Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, and the Cowboy Junkies (ordered by their arrival therein). They are the only artists to have remained firmly in place for more than a decade. The Police, the Moody Blues, and U2 came and went; the Waterboys, k.d. lang, Elvis Costello, and Roxy Music circle the Olympian peak (I'm mixing my geographic metaphors) but have not yet landed. PLT knows this, knows it very well.

A little more background. Sometime before they started dating, SEB told me PLT asked her what her favorite song was. She replied, "Oh, I dunno, I guess "Scarborough Fair'" and PLT started beatboxing it, "Are you going to Scarborough fair, parsley sage rosemary and thyme," and I just considered myself blessed I had been Warned before he got similarly inspired around me. You'll notice that at no time, and at no point on my site, do I ever confess what my absolute favorite song is. But he knows what the likely candidates are. No one except Kymm, who I know loves The Kick Inside because of "Wuthering Heights," will understand the heresy, but today he closed,

"rolling the ball, tanguhd uhp in BLOO!"

Eric Clapton (who's covered "Tangled Up in Blue") played guitar for Kate on "And So Is Love" on The Red Shoes. So maybe it all works.

---

The stain of our new dining table is called distressed honey, which makes me giggle. Our other choice was Mahogany, apparently unvexed since it has no adjective. RDC and I have been amusing ourselves since with other irked stains. Cantankerous molasses. Sourpussed syrup. Blackhearted blackstrap. Nettled nectar. Disgruntled treacle.

Pardon me. That's couple humor. My sister hates couple humor when she's not in one. In 1996 when she left Aspen, abandoning me for Boston, she and a friend drove down to Denver the night before her flight east. We four went out to dinner, and by the time we came back, our usual parking area was filled. "Servants' parking," Rich and I pouted as we drove further away. That's couple humor.

---

The book group at Dot Org is meeting next week to discuss Crooked Little Heart, which I, OMFB, did not choose. I liked Bird by Bird a nawful lot and Operating Instructions was okay and I liked some of Lamott's columns in Salon but Hard Laughter was one of the worst novels I have ever read. The reason she could write Bird by Bird is that she's a writer, but just because someone's a writer doesn't mean she can write. Furthermore, in real life Lamott's father died, and so the novel, in which the young woman's father does not die, read to me like wishful thinking.

I say I like autobiographical novels. I like that Meet the Austins sprang from L'Engle own experiences adopting Maria, though if I had a character like Maggie based on me I wouldn't be any too pleased with my new mother. I like Byatt's The Game better when I knew that she had her own real-life sororial competition with Margaret Drabble; I've considered Stephanie and Frederica's relationship with new perspective as well.

Lamott stands to unravel that blanket generalization.

From the jacket flap of Crooked Little Heart: "Rosie Ferguson, in the first bloom of young womanhood, is obsessed with tournament tennis. Her mother is a recovering alcoholic still grieving the death of her first husband; her stepfather, a struggling writer, must wrestle with his own demons." Let's just sketch a run-down of Lamott's life: tennis, alcoholism, "recovery" from same, death (husband was, N.B., Rosie's father), struggling writer, demons. If Rosie weren't such an athlete, postponing her own date of menarche* with tennis, then I'd expect her to spore a little Sam, just to complete the major points.

The library had it on the shelf, so I borrowed it, placed a hold on Ragtime, which RDC opines is the best of the MLA 100 that I haven't read, and read Lamott over lunch at the museum and walking back to work. It screams "relationship novel," which does not at all thrill me. I'm on page 17.

* Perhaps if she hadn't died at 42, Jane Austen would have got around to writing Men and Menarchy. That's another PLT-ism and the last for today. I don't know whether he misspelled "menarche" on purpose so that his audience would know how to pronounce it for better cadence or because it looks more like "anarchy" that way, or inadvertently because he doesn't know how to spell it. I asked once if I could use his dictionary and he said he didn't have one because he already knew all the words. I threw "wont" at him and he bungled it thoroughly, which was one of the only times I've caught him being outright wrong and therefore was a highlight of my life.