They say that waking up is hard to do...

And now I know, I know that it's true.

Dr. Bombay's
10:30 AM

Now playing on the in-house system: The theme to Get Smart, arranged for jazz combo, organ and horns. Sweet!

In other news, on Thursday I watched Inland Empire, the new David Lynch film. This film is rated 'OMGWTF' and is not recommended for those unable to accommodate a warehouse-full of ambiguity.

Sabitathica's official assesstimate: It had something to do with a woman. Unless it didn't.

And now playing over the inestimable Doctor B's sound system: Dino's version of Mambo Italiano, possibly my favorite song of the last six weeks. I just can't seem to get enough of it. If you aren't listening to it right now, you really should be. In fact, why don't you go ahead and download it right now, as we speak. Download it and listen to it. Go ahead, I'll wait.

The Narrow Way: Part Two

Today was a day of auditions at the Greatest Music School on the Whole of God's Green Earth. Which means I was there early, managing the show. And now I’m tired. I’m sooo tired.

Here's a representative sampler of my morning for you:

At 9:20, after the panel of speakers had their say, but before both the music theory placement test and the parents’ meeting, a man approached me, a father to one of the auditionees. Here's what he said to me:

'I died a few years ago. I can remember what happened twenty years back, but I can't tell you what I had for breakfast this morning, so I’m going to be writing down everything you say. So . . . is there any way you can get my daughter a scholarship?'

What. the. hell?

Every audition day something bizarre happens, like some guy telling me he’s dead and can I give his daughter some money. Every time. The pattern suggested by events like this has led me to formulate

Sabitathica's Apophthegm: The more concentrated the event, the more oddness will be attracted to it.

I also got to see erstwhile buddy Natasha for the first time in a while, over a year I think. Her first words upon seeing me: You're old. Awww, what a sweet thing she is . . .

Oh, and props to my two assistants, Brendan and Diana (pronounced Deeana, and don't you forget it!) who were (and are) reliable and cheerful even while doing some of the necessary grunt work. And this despite the fact that I've fired them at least twice a day since August and regularly tell them to stop showing up for work.

Yes, I'm reading the Catcher in the Rye again. Deal with it.

. . . or kindly fuck off.

Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddamn curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again.

This line, and you may recognize it, is Holden Caulfield having a Holden Caulfield moment. Holden has the disease, undiagnosed and unnamed, that I saw so much of in my high-school years and late teens on the coast, south of Boston. Almost all my friends had it growing up. Two of them even died needless, stupid deaths because of it, deaths unworthy even of far lesser people.

I got an email from an old friend which has been having a time-machine-like effect on me, a time-machine that only knows how to take you into your past and leave you there.

Niles was the first friend I made after my family left my childhood home to move closer to the city. He was the first and most significant friend of the second phase of my life. We had our first explorations of drinking together. Several times he took it upon himself to try and correct my almost impossible naivete in the area of sex (there were some very funny conversations). It was Niles who convinced me to pick up a musical instrument for the first time. And I was with him when I almost blew my thumb and first two fingers off my left hand with some sort of firework that he had rigged to, as he said, 'make the fuse last longer'.

Jules was different. Difficult, frustrating, creative, well-meaning, his horses eventually got away from him. His mind was always moving and he had a real gift for crisp observations. I lived with him in his rent-controlled house in Dorchester for a little while after I left school. We were in bands together, so many of them I can't even count, at least five or six, me a bass player, him a drummer which, if you know your music, is a traditionally sacred relationship if ever there was one.

These were good young men. No more confused than anybody else I knew. Male friendships are rarely mentioned in this culture, unless it's a ridiculous caricature on a sitcom.

~~~~~~~


10:22 PM

So now I'm thinking (for reasons both terrible and trivial) about Sylvia Plath and what she referred to as her bell jar. Sylvia grew up where I grew up, and she went to school where I went to school, in the Pioneer Valley in the middle of Massachusetts. Of course, she went to Smith; and, while I obviously did not, I did take two classes there. Combinatorics and Real Analysis. The combinatorics class was a joke, but it was that analysis class where I had a strange non-reoccurring experience toward the end of the semester.

The class discussion had for some reason digressed into the topic of voting systems, and we were working through a proof of either Gibbard-Satterthwaite or Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, I don't recall which, when, in my experience, the whole room temporarily receded and, for a spellbinding quarter-minute, the proof seemed actually to be about human psychology, and not about voting systems at all.

This was striking me as a Sylvia Plath-like moment. I don't know. Maybe there's something in the ivy at Smith that induces distressing transpersonal experiences. Either that or I'd been drinking before analysis class again.

The Narrow Way: Part One

Just got in from seeing Children of Men with Jennifer. Sabitathica's official assesstimate: Better than Cats!

Everybody I know: Hey, Sabitathica.
Sabitathica: Yes, what is it now?
Everybody I know: Who do you think's going to win the Superbowl?
Sabitathica: Prince. I think Prince is going to win the Superbowl.

New Year's Eve redux

Dr. Bombay's
8:35 AM

Now playing over the in-house system: my new least-favorite version of Mood Indigo. It is, if you can believe it, a cross between eighties hair-metal and barbershop. A genuine stylistic disaster area, ill-conceived from da capo. Someone should quietly wrap a full roll of yellow police tape around this song. But still, I have to say . . . it's fascinating in a morbid way, like slowing down near a car wreck, or witnessing an execution. It's hard to turn my ears away.

How to explain last night? Remember when I told you about my well-documented winter holiday? Well, it fell to Josh to take the whole goddamn variegated mess of footage and edit it together into a 26-minute film. Vlindinhauer, Vlindinhauer's wife M, Josh and I screened the world premier last night. Nota bene dear reader, that they three were all in Boston and I'm here in Bedlam- I mean Atlanta. So circumstances required us to video-conference the event.

There were at least two distinct successes last night:

1. The film itself was brilliant. I told Josh it's the best thing he's done that I'm aware of. It was so good we watched it twice.

2. The strangeness of videoconferencing a social event quickly became a source of entertainment in its own right.

Please don't ask me to explain all the reticulate meta-levels of hypercommunication that were inter-knitting each other at every turn last night. All I'll say is that the videoconference itself was being filmed. And it wasn't long before the film of the vidoeconference was being used in the videoconference.

Stir well. Repeat as necessary.

If that doesn't sound like fun to you . . . well, maybe that's why you weren't invited, sunshine.

Even if I were able to 1) reconstruct for myself and 2) explain to you the myriad levels of communication that were being juggled last night, like maybe by drawing you a Venn diagram or something, I wouldn't do it. I swear to god it would make your head explode.


~~~~~~~

Now playing: Naima by Coltrane. Once while I was at Hampshire I had the great pleasure of playing (bass on) this song with Yusef Lateef. Only, he had reworked it, putting it in 5/8.

They're heeere

I was reading today on the internet about alien abductions. Not a very well-known fact, but I used to date the daughter of possibly the top UFOlogist in the world, swear to god, back at Hampshire. This girl, her dad specialized in helping abductees cope with . . . you know, with being abductees and stuff. She used to say, with an eerie seriousness, that her dad knew so much about the aliens that the aliens definitely knew all about her dad, and that they probably knew about her, too. I asked her if that meant that the aliens knew about me as well because, you know, with her being my girlfriend and everything, but she didn't answer.

But I didn't start out meaning to read about alien abductions on the internet, honest. I was on Wikipedia, just sort of browsing amongst the shelves, when all of a sudden I found myself accidentally reading about aliens. Or alien abductions, really.

So if I were to tell you that I saw a UFO, would you hold it against me? Would I lose what meager measure of credibility I have with you? I ask because whenever I find myself telling people that I've seen a UFO (which, thankfully, is not frequently), they all, almost to a person, look at me like what I really said was that I'd seen the WMDs. What. Ever.

So I wrote a short play about it. I've even given you a part. Not the leading role, but I don't think you should be complaining about that right now. If you do a good job, maybe I'll write you a better part next time. Anyway, here's how it goes, with you playing the interrogator . . .

Sabitathica: I saw a UFO once.
You: That's ridiculous. Don't say that again.
Sabitathica: Okay. But which part of 'I saw a UFO' are you having difficulty with? That what I saw was unidentified, that it was flying, or that it was an object?
You: Oh.

See, wasn't that fun? And now that we've had this little chat, and I've dazzled you with my unassailable logic, and we've been in a play together and stuff, I feel like we're closer, like I can open up to you more. So in this exciting newfound spirit of forthcomingness, transparency and trust, I've decided to tell you a little more about the UFO I saw.

It was on Martha's Vineyard in 1988, on the coast, as you look north or north-east across Nantucket Sound. It was dark out, well after sunset, maybe 11 or 11:30 PM and I was standing on the beach. I was living on the Vineyard that summer. I looked up into the sky and saw a bright white-blue light, about the same shape and size as the average streetlight appears to be from maybe 100 feet away.

It was moving, not terribly fast, downward, earthward, and tacking north. And then the strange thing happened. Without decelerating, it completely changed direction and moved, still northward, but now suddenly and with great velocity up, away from the ground. It was gone from my sight very quickly, in less than two seconds, maybe less than one.


~~~~~~~

Anyway, segueing gracelessly into other things that're out of this world, I'm listening to Paul's piano on Drive My Car right now.

My last serious girlfriend didn't know all that much about the Beatles. In fact, there was one time when we were talking about them, and the phrase 'All Five Beatles' came out of her mouth. And no, she wasn't counting any of the people that you sometimes hear referred to as the Fifth Beatle, like George Martin or Billy Preston or, inappropriately, Pete Best. No. She really thought, and granted it may have only been for a moment, but still, that there were five boys in the band. It was all I could do to remain civil. I think I made her sleep on the couch that night.

Brrr

All right. I don't care who you are, or what you do, or what you wear. I don't care how luminous you are. I don't even care what music you sing along to when you're alone inside your car. The truth is, wherever you may be right now, whatever temperature it is there, it's colder here. A lot colder.

As we discussed earlier, I have a low threshold for any sort of heat-recession or heat-starvation. Atlanta's like what, only 35 degrees latitude? And it's officially uninhabitable today. Like Mars, but you know, with plumbing and air. Cold plumbing and air.

I think I read somewhere that science was going to build a giant dome over the earth, so the whole planet can finally be indoors and we can control the weather. In the future you can rotate a dial on your bedroom wall and North America will get a couple degrees warmer.

Reigning cats on blogs

The Nunnery
7:28 PM

Listening to a record Jennifer just burned (if you're from the RIAA, substitute 'bought') for me. Several Arrows Later by a band called Matt Pond PA. A singer-songwriter with a likeable, tight, understated band, good song structures, and his voice is growing on me. It reminds me of the record Steve McQueen by Prefab Sprout from 1985. High praise, that.

Here's some photographs for all you shy, beautiful people out there in radioland. Cheer up, freaks! If you don't start looking like you're having fun, there will be serious repercussions! Or else!


This was Sunday afternoon during the rain squall, facing south.




This is Minnie, the neighborhood cat I said about earlier. This was maybe a half-hour ago. She wanted to come in after I returned from sloughing the garbage/recycling to the curb. It's been a while since she's graced the Nunnery and it's good to have her back.




And here she is again on my lap.




Good kitty.

Viva Le Vlin!

Take a moment, if you will, and check out the clip that someone posted a link to in a recent comment. The clip is a succinct but chilly statement on mortality and sea-worship featuring none other than Vlindinhauer Haverhast himself! Quite literally in the flesh. Keep in mind that this was recorded in the middle of the month of January, north of Cape Cod. Sabitathica's favorite part: the barely audible 'Hail Poseidon!' before communing with the deeps.

She is really a foreigner, though a cute one, to absolute honesty of conversation.

I'm reading Hapworth 16, 1924, J.D. Salinger's last published story. After The Catcher in the Rye, after Franny and Zooey, and after both Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction, it was published only in The New Yorker in June of 1965, and never collected into a book. I knew someone who had a copy of that issue of The New Yorker, a close friend, now dead by his own hand. We were both Salinger-crazy together. He let me borrow it, the New Yorker, so I was able to read the story in it's original context.

Hapworth takes the form of a long letter, written by a 7-year old Seymour Glass. He's at a summer camp and he's injured his leg. He's using one afternoon of his convalescence to write a letter to his family back in New York City. If you've read some Salinger, you might know that Seymour is a genius. He's enlightened, or he's getting very close. Reading it is resonating with lots of good memories from the early nineties.

Anyway, fuck all that. I went to Guitar Center this morning to information-gather and possibly purchase a firewire mixer. Why do I ever go there? I've never been in there without having to witness terrible guitarists playing loudly and looking around to see who's impressed. God dammit, go get laid buddy. Today it was a bassist, which is better becuase with the lower frequencies, the jarring, misplaced, meaningless notes are less arrow-like and piercing, but it's also worse, because bass was my principle instrument for twelve years and I'm sensitive to lack of care in that area.

It was a real pleasure over winter holiday to get a chance to play guitar with two bassists I can relate to, though in very different ways, Vlindinhauer and Josh.

The guy at Guitar Center, the salesman who attached himself to me when I walked in, barely knew what he was talking about. He had to ask the internet whether the mixer I was looking at sent audio pre- or post- effects and faders. He got so involved with the website he was on that he began talking to me less and less, until eventually he stopped talking to me altogether.

He asked first one, and then another of his fellow salesmen to stand next to him and stare at the internet with him. Together, the three Zombified merchant-peddlers stood close to each other and did nothing but look at the screen. I wandered away after two minutes of this and left the store after ten. Not one of the three looked up from the monitor long enough to see their customer leaving. That place is bizarre.

It is a pure fact that you are utterly haunting persons in simple retrospect. . .

The Nunnery
6:01 PM

First, my back still hurts. Thanks for thinking of me.

And yes, I went to a chiropractor and got adjusted, but it didn't work, not completely. Some of the pain is gone, but not all of it. Here's a snippet of conversation from my time with the chiropractor:

Chiropractor: You look good.
Sabitathica: Yeah, thanks.
Chiropractor: You look like you've been taking care of yourself.
Sabitathica: Yeah, I have. Thanks.
Chiropractor: So, how's your daughter?
Sabitathica: What?

He must have me confused with someone else.

In other news that has nothing to do with my back, I saw Pan's Labyrinth last night. Official status: recommended.


-------

My Guitar Craft friend Jonathan B. visited Atlanta a few months back and stayed here at the Nunnery. While here, he told me about a video project he was working on. It sounded interestingso I told him to send me a copy on DVD. Well, it just arrived a few days ago and I've checked it out and I have to say, this shit is seriously fucked up, like I can't tell you. Official status: Not recommended for epileptics or other human beings. But if you're adventurous and don't fall into either of the two previously mentioned categories, let me know and I'll ask him if it's okay if I send out a few copies. It's brilliant. You'll hate it.

You've got tombs in your eyes, but the songs you punched are dreamy. . .

The Nunnery
4:00 PM

Just got in from a 1:10 showing of Night at the Museum with Michelle, sans her husband. Sabitathica's official review: 'It was kind of like Doctor Zhivago, only different'.

I injured my back yesterday, doing absurdly little. Around T4 or T5, so it's hard for me to get to. A few years ago I was both a) dating my chiropractor and b) living with a massage therapist. Sweet, huh? Through osmosis alone, I learned much about how my spine works. Plus the fact that I was studying to be a teacher of the Alexander Technique before I accepted my current job. The problem is though, I can't reach T4/T5 with enough leverage to adjust myself. Anybody who knows something about how to fix backs is welcome to give it a shot.

Last night I was over at Rashid's. We ordered a pizza and watched the first two hours of the new season of 24. It was okay. Kind of like Belle de Jour, only different. After it was over, I asked R to follow my instructions and try to adjust my back. He did a very good job, but it wasn't ready yet. I'm still in discomfort.

Oh, and a tree hit my house this afternoon. Swear to god. It's mostly on my neighbor's house, but it's a little bit on the Nunnery. I saw it when I got home just now. It's leaning against the roof of my porch, nothing broken that I could see. I suppose I should go try to lift it off the porch roof but, have you heard? I injured my back.


~~~~~~~

4:42 PM

I'm going outside now to have a look at that uprooted tree, so I'm going to love you and leave you with this photograph. I took it at Vlindinhauer's months ago, at sunup.

See the marketplace in old Algiers, send me photographs and souvenirs

Dr. Bombay's
11:25 AM

The rest of yesterday was spent low key. Taking it easy, not drinking. I talked to my sister, K. She was at home, her home, waiting for her daughter, my goddaughter, to get back from visiting with her daddy. K and I talked for about an hour, on two topics, mostly: 1) her job and 2) our family, with no lack of material on either front.

I had planned on using that phone call to straighten out a problem that came up with the Bath and Body Works gift certificate I sent her via email. The problem? Apparently I had it sent to the wrong email address. An old one, one she doesn't use anymore. As I say, I was going to straighten it out, but I got interrupted by a phone call from Regina, an old friend/girlfriend I haven't heard from in about a year and a half. We caught up for a little while, then I returned to 'taking it easy, not drinking'.


~~~~~~~

12:12 PM

Just got a phone call from my parents. They seemed happy. Which reminds me, I was reading about a 10-year study where these researchers from U Washington developed a mathematical model which predicts (with 94% accuracy!) which marriages will survive and which will end in divorce. The URL is http://marriage.about.com/cs/longlasting/a/math.htm.

A key finding: 'Couples with the best chance for long lasting marriages are couples who have a sense of humor, are affectionate, able to lovingly tease, and take interest in one another.' Wow, thanks science!

Now playing over the in-house system: You Belong to Me. Which is a coincidence, because I woke up with this song in my head this morning, I was singing it in the shower, and I haven't been able to shake it all day.