It’s cooled off nicely.

Just spent five minutes staring into space, contemplating the great & profound disinterest I have in writing anything at this moment.

(162 words about the job excised.)

Tried another redesign tonight –

No, that’s about the job.

You know what I miss? Music. I miss listening to music, and futzing. I miss filing and scanning and sorting and tweaking and perfecting. I never spent more than an hour a day on it, but it was my version of meditation. Then came the new job, bless its buzzy heart; then came the latest Hard Disk crisis, which I suspect is actually a firewire problem on my main computer – like campaign contributions, the firewire seems to corrupt everything it touches. In any case, it’s meant that my precious Collection of Things exists in a state of double redundancy, and that’s not enough; I need three copies of everything, hard copies, offsite copies, the entire magilla. It was always a pleasure to arrange the usual accumulations; now things are piling up horribly. I’m not complaining – this is, as I understand the common term, life. I’ll ge the equilibrium back soon enough. But I miss music, as noted. Today, coming back from an errand with Gnat in the backseat the radio kicked up “End of the Line” by the Traveling Wilburys, and I had one of those moments where you decide that this is your favorite song ever.

I’m no Dylan fan – yes, yes, genius, cryptic cipher of a generation, et cetera, he still sounds like someone trying to push an anthology of 60s poetry out his nose, I’m sorry. I was never a big Beatles fan, either – heresy! Well, I like the early stuff; brilliant pop. (Yes, I’m sure the world is glad to know I approve of early Beatles, and find it to be brilliant pop, because no one’s ever thought that before. Next insight: the Stones were a much more raw alternative!) I find all their stuff interesting and fascinating and gear and fab, but there’s always been an iron wall between me and them, a strange generational thing. It’s not my music and it’s never felt like my music. So the George Harrison contributions don’t flick my Bic, as we said, sarcastically, in the 70s. I can’t explain it any more than that. Now, to completely demolish my credibility: I do have a certain fellow-feeling for Jeff Lynne, since his Beatley retreads of the 70s provided my high school soundtrack. As I said on the Diner this week – I loved him, then hated him for all the reasons we were supposed to hate the over-produced dino-bands in the Brave New Wave era, but I’ve come to appreciate his craft. Tom Petty? One of those artists who never made a single I didn’t like, and never made a single I ever bought. Except for “Ankle Deep,” which came out a few years ago on the “Highway Companion” album. It’s like every other post-fame Petty single, perhaps, and we all know those chords by heart; the melody sounds like a Dylan tune kicked into gear by the drummer for the Oneders. I don’t know why I love it, but I do, and isn’t that the only thing that counts?

Then there’s Roy. If I can’t reach across a few years to  embrace the Beatles, I should have nothing to do with Orbison, but he belongs to an era of music that had much more universal aspirations, even if it had already fragmented into the over / counterculture schism. (Oooh: big critical words are being deployed; this can only get worse.) I mean, there were the remnants of the old singer / band model on one side in ’56, and the rockabilly ruffians on the other. But Roy was more about “Crying” than “Ooby Dooby,” I think, and that aching tenor gave him a grown-up quality his peers couldn’t touch. His work on the Wilburys album – aged and hesitant in one tune,  bright and pure in another - draws a direct line back to ’56. It’s like having Methuselah show up for a tent revival show.

It’s a song about getting old, riding the train with the knowledge that it’ll slow, and the bony fellow in black will be on the platform. But that’s a while off. You’re with your friends; everyone’s in a jovial mood. It’s a good ride. Man, I love that song.

Anyway. I need to listen to some music now before I get back to the buzz work.  It’s been a grand day – the work slacked off around six, and then Gnat’s cousin came over while my Wife and her sister ran around the lakes. I made the kids tacos and fed them pears and forced them to say excuse me when they burped. Around seven I had the dishes put away, the kitchen clean, the dog fed, the house straightened, and the kids were outside dancing on the perimeter of the sprinkler while Jasper Dog barked a warning. It’s water! You don’t know what it can do! 

Sometimes you only get the point of the day in retrospect. As I just did now.

Some radio for you! It’s an old Suspense show from the early 40s. Love those old dese-dem-dose crooks.