Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Strangers on Our Own Turf, in Our Own Time

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[Image: “In Clover,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, you should not blame yourself for making bad mistakes that you greatly regret. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place that you would otherwise have always avoided. You should bring a compassionate mindfulness to your mistakes and wounds. Endeavor to inhabit the rhythm you were in at that time. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner belonging.

(John O’Donohue [source])

…and, from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Prayer

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally – arriving boat – wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers) a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change—
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

(Jorie Graham [source])

Not from whiskey river:

There are a hundred kinds of silence.

There’s the thick silence of places long sealed shut, and the muffled silence of ears stoppered up. The empty silence of the dead, and the heavy silence of the dying.

There is the hollow silence of a man who has stopped praying, and the airy silence of an empty synagogue, and the held-breath silence of someone hiding from themselves.

There is the awkward silence that fills the space between people who don’t know what to say. And the taut silence that falls over those who do, but don’t know where or how to start.

(V.E. Schwab [source])

…and:

If You Said You Would Come With Me

In town it was very urban but in the country cows were covering the hills. The clouds were near and very moist. I was walking along the pavement with Anna, enjoying the scattered scenery. Suddenly a sound like a deep bell came from behind us. We both turned to look. “It’s the words you spoke in the past, coming back to haunt you,” Anna explained. “They always do, you know.” Indeed I did. Many times this deep bell-like tone had intruded itself on my thoughts, scrambling them at first, then rearranging them in apple-pie order. “Two crows,” the voice seemed to say, “were sitting on a sundial in the God- given sunlight. Then one flew away.”

“Yes… and then?” I wanted to ask, but I kept silent. We turned into a courtyard and walked up several flights of stairs to the roof, where a party was in progress. “This is my friend Hans,” Anna said by way of introduction. No one paid much attention and several guests moved away to the balustrade to admire the view of orchards and vineyards, approaching their autumn glory. One of the women however came to greet us in a friendly manner. I was wondering if this was a “harvest home,” a phrase I had often heard but never understood.

“Welcome to my home… well, to our home,” the woman said gaily. “As you can see, the grapes are being harvested.” It seemed she could read my mind. “They say this year’s vintage will be a mediocre one, but the sight is lovely, nonetheless. Don’t you agree, Mr…”

“Hans,” I replied curtly. The prospect was indeed a lovely one, but I wanted to leave. Making some excuse I guided Anna by the elbow toward the stairs and we left.

“That wasn’t polite of you,” she said dryly.

“Honey, I’ve had enough of people who can read your mind. When I want it done I’ll go to a mind reader.”

“I happen to be one and I can tell you what you’re thinking is false. Listen to what the big bell says: ‘We are strangers on our own turf, in our own time.’ You should have paid attention. Now adjustments will have to be made.”

(John Ashbery [source])

…and:

Vapor Wake

Intelligence came on
about seven o’clock
that evening, without
any warning, for the
first time in two or three
months—I’d been crying,
my eyes were Christmas bulbs,
love had dropped its honeydew
and my mind was splattered
when suddenly I heard Edith Piaf
singing in the next room
and remembered that pretty souvenirs
were manufactured after the war
to be bought by soldiers
who had greatly suffered,
pink rayon handkerchiefs
with the flags of two countries
embroidered there—lo,
I could leave these shores,
I could sail home, I could
take something with me,
I could leave something in
return, and at that word
it came back, alive.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

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Haunting the Margin Between Thee and Me

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[Image: photo of “On the Margins of the Borderland,” a mixed-media work by António Ole. Found it at the site of the Smithsonian Learning Lab, where it is described this way: “A broken canoe of welded iron holds stacks of newspapers and colonial era papers in one half and piles of crumbling bricks in the stern. Each of the boat’s two sections holds a monitor playing scenes of light reflecting on water and topped by a pied crow. A used fishing net falls across the papers filling the canoe’s broken prow.” For more details, see the note below.]

From whiskey river:

Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else. So, a man seeking knowledge must be first tested to determine if he is worthy.

(Tom Robbins [source])

…and:

You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal.

(Zadie Smith [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

I See My Beauty in You

I see my beauty in you. I become
a mirror that cannot close its eyes

to your longing. My eyes wet with
yours in the early light. My mind

every moment giving birth, always
conceiving, always in the ninth

month, always the come-point. How
do I stand this? We become these

words we say, a wailing sound moving
out into the air. These thousands of

worlds that rise from nowhere, how
does your face contain them? I’m

a fly in your honey, then closer, a
moth caught in flame’s allure, then

empty sky stretched out in homage.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Least Figure

I tried to think of some way
to let my face become yours.

“Could I whisper in your ear
a dream I’ve had? You’re the only one
I’ve told this to.”

You tilt your head, laughing,
as if, “I know the trick you’re hatching,
but go ahead.”

I am an image you stitch with gold thread
on a tapestry, the least figure,
a playful addition.

But nothing you work on is dull.
I am part of the beauty.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

…and:

Marginalia

Finding an old book on a basement shelf—
gray, spine bent—and reading it again,
I met my former, unfamiliar, self,
some of her notes and scrawls so alien

that, though I tried, I couldn’t get (behind
this gloss or that) back to the time she wrote
to guess what experiences she had in mind,
the living context of some scribbled note;

or see the girl beneath the purple ink
who chose this phrase or that to underline,
the mood, the boy, that lay behind her thinking—
but they were thoughts I recognized as mine;

and though there were words I couldn’t even read,
blobs and cross-outs; and though not a jot
remained of her old existence—I agreed
with the young annotator’s every thought:

A clever girl. So what would she see fit
to comment on—and what would she have to say
about the years that she and I have written
since—before we put the book away?

(Deborah Warren [source])

…and:

#57: In the diner booth, my old friend’s hands on the table between us; mine, inches away from my friend’s. I don’t recognize those spots on my friend’s hands; my friend seems puzzled by this line on my wrist, the line above that one, the line below. The space between our fingertips swirling, memories tracing the woodgrain and the syrup smears. It’s not obvious where one swirl begins and leaves off, nor one memory, nor another: whose smear is whose; whose memory. All those years, those sticky dots on the timelines, some overlapping, most not. While X was happening to me, Y was rattling my friend’s life; we shared a Z from two different sides, each unrecognizable to the other. No memory, no smear or adhesive moment identical for us both. And yet somehow, a perfectly shared past…

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

_____

Note: more about “In the Margins of the Borderland,” from the work’s label as it appeared at the Smithsonian:

Over the past 15 years António Ole has created several provocative and critically acclaimed installations, of which this is the first. It has been exhibited on three continents and appears here for the first time in North America. The work stems from Ole’s desire to draw attention to the history of colonial and local violence and to the architectural decay that surrounds him in Angola. Inside a broken boat that goes nowhere are police reports the artist collected off the street outside an administrative office. He paired the bundles of papers with birds that no longer fly and bricks that are not being used to build. The birds, net and scenic ocean waves playing on the TV sets refer to Angola’s coast, his homeland. At once haunting and beautiful, this installation reveals Ole’s ability to address difficult subject matter and still create a visually rich experience.

[back to top]

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Midweek Music Break: “The Fantasticks”

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Among many, many other things that can be said about the Boomer generation is this: we lived constantly on one cusp or another — at the winding-down of one era, at the start of another, even as the lifespans of each succeeding era narrowed, and narrowed, and narrowed… While it’s true that we’re now woefully out of step with popular culture, basically all that’s happened is: we got tired of keeping up.

Anyhow, each of us seems able to recall at least one cultural pivot moment, some time when a fragment of the former world managed to touch us deeply just before that thing, whatever it was, went fully out of style. For me, one such moment was my first listen to the soundtrack of The Fantasticks.

Musical theater and films had never (as the expression goes) done it for me. They were all so cooooorny, y’know, their “plots” and “sentiments” almost ridiculously easy to lampoon: people meeting and falling in love, falling out of love, falling back in love again; the collision of worldly upper-crust characters with innocent young ingenues and songboys; aspiring singers and dancers getting their Big Chances in ridiculously overproduced numbers (any excuse, really, for the frequent, manifestly implausible burstings-into-song which the genre required); all the absurd reworkings of old classic non-musical genres (Westerns, especially) into misshapen pastiches of easy plot devices stitched together with music…

One of my sisters had latched onto musicals early on, and frequently played their Broadway original-cast soundtrack albums (around the house, where I could not escape the experience) — especially of My Fair Lady. (Ye gods, how many times must I have heard Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews warbling about Spainish weather?!?)

But here’s the thing: I could easily scorn all those tropes… because, well, I had almost no idea what was actually going on, onstage or -screen. I couldn’t hear a lot of what was being said, let alone sung, especially in musical numbers which often delivered their goods in rapid-fire fashion. (Missed that last line? Whoops, sorry, too late — here’s the next one!) Furthermore, I had close to zero life experience (especially with anything like romance, or, all right, with emotion in general). And finally, the culture itself was edging into cynicism and “cool.”

So then I got all the way to college, where an admired professor adroitly mocked my mockery, punctured my balloon: she simply observed the obvious. Which was: if I’d never really paid attention to the form at more than an eye-rolling dismissive level, then sorry, I had no idea what I was talking about. If I wanted to badmouth musicals, then fine, badmouth away… as long as I borrowed, listened to, and (very important!) returned to her this, her treasured original-cast soundtrack album of The Fantasticks.

It probably helped that I knew pretty much nothing about The Fantasticks at the time.

What little I did knew about it came from the pages of The New Yorker. I’d recently started picking up occasional copies of the magazine and would soon start subscribing to it. In the front of each issue, a section headed “Goings On About Town” simply listed — page after page after page — capsule details about art galleries, films being shown, dance performances, library events, concerts, and of course stage productions. About The Fantasticks it included the theater name and performance times, of course, but nothing at all about the plot; it simply said, like, “[Some ridiculous number in the thousands] performances and counting.” (From the start of its Off-Broadway run to its closing, it ultimately played at the same theater for 42 years — over seventeen thousand performances.)

But of the plot and music, the cast and so on: a complete blank space in my head: a blank space — a malleable hollow just ripe for filling.

Well, I’m not gonna try to convince you that it’s high art. (It never pretended to be.) It’s outdated in its attitudes about men, about women, about women-and-men, about children and parenting. Two songs in particular jar today — jar so much that the show’s creators struggled for years with how to completely rework them; they jar so much that if I’d come to the soundtrack for the first time at any point in the last 20-30 years, I’d be horrified. (The songs, for what it’s worth, are “It Depends on What You Pay” and “Rape Ballet,” and while the lyrics make plain the meaning — “rape” in the old, antiquated sense of “abduction,” as here — well, there it is: sticking up in the middle of the playlist like an upraised middle finger.)

But The Fantasticks meant something to twenty-year-old me. I’d recently tried my hand at poetry and discovered, you know: writing to a rhyme-and-rhythm form is hard as bejeezus… Primarily, though, it’s easy to be glib and cynical about love if you’ve never been in love. But when you’ve started — oh so tentatively — for the first time to feel something magnetic about one other person, and when you’re suddenly forced to listen to lyrics clever enough to appeal to your language-loving mind, and grateful for a work’s occasional, self-aware nod in the direction of its own genre’s artificiality…

…well, then, it’s easy to remember that kind of September, or March, or Tuesday, or year.

___

A handful of additional resources, if you care to follow up:

  • The show’s home page (still active, after a fashion)
  • Wikipedia, inevitably
  • Lyrics
  • YouTube: the 1964 Hallmark Hall of Fame TV broadcast, complete with advertising (I vaguely remember this playing in our house, but 13-year-old me certainly wasn’t “into it”)
  • Variety: interview with librettist Tom Jones (no relation!), published after his death last year at age 95
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Potpourri: June 18 (2024 Edition)

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[No idea why this symphony — especially but not exclusively its second movement — might’ve been on my mind so much lately… For more, see below.]

Welcome to my more or less annual post consisting of nothing but whatever’s on my mind on June 18. The most notable feature of the 2024 edition, I think, is the feeling — lost for five years — of composing it from home. True, it’s (as they say) “only a rental,” but it is indeed a house, in a place where we have chosen to live.

(Technically, 2023 was our first June 18th here, but you will search in vain for a 2023 edition of this series… because there wasn’t one. We’d flown back across the country last year, for a wedding.)

About that Spotify playlist: I vaguely remember, sometime in the 1970s, deciding that I needed to “get” classical music — become more familiar with it, if not exactly, y’know, conversant with it. To that point, I was vaguely familiar only with Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, along with fragments like Brahms’s lullaby and so on; I suppose you could also throw in Gershwin and Copland, but I wanted to “get” pre-20th classical music. And I have no idea why I settled on Mahler. His music hadn’t been recommended to me by anyone I remember, and I hadn’t encountered it in the soundtrack of a film or other media context…

Anyhow, Mahler it was.

I could not tell you even back then (when I must have seen the album jacket a hundred times) nor later (ditto, cassette-tape and CD labels) which recordings of the First Symphony I listened to so many times, at home or in the car. I vaguely remember that the first album — by whoever performed it — was on the Deutsche Grammaphon label; I base this on the near-certainty that I wanted to impress myself with an “authoritative” actual-by-gods-real-German investment, as if I had any idea what I meant by that.

It wasn’t the Boston Symphony, though. And Seiji Ozawa wasn’t conducting. But this will more than suffice for today.

(Aside: I just discovered I also featured the second movement of the “Titan” symphony in a post back in 2019.)

I don’t talk much here about my experience of getting, well, old. When I do get into it with family and friends, it’s in what we might call a commiserative context: “Can you believe I’m/we’re over 70 now? And boy, do I ache when I get out of bed in the morning. And my hearing’s observably worse. And I need new glasses. Don’t even ask about my teeth. And what about all those whippersnappers cavorting on my lawn?!?” That sort of thing.

The one thing we don’t talk about (even kiddingly) is, well, The Thing. The one inescapable fact of life, after being born in the first place (both events more or less out of our control): the, y’know… terminus.

I’m not sure I’d even know how to talk about it, or why it should feel so off-limits as a topic — given, especially, how much and how thoroughly we — all those friends and family — have talked about every single other Big Event in all our lives. (I’ve always loved that I can talk with these folks about “anything.” And that’s true. Except for this.)

Now, the practicalities of death: oh yeah, we’ve discussed those (before moving hurriedly on to lighter matters, like major surgery). We talk about wills and estate planning, end-of-life directives and do-not-resuscitate forms, and so on. We talk about those things, I think, mostly because we have to: they necessarily involve other people (people about whom we generally care very, very much). Those are difficult but loving discussions.

But that’s not the sort of thing my mind is nudging up against at the moment. I’m thinking, more, about death as a personal thing: my death. What will it be like, to die? Will I know that it’s happening, before it happens, and if so, how soon before? What will I leave undone — what pieces will I have inadvertently left behind for others to pick up? (Because there are always unpicked-up pieces, aren’t there?)

Oh, I’m not morbid. I don’t want to think about such matters; a common trope in the media might be “good deaths,” but I doubt that many deaths at all — no matter how peaceful and pain-free for the dying — leave behind 100% nice and tidy lives for others involved.

I have been very, very fortunate to have had few deaths in my own family and among my dearest friends. I’ve lost my grandparents and dad; two friends from my younger days died way too early, but not, y’know, violently. On the other hand, I know this leaves me woefully unprepared to deal with the deaths — however peaceful and “good” or otherwise — of all these other people I’ve been close to my whole life. I don’t want to hurt them by being the first of our circle to die, but on the other hand I’m terrified of not being the first. (It’s weird to be thinking about this at all, I know.)

Enough of that. It’s just on my mind today, and, well, on most days anymore.

Edit to add: 100% coincidentally, I just now learned — while following up on a very old blog post — of an app called WeCroak. (That’s the logo at the left.) Says the Web site:

The WeCroak app is inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying: to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily.

Each day, we’ll send you five invitations to stop and think about death. Our invitations come at random times and at any moment, just like death. When they come, you can open the app to reveal a quote about death from a poet, philosopher, or notable thinker.

We encourage you to take one moment for contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation. We believe that a regular practice of contemplating mortality helps us accept what we must, let go of things that don’t matter and honor the things that do.

How about that? Unfortunately, it’s not available for my phone’s version of Android, but you might be interested (even if not in your 70s)!

___

One of my favorite “followees” over on Instagram is one whose handle there identifies her as ceegee_cgn — AKA Claudia, based in Cologne, Germany. Otherwise, I know only that she occasionally visits other cities around western continental Europe: Paris, Düsseldorf, Köln, Marseilles, and so on, with what seems to be an annual or semi-annual jaunt to Ibiza. Because I’ve asked her, I know that she shoots not with a “real” camera, but with an iPhone (“for me,” she says, “still the best way to catch moments while travelling”).

Okay, that’s not all I know about her. I know about her principally that she has an exquisite eye for geometry, especially the geometry of structures — and for the ways that people interact (often unconsciously) with the structures in whose presence they find themselves. Like most frequent photographers, she has favorite subjects which she returns to regularly, but she always finds a little something just so — just right, just different enough — to imbue the shot with one-of-a-kind authenticity. Her photos are almost exclusively in black-and-white, sometimes only B&W, with no shades of gray at all, and she generally follows the original Instagram format restriction (square pix only — exceptions for the rare portrait-format video clips). In a given caption, you’ll find little specific information: lots of general-purpose hashtags (#bw_lightandshadow, etc.)… which might be frustrating for some. But — for me — the dearth of information paradoxically adds weight to her reverence for the sheer beauty of form, for two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional geometry: girders, windows, railway stations, sidewalks, stairways… all boiled down to straight lines, circles, graceful loops and whorls, all the myriad fingerprints of civilization.

I thought I’d close today’s (this year’s) “Potpourri” post with a tiny gallery of some of Claudia’s work (the last one, a rare color shot). I’ve been following her for years, but the ten photos here go back only to 2022 or so.

My thanks to her for her permission to grace this space with a selection of her work. I greatly admire it, and am delighted to feature it in this post.

And with that, I’ll bring this yearly installment to a close. I hope you (whoever you are) are, like me, continuing to find reasons to be happy as well as, uh, excruciatingly aware of the passage of time. Cling to the good stuff, note but give no particular weight to the bad, and perhaps we’ll find ourselves crossing paths again next year, hmm?

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“The Place Where, When You Go There, They Have to Take You In”

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[“At a special corner in the town where The Boy lived stood a silvery steel pole which rang like a dinner plate when you struck it with a broom handle or fast-moving bicycle. Atop the pole were mounted two white-painted sheet-metal strips turned at right angles to each other. On one, the embossed black letters spelled out THIRD ST; on the other, HOLLY ST.” (Those black-on-white sheet-metal strips, of course, have since been replaced.) Photo by John E. Simpson.]

The universe’s mysterious energies have aligned to offer two quotes (via whiskey river) which seem in tune with personal life of the moment (given my weeklong stay with family back in New Jersey)…

First:

If you could be anyone, would you choose to be yourself?

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and then:

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded.

(Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles [source])

Not from whiskey river, but in that same dimension of spirit:

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it.

(George A. Moore [source])

…and:

Deep in his being, The Boy knew that somewhere out there existed a world wider than his own, and what The Boy thought he knew about this wider world was this:

Somehow, weirdly, this other world continued to spin on its axis even without The Boy at its core. Presidents, artists, convicts, detectives, and saints walked on this strange world’s uncracked pavement (their mothers’ backs forever safe). It was a world where movie musicals were filmed, where automobiles functioned as their manufacturers promised. A world where eating caramel candy by the bagful led straight to smiles — yes, as in The Boy’s own world — but never to a dentist’s chair. A world where he would fear neither the shadows of the night nor the heavy climbing rope of gym class, a world in which no one he loved would ever die, and there was no ham.

The people in this wider world spoke in exotic tongues, their melodic speech lacking the sweetly nasal twang and erratic rhythms to which The Boy was accustomed. Their hair (even beneath the helmets, war bonnets, and coonskin caps which many of them wore) was combed and coiffed immaculately. Some of these people had children, or were children themselves, some of whom were children that The Boy might eventually (in that murky future when he and they had ceased to be children) come to know and even to love.

This wider world lay not miles but whole light years of imagination from the town where The Boy lived, remote and untouchable, far beyond the range of his parents’ battered car (any of their half-dozen sputtering, wheezing, gear-grinding cars) which bore The Boy and his family through his own world’s dark heart.

Yet The Boy knew deep in his own heart that what separated that wider world from his own was not geography, but ignorance. Its people, even its children, knew nothing at all of his world. They did not (and would never) know of the boundaries of his life: the town, the neighborhood, the intricate web of human eccentricity which cross-hatched the map of The Boy’s daily wanderings…

(JES, The Boy’s Seasons: How It Was)

…and:

You can almost always return to Home, The Place. But — eventually — you can never return to Home, The Actuality. It’s as gone as gone can be. Those big maples along [my childhood home on] Third Street used to drop all their leaves in autumn over about the same month-long period, and you could smell the aroma of curbside leaf fires (which were still legal, until they weren’t) that whole time. I used to think about that aroma, those glowing and brown particles of smoke drifting up and through the air, eventually settling on neighbors’ lawns and out onto the surface of the river. Those particles are still there, in some form — I was right about that. But eventually they stopped being added to, and eventually the trees themselves were gone, and now few people in the town remember or think of any of that. They’ve all got their own homes, homes they’ll eventually never be able to return to.

We’ll all just have to carry Home, The Actuality, around with us, until our own blood stops pumping. And then Home, The Actuality, will have some new and just as unrecoverable shape: whatever Home is, it’s not something “out there” to return to. It’s something inside, to which we can all return (or not) as we want, as often as we want.

(JES, quora.com [source])

__________

Note: the title of today’s post is a quotation from Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” ([source]).

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RAMH@16: The Plate Tectonics of Blogging

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[Image: animated GIF (five loops) of a brief clip from the film Miller’s Crossing (1990). Why five loops? Well, I had to stop somewhere! The original version of this GIF looped endlessly, which might be fun/interesting as a meme-type image on a social media platform, but looked ridiculous — compulsive and twitchy — when spread across a canvas this grand. Heh.]

Per tradition, here’s a playlist to start off my anniversary post this year. It’s the soundtrack from — yes! — Miller’s Crossing. (Tempting to select just track , for obvious reasons, but this is the whole thing.)

[Original score for Miller’s Crossing by Carter Burwell (a.k.a. “the third Coen Brother” for his frequent collaborations with Joel and Ethan Coen (writers/directors/producers of this film and others). In the film itself there were also a handful of songs not written by Burwell, including Jelly Roll Morton’s “King Porter Stomp” and Jimmy Campbell’s “Goodnight Sweetheart.” Note that the score as embedded here is brief, only about a half-hour in length.]

The very first post here on Running After My Hat laid out what — as I prematurely imagined — the blog would be “about”: a series of booklets I’d originally written as Christmas gifts for my family. In fairly short order, I added posts providing further information about the background of these little things, such as this one about the real-world town which provided the setting for the books’ accounts of growing up there.

Well, things happened (as things, yes, tend to do). I kept revisiting the How It Was stories, in my head and on the blog. When such a thing became possible, I experimented with turning the booklets into e-booklets, for distribution to a wider audience. But these experiments never quite got off the ground…

…until recently.

Mainly, and outwardly, this newfound effort was driven by my rediscovering a cache of short stories I’d written over the course of some 25 years. (Of course, this rediscovery itself had to wait until The Missus and I finally settled down somewhere after our two years’ rambling around the country, post-COVID lockdown, and started unpacking boxes.) After about four months of modestly revamping and reformatting the stories — to say nothing of banging my head against the whole “make an e-book, and then make a REAL book” learning curve, those stories are now available via Amazon either in Kindle-readable format or in print (paperback) editions of two anthologies. Yes, that’s a photo of the “author’s proof” editions of the paperbacks at right. (The gray bands across the covers do not appear in the books as finally printed.)

The links below take you to Amazon’s pages for the paperback editions; once there, you can if you want opt for the eBook (Kindle) version — and regardless of format, there are several pages of sample text available:

  • Webster, Unabridged: a half-dozen tales featuring the same protagonist — occasionally mistaken for the author — known only as Webster.
  • Left-Handed Inventions: a full dozen stories — different characters, different genres, different “voices,” and so on.

…all of which has led me to visit — again — the notion of “publishing” the How It Was series. I should have more on that front sometime in the next few months.

In the meantime…

You probably know already of the Substack platform for making one’s writing available to wider audiences — basically, a form of what we’ve always called blogging, with some 21st-century accoutrements (easy subscriptions — paid or free; easily managed mailing lists and commenting systems; “Share” buttons and the like).

Substack first made its way into my consciousness because they’d signed up some “big names”: Garrison Keillor, for instance, and Salman Rushdie, and novel/short-story author George Saunders. It’s a very simple platform both for posting occasional writings and for reading them: more restrictive than, say, a WordPress blog in terms of what you can do besides post writing there, and in terms of the look-and-feel of your site, but yes, much much simpler.

Anyway, long story short, I set up a Substack site — also called Running After My Hat — back in November. As you can see, I haven’t really figured out (or “decided”) what exactly I’m doing there as well as here. The things I’ve posted there are original, not duplicates of what’s here… on the other hand, there was no particular reason why I didn’t post them here instead. They’re pretty much RAMH posts in Substack garb.

But of course they’re not identical, except superficially. “Under the hood,” a post on Substack (vs. on a WordPress blog) is more likely to be read by a wider variety of new folks, because of the easy subscribe-and-share features.

I don’t expect to abandon RAMH-the-original for the new platform; I hope eventually to figure out a way to keep both healthy and familiar to the people used to reading them, without cross-posting duplication.

But the main reason I’m bringing it up now is because of a series called “The Fiction Garage.” (The series as a whole is collected here.) It doesn’t get into the nuts-and-bolts of self-publishing on Amazon, but it does lay out the general outline (for now) of how and why the two anthologies — Webster, Unabridged and Left-Handed Inventions — came into being. At some point, I hope to add a related series on getting How It Was (subtitle: The Boy’s Year) into print as well.

Which will sorta bring the whole “running after my How It Was” saga full circle.

In the meantime (again) I’m glad you — whoever you are* — are here, reading this. Thank you for 16 years’ attention, however intermittent or steady!

[Yes, I know — corny and obvious, maybe. But surely I’m entitled!]

_____________________________________________

* “Whoever you are*, haha. Right. I probably know who you are — among others, thank you for your years of reading, especially: Cynth and Michael (someone’s bruther); Marta; Paul in Southeast Asia and Susan in Italy; and a bunch of people who may still be putting in silent appearances from time to time: Nance, Misssy, Jayne, Squirrel, whaddayameantheresnodessert… the list is endless! And it goes without saying, maybe, but thank you as well to my anonymous (because, really, unknown) source of weekly blogging inspiration: the always thoughtful, always challenging whiskey river — hard to imagine RAMH without that mysterious hat blowing by the window and pulling me outside every few days.

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Time Passes. This Could Be the Start of Something Big, and/or of Something Small…

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[I recently came across a small, grimy tin box which had originally contained cough drops; folded up inside were several sheets of lined “notebook paper,” as we called it, obviously stashed there for safekeeping (if not posterity). That’s my “handwriting,” of course. To the best of my recollection, therefore, this would have been from around 60 years ago; by sometime in 1966, I’d switched to block printing. This is thus — as far as I know, barring any other treasure buried in the sundry cardboard boxes around me — the only remaining scrap of evidence from childhood of my aspirations to write fiction: a “parody” of The Wizard of Oz. (My cartoonist friend Dean was illustrating the book-to-be… I wonder if he still has those drawings???) Looking back on it now, I’m kinda impressed that I seem to have already grasped the idea we now refer to as “meta-[whatever].”]

From whiskey river (first stanza):

January First

The year’s doors open
like those of language,
toward the unknown.
Last night you told me:
                                tomorrow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper.
Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.

I opened my eyes late.
For a second of a second
I felt what the Aztec felt,
on the crest of the promontory,
lying in wait
for the time’s uncertain return
through cracks in the horizon.

But no, the year had returned.
It filled all the room
and my look almost touched it.
Time, with no help from us,
had placed
in exactly the same order as yesterday
houses in the empty street,
snow on the houses,
silence on the snow.

You were beside me,
still asleep.
The day had invented you
but you hadn’t yet accepted
being invented by the day.
–—Nor possibly by being invented, either.
You were in another day.

You were beside me
and I saw you, like the snow,
asleep among appearances.
Time, with no help from us,
invents houses, streets, trees
and sleeping women.

When you open your eyes
we’ll walk, once more,
among the hours and their inventions.
We’ll walk among appearances
and bear witness to time and its conjugations.
Perhaps we’ll open the day’s doors.
And then we shall enter the unknown.

(Octavio Paz, translated by Elizabeth Bishop [source])

Not from whiskey river:

January in Paris

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
—Paul Valéry

That winter I had nothing to do
but tend the kettle in my shuttered room
on the top floor of a pensione near a cemetery,

but I would sometimes descend the stairs,
unlock my bicycle, and pedal along the cold city streets

often turning from a wide boulevard
down a narrow side street
bearing the name of an obscure patriot.

I followed a few private rules,
never crossing a bridge without stopping
mid-point to lean my bike on the railing
and observe the flow of the river below
as I tried to better understand the French.

In my pale coat and my Basque cap
I pedaled past the windows of a patisserie
or sat up tall in the seat, arms folded,
and clicked downhill filling my nose with winter air.

I would see beggars and street cleaners
in their bright uniforms, and sometimes
I would see the poems of Valéry,
the ones he never finished but abandoned,
wandering the streets of the city half-clothed.

Most of them needed only a final line
or two, a little verbal flourish at the end,
but whenever I approached,
they would retreat from their ashcan fires
into the shadows—thin specters of incompletion,

forsaken for so many long decades
how could they ever trust another man with a pen?

I came across the one I wanted to tell you about
sitting with a glass of rosé at a café table—
beautiful, emaciated, unfinished,
cruelly abandoned with a flick of panache

by Monsieur Paul Valéry himself,
big fish in the school of Symbolism
and for a time, president of the Committee of Arts and Letters
of the League of Nations if you please.

Never mind how I got her out of the café,
past the concierge and up the flights of stairs—
remember that Paris is the capital of public kissing.

And never mind the holding and the pressing.
It is enough to know that I moved my pen
in such a way as to bring her to completion,

a simple, final stanza, which ended,
as this poem will, with the image
of a gorgeous orphan lying on a rumpled bed,
her large eyes closed,
a painting of cows in a valley over her head,

and off to the side, me in a window seat
blowing smoke from a cigarette at dawn.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

They imagined. But they could not imagine where all of it started. For all of their intelligence, there were limits to their imagination. They could not know of things that were not of their essence. They could not know of the Void. But the mystery of such things they did seem to feel, and it tingled in them and opened them up…

Time fluttered and spun and wound itself up. Time stretched and compressed and dilated and dissolved… Although time could be measured and sliced by the beats of the hydrogen atoms, now that other minds existed time did not move on its own. Or rather, even if it moved on its own, its movement was relevant only to how it was witnessed. Time was partly conception. Time was partly a thing in the mind. Just as events. Since the universe began, nearly 1033 ticks of the hydrogen clocks had transpired. Stars had been born. Stars had aged, then exploded or dwindled to dim and cold ashes. Galaxies had collided. Living cells had formed. Then minds. Cities had risen on deserts. Cities had fallen. Civilizations had flourished, then ended. Then new civilizations emerged. Nothing was lasting, nothing was permanent. Living creatures, beings with minds, were the most fleeting of all. They came and went, came and went, came and went, billions upon billions of lives, each quick as one breath. Atoms converged in their special arrangements to make each precious life, held together for moments, then scattered to dull lifeless matter again…

Only one-millionth of one-billionth of 1 percent of the mass of the universe abided in living form.

(Alan Lightman [source])

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A Month Mixed and Remixed, Mulled Over and Muddled

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[Image: “Christmas in Color and Grayscale,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river (first paragraph):

In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it Christmas and went to church; the Jews called it Hanukkah and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say “Merry Christmas!” or “Happy Hanukkah!” or (to the atheists) “Look out for the wall!”

These days, people say “Season’s Greetings,” which, when you think about it, means nothing. It’s like walking up to somebody and saying “Appropriate Remark” in a loud, cheerful voice. But “Season’s Greetings” is safer, because it does not refer to any actual religion. Some day, I imagine, even “Season’s Greetings” will be considered too religious, and we’ll celebrate the Holiday Season by saying “Have a nice day.”

(Dave Barry [source])

…and:

Initiation Song from The Finders’ Lodge

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

(Ursula K. Le Guin [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe.

Pine Cove, her pseudo-Tudor architecture all tarted up in holiday quaintage–twinkle lights in all the trees along Cypress Street, fake snow blown into the corner of every shop’s windows, miniature Santas and giant candles hovering illuminated beneath every streetlight–opened to the droves of tourists from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the Central Valley searching for a truly meaningful moment of Christmas commerce. Pine Cove, sleepy California coastal village–a toy town, really, with more art galleries than gas stations, more wine-tasting rooms than hardware stores–lay there, as inviting as a drunken prom queen, as Christmas loomed, only five days away. Christmas was coming, and with Christmas this year, would come the Child. Both were vast and irresistible, and miraculous. Pine Cove was expecting only one of the two.

Which is not to say that the locals didn’t get into the Christmas spirit. The two weeks before and after Christmas provided a welcome wave of cash into the town’s coffers, tourist-starved since summer. Every waitress dusted off her Santa hat and clip-on reindeer antlers and checked to make sure that there were four good pens in her apron. Hotel clerks steeled themselves for the rage of last-minute overbookings, while housekeepers switched from their normal putrid baby-powder air fresheners to a more festive putrid pine and cinnamon. Down at the Pine Cove Boutique they put a “Holiday Special” sign on the hideous reindeer sweater and marked it up for the tenth consecutive year. The Elks, Moose, Masons, and VFWs, who were basically the same bunch of drunk old guys, planned furiously for their annual Christmas parade down Cypress Street, the theme of which this year would be Patriotism in the Bed of a Pickup (mainly because that had been the theme of their Fourth of July parade and everyone still had the decorations).

(Christopher Moore [source])

…and:

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs where the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn’t the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house.

“What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?”

“No,” Jack said, “Good King Wencelas. I’ll count three.”

One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.

Good King Wencelas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen…

And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small, dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.

“Perhaps it was a ghost,” Jim said.

“Perhaps it was trolls,” Dan said, who was always reading.

“Let’s go in and see if there’s any jelly left,” Jack said. And we did that.

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang “Cherry Ripe,” and another uncle sang “Drake’s Drum.” It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

(Dylan Thomas [source])

…and

#21: Few shared cultural experiences in developed countries provoke the winds of nostalgia like those bestirring the air during the month of December. And everyone’s recalled experience of the month seems at odds with everyone else’s: “It used to be so horrible!” “It used to be so wonderful!” “I always loved this!” “I always loved that!” It’s impossible to declare, really, which memories might be correct and which, false, let alone which might be only half-true and in what ways.

And when you stop to think about that, it seems hardly to matter: that you remember something at all, and are now sharing it, passing it back and forth across the table like a small bowl of treats — that alone seems to be the point.

Meanwhile, today, here in December — whatever the month or day — is here, now, right? So then: what now? What tidbit will you share in a week, next year, in five years, in ten? Which might outlive you entirely? It’s there among the 86,400 seconds of the day, glittering like a tiny diamond in a sandbox… but only if the light hits it from the right angle. Are you looking at it properly, ready to see?

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

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You Know What Water Is; So Do I. Now: Let’s Define Water…

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[Image: “H2O (Tiffins Edition, Orlando, Florida),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things. If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others’ shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.

(Nick Cave [source])

…and, from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

A Word on Statistics

Out of every hundred people,

those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four – well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).

Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred—
a figure that has never varied yet.

(Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak [source])

Not from whiskey river:

We assume too readily that we share the one world with other people. It is true at the objective level that we inhabit the same physical space as other humans; the sky is, after all, the one visual constant that unites everyone’s perception of being in the world. Yet this outer world offers no access to the inner world of an individual. At a deeper level, each person is the custodian of a completely private, individual world. Sometimes our beliefs, opinions, and thoughts are ultimately ways of consoling ourselves that we are not alone with the burden of a unique, inner world. It suits us to pretend that we all belong to the one world, but we are more alone than we realize. This aloneness is not simply the result of our being different from each other; it derives more from the fact that each of us is housed in a different body. The idea of human life being housed in a body is fascinating. For instance, when people come to visit your home, they come bodily. They bring all of their inner worlds, experiences, and memories into your house through the vehicle of their bodies. While they are visiting you, their lives are not elsewhere; they are totally there with you, before you, reaching out toward you. When the visit is over, their bodies stand up, walk out, and carry this hidden world away. This recognition also illuminates the mystery of making love. It is not just two bodies that are close, but rather two worlds; they circle each other and flow into each other. We are capable of such beauty, delight, and terror because of this infinite and unknown world within us.

(John O’Donohue [source])

…and:

: Our souls’ terrains — shaped as they are by our varying natures and nurtures — differ so much from one another’s that it makes little sense to say “X happened,” because none of us can say what, exactly, X was in the first place…

Get a couple of friends; each of you take a five-gallon can of water into the forest, to the desert, to a suburban street; there, wherever you are, each of you open the lid, tilt the can, and empty the water, trickling it out here or dumping it in a flood there as you will. Watch the results carefully.

Now report back on the question: what happened to the water?

And what — now that all three of you are thinking about it — what sufficiently defines your sense of water that you can say, without contradiction, what water itself even is?

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

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My 1970s AM-Radio Playlist: 1978-79

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[Yes, I’m wrapping up this painful series by combining two years’ lists into one… I think it’s called “cutting one’s losses”!]

Many of life’s most difficult lessons can, in the retelling, be introduced with the sentence It seemed like a good idea at the time. As I’ve worked through this series of posts ostensibly about the pop music of the 1970s — at least as I experienced it in my firmly middle-of-the-road suburban South Jersey life — I’ve realized how much and how often I could have used that opening line.

First, there’s the “good idea” of building this playlist at all, at least the way I’ve done it: examining each year separately and including every single song which I still remember hearing, no matter how inconsequential to my life then or since. (And of course, no matter whether or not I actually thought a given song was very good.) The final list (on Spotify) grew to include almost 200 songs; it would take over twelve hours to listen to it all. I don’t know anyone (least of all, myself) with the curiosity and/or patience required to listen to it all.

Second, I decided to blog not just about the decade’s music or pop culture in general, but about events of my personal life back then, year by year. And you know what? I came to genuinely hate re-experiencing all those “good ideas” gone wrong. Hence my collapsing these two years into one: I’m just sick of thinking about it.

Herewith, a blitz through my life then, between mid-1977 and the end of 1979:

In August 1977, the sister with whom I’d been sharing an apartment got married and moved a good distance away. I moved back in with my parents. And my only income, right after I wrecked my teaching career (I’d had the “good idea” of “becoming a writer”), came from delivering furniture for a furniture store about 15-20 miles distant. Since that job didn’t pay very well at all, I decided it’d be a “good idea” not to blow money on insurance for my motorcycle or my car; indeed, that remained a good idea right up until I had a hypothetically minor traffic violation while on my motorcycle. In New Jersey, at least back then, operating an uninsured vehicle required judges to suspend one’s driving privileges completely for six months. So there went my furniture-delivery job.

[A not-inconsequential aside: I also decided to insist to family and friends that I did in fact have insurance, simply didn’t have my insurance card with me at the time. They were, of course, outraged by the miscarriage of justice — right up until I had to confess that, uh, well, no, I actually did not have insurance at all…]

I got a job, then, working in the shipping department of a major publishing company just 10-15 minutes away from my parents’ house. Even better, my other sister — who had not yet gotten married — also worked there, and also lived with my parents. So I had a pleasant ride to and from work, at least. I worked for the publisher all through the remainder of 1977, and then all the way to early 1979.

Somewhere in there, after my driving privileges were restored, I started seeing a young woman who also worked in the warehouse. This seemed like a “good idea” at the time because… well, it didn’t seem like a good idea at all, except on the most superficial level. (Interpret that as you will, and you’re probably not wrong.) Inevitably, I guess, I ended up simply walking away from that relationship when I got another job — a much better one — requiring me to move away from the area; I promised to keep in touch, though: a promise which was a “good idea” only from a cheap, heinously callous perspective.

But hey, I had a better job! And this one had staying power: I was a computer-programming trainee for The Phone Company — AT&T, which was then still one single unified enterprise, the only source of any telephone services in the country. I would stay with AT&T, moving on up the career path (technical, to management, and back to technical) until the 1990s…

…but on the way, in the first few months I was with them, I fell in love, hard, with a young woman in my training class. This, I still believe, was not merely a good idea but an excellent one — right up until the relationship ended six months later. (I never understood why it ended, but that it did apparently seemed a good idea to her.)

So there I was at the end of a decade’s worth of embarrassingly bad — and/or clumsily executed — ideas. When January 1980 rolled around, I didn’t know about the genuinely excellent (and well executed) ideas which lay ahead, and I didn’t know about the godawful missteps I’d take to undo the excellence of many of those ideas. Really, I didn’t know a lot of things.

But I do know that for my purposes now, it’s time to tie off off this series of posts here on RAMH.

About the playlist…

The same general rules apply here as in earlier years’ lists: songs appear in chronological order by release date; they’re not selected for their importance (to me or to the world), just because they sold enough copies to make the Billboard “Hot 100 Singles” lists for their respective years; and thanks to the way AM radio and the music business worked back then, the release dates run not from January 1 through December 31, but more like mid-year to mid-year.

Specific notes:

  • Suddenly coming across 1979’s “Just When I Needed You Most” gave me (in October, as I’ve already said) the “good idea” to undertake this playlist series at all. Fittingly, I guess, my most maudlin self has always strongly associated the song with the collapse of the relationship at the end of that year.
  • Disco was such a thing on AM radio in the late ’70s, especially with the 1977 release of Saturday Night Fever and its soundtrack album. I’d be lying if I said The Beegees had only one Billboard “Top 100” song in 1978-79. But that doesn’t mean I felt compelled to include more than one (“Stayin’ Alive”).
  • Not recently, but I have over the years blogged, at least in passing, about some of these songs (“Blue Bayou,” “Fire,” “Chuck E’s in Love,” “My Sharona“…) — maybe the music stuck with me more than I imagined.
  • I don’t feel at all guilty or hypocritical for including two Linda Ronstadt tunes — one for each year.
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