I’ve Been Kissed By Aunt Rose On The Grapes

I never could figure out what the fellow with smallpox and the hot wife was singing about when the original version of this song used to dribble out of the Muzak speakers back in the day. It was like an earworm Rorschach Blotch. And this karaoke version making the rounds of the So Bad It’s Good Interverse isn’t helping in the forensic lyric investigation department, either.

I’ve been kicked in the groin and the taint

Believable, but I don’t think so.

I’ve been flicked on my nose in Green Bay

Prolly not.

I’ve been licked like a pole in a tent

Unlikely.

I’ve been pissed since a quarter to eight

Sounds closer.

I play whist with Tebow and crochet

Getting colder, I think.

I coexist with a goy in Bombay

It shows a spirit of diversity, but I don’t think it’s accurate.

I have a cyst on my hip, Beyonce

That one right there. I don’t care if it’s right. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

(Don’t miss Pavarotti at 1:26. HORK!)

So I’m Eating My Lunch

So I’m eating my lunch.

It’s 42 degrees out. The sky is like passing a battleship in a skiff. We got a couple of inches of snow yesterday. The plow came by a couple times, yesterday afternoon and evening, which flummoxed me. I checked to see if the seal on the door of the truck had been altered to read:  The Department of Public Works and Mordant Humor. It hadn’t.

So I’m eating my lunch. I hear this sound. My wife staggered up next to me, and we looked out the window together. “It can’t be,” we said in unison.

Oh, it be, as Elaine Benes used to say. There is an ice cream truck driving around our neighborhood.

So, I’m eating my lunch. When I’m done, I’m going down into the basement, and assembling all the components and pieces and parts and appurtenances and tools I own, I’m going to spend what may very well be the bulk of the remainder of my natural life trying to assemble  a machine that can possibly measure how utterly and irrevocably insane you’d have to be to drive an ice cream truck through the slush in forty-degree weather around a moribund mill town populated exclusively by elderly women and their dogs.

If I’m successful — in a decade or three — and have any time left, I’ll turn my attention to inventing a second machine capable of measuring the insanity of any customers.

Don’t Know Much About History

I don’t know why the town I live in has a statue of Billy Mays with an ax standing guard over it. I don’t know a lot of things.

I don’t know when spring’s supposed to begin. I ran out of firewood about a month ago. But I didn’t run out of winter.  It’s thirty-three degrees right now, at 3:30 in the afternoon. It’s snowing. Earlier it was sleeting. I don’t have a Bible handy to figure out what might happen next.  I didn’t move to western Maine expecting palm trees or anything, but I expected the bears to be brown around here, at least.

There’s a disreputable heap of snow in my front yard. It’s about 18″ deep. It’s the distillation of all the snow that was heaped there all winter. I don’t know if it has tuberculosis, or leprosy, but it certainly doesn’t look well. It’s waiting to be euthanized by the spring. I want to drive to Punxsutawney and insert a few fistfuls of it into Phil.

I don’t know why the cat’s angry with me. I open the door to let him out, and he glares at me. Perhaps he figures this is all my fault. He occasionally comes into my workroom downstairs, and wants to be let out the door I have there, which leads to a ramp to the ground. I think he figures that since it’s still winter out the front door, he’ll go out the side door instead, because it’s most likely summer if you go out there.

I don’t know why the cat is the only creature in my house that knows how to enter my workshop properly. He simply walks noiselessly way out in front of me and looks at me until I see him. Everyone else in the house sneaks up on me inadvertently and startles me. I’ll lose a finger someday over it. I’ve lost my temper over it already, but a temper is never as effective as amputations for fixing things in people’s minds. I don’t know why the cat is so solicitous about his comings and goings. I know in my heart that he’d eat my amputated finger off the floor if he thought he could get away with it.

I don’t know exactly why, but I pretended I didn’t know something, to get along with somebody else. I haven’t done that in a long time. When I was young, I did it a lot. I went to school, and then worked with people that distrusted intellect, so I hid mine. It’s not manners; I didn’t refrain from telling someone with a big nose that they had a big nose. I acted dumb to get along. The world is becoming a place where that’s about all you can do. Dumb people seem happier anyway. I don’t know; maybe I should hit myself in the head with a shovel until I’m ebullient.

I don’t know why, but my little son once memorized all the Presidents, and did a little mathematical trick with the order of them. It was quite sweet and precocious of him, and the charm in it was multiplied by the accent his missing teeth offered to the proceedings.  He was asked to repeat it — endlessly. Eventually he got tired of it, and lied like a Turk in a bazaar and said, “I don’t know,” when someone asked him about it for the umpteenth time. It’s boring being a human filing cabinet, and he rebelled against it. That’s my boy.

Jeezum Crow, the plow just went by. I don’t know why.

Take The Sippican Cottage Parenting Test (from 2006)

I’m an OK parent. I’ve seen really good parents. I’m not them.

I am A Parent, though. There is a pass/fail aspect to it, and I defy any person to say I don’t pass. I think that many parents fail because they are not satisfied with passing; they are determined to be THE BEST PARENT EVAR. And they mess up their kids trying.

There is only one way to demonstrate that you are THE BEST PARENT EVAR – your kid must be Bruce Lee/ Buzz Aldrin/ Tom Brady/ Albert Einstein/ Steve Jobs. Unless of course you’ve got a female of the species, you know, the ballerina/astronaut/CEO/oarswoman/scholar/runway model. There will be no finger painting. You will learn Mandarin Chinese while listening to Bach fugues and eating free range organic watercress sandwiches and drinking only water collected from terne metal gutters from French cathedrals, while waiting for your violin lessons to start.

While wearing a helmet.

I’m not THE BEST PARENT EVAR. My children get three squares a day, and can read and write after a fashion, and their peers don’t point and giggle after they walk by, and other parents ask their children: “Why don’t you invite that Sullivan boy over, he’s nice and polite.” They sleep all night in their beds untroubled by adult cares. We don’t watch slasher movies together. They go outdoors occasionally. They won’t get mumps or whooping cough because they have THE BEST PARENT EVAR who won’t let them be immunized because immunization leads to being average! Like everybody else!

NO WIRE HANGERS!

Sorry, I was channeling a bit. My kids are not extraordinary. You know, like Michael Jackson or The Olsen Wraiths…oops I meant Twins, or Paris Hilton or River Phoenix or Screech or Danny Bonaduce or Gary Coleman or … well, you get the picture.

Anyway, I’d like to set your mind at ease. Take the Sippican Cottage Parenting test. Don’t worry, it’s Pass/Fail. Watch the following video. If it doesn’t look like you and your children, then you’re probably fine.

How’d you do? I thought so.

I wonder how many kids that woman had before she started the act.

Dutch Treat

Wes Montgomery plays in Holland sometime in the sixties by the look of it.

The smile was genuine. Wes Montgomery had a perfection in demeanor for his job. Serious and genial in equal measure.

I think it came for his background. He was a real person. Too many entertainers are born to the ermine of prodigy treatment almost from birth. Hothouse flowers. Wes Montgomery was more of a florist delivery van driver than a hothouse flower.

Wes played with his thumb instead of a plectrum or his fingertips. I’ve heard that he started playing like that because he worked as a machinist all day to support his family, and had to practice in the middle of the night, and strumming with his thumb was quieter and allowed his wife to sleep. One’s eye pauses over such minutiae when considering a man’s life, and wonders if you’ve discovered something sublime abroad in this world of pain and heartache.

To be successful after toiling in obscurity for a long time is a remarkable thing. It makes people smile to be popular among strangers instead of sneering at their publicist and audience alike while demanding your M&Ms get sorted. You are a fully-formed human person before the world gets its chance to deform you with celebrity.

It’s almost a half-hour of good music, with the end the best of all. Wes goes over what he’s playing with a bunch of strangers who are game and capable but not hip. This is often what the highest levels of music instruction look like: the chance to play with someone like Wes Montgomery, and talk to him. Wes already offered the highest level of instruction on being a proper male human being with his machinist thumb.

Interview with Wes Montgomery in Guitar Player Magazine. He passed away in 1968.

Month: April 2013

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