without feeling fine

It was around this time last year that a small, black and orange female long-haired cat began showing up each night to munch on any food left over by our usual gang of ferals.

I named her "Contessa" because she looked like a photo-negative of Princess, another of our frequent feline visitors. This was soon shortened to "Tessa," "Tess," and (my favorite pet name for her) "Tessie the Tortoise." She became a regular, showing up first by herself, then later in the company of an even smaller female calico (a sister, we think) we named "Pepi." Tess made a point of watching out for her companion. She stood guard over the driveway until her friend had her fill, then the pair would take off together to their hidden lair.

The wife and I have a pretty good track record when it comes to earning the trust of the local ferals (to the point where the wife refuses to call them such, preferring "outside" or "garage" cats), but Tess was a hard sell. She loved the idea of human companionship, but would retreat to a safe distance whenever an actual pat or scratch loomed. She did eventually come around, and in the past few weeks would do figure-eights around my legs as I stroked her fur. She never warmed to being picked up, though, and the one time I presumed to try, she tried to razor my face with her claws, then spent the rest of the afternoon trying to wash the stink of my touch from her fur.

Maura did managed to coax Tess and Pepi to take up residence in the garage for the winter. Beside the warmth and shelter the space provides, it was also supposed to give us an opportunity to keep tabs on the pair. The presence of the large, tough, and fiercely territorial neutered male Marmalade would keep away any would-be suitors until we got a chance to get the lasses seen to by the low-cost spay and neuter people. A reasonable plan, though it didn't stop Tess from getting knocked up by one of the oversexed toms who slipped through the population control net.

Tess, with Pepi in tow, left the garage's communal quarters for the privacy of their old hidden lair, though they still showed up at our house at mealtime. Once Tess gave birth to her litter, she and Pepi switched off between maternal duties, one keeping an eye on the kids while the other grabbed a bite to eat. (Poor Pepi got the shit end of the deal as Tess chose to linger and lounge on our patio for most of the day while Pepi was stuck babysitting.)

We'd been through a similar scenario with a mother cat and kits a few years previous. The ideal plan is to wait until the kittens have been weaned and start following the mother to the food station, then nab the lot of them. The mom gets spayed and released, and the kittens socialized for adoption. Based on information given to us by the local feral cat coalition person over the past couple weeks, Tess's kittens had started to wander and we'd begun to coordinate our plans accordingly.

Last night I got a call from the woman in charge of feral cat coalition. Some neighbors of ours had discovered a dead cat in their backyard and were too nervous about potential diseases to dispose of it, and she was wondering if we could take care of it for them. The corpse had dark fur and was located pretty close to where we figured that Tess and Pepi had their lair, which immediately had me imagining the worst. The last I'd seen Tess was Monday afternoon. She seemed well enough then, but she missed three mealtimes since.

It was late by the time Maura got home last night, so we had put off getting verification until this morning, hoping against hope that our fears would not be confirmed.

They were. In the mud of the neighbor's yard lay poor Tess's body. There weren't any signs of violence or other possible causes of death. Maura suspects she was poisoned (not intentionally) by something. I wonder if she wasn't clipped by a car (or knowing my neighborhood, some shithead speeding down the street in an SUV) and died trying to make it back to her hiding spot.

As rotten and unwelcome as the discovery was, at least we know what happened to her and aren't left to guess her whereabouts, and we were able to lay poor Tess to rest down by the back end of our yard.

A distressed and confused Pepi has since moved back into our garage, where hopefully she'll take up permanent residence. We've still got to round up Tess's litter, which will be trickier without having her around to vouch for us.

I knew on Monday that this was going to be one fuck of a week.

The Damned - I Just Can't Be Happy Today (from Machine Gun Etiquette, 1979) - No kidding.

one hundred hairs make a man

I was flipping though some old comics the other day when I came across this ad:


...and I got to thinking about my ranking on the Machismo Index, and how of late it seems to be dropping faster than this blog's Technorati authority score. Perhaps the addition of some facial hair would be just the ticket to turning things around. The only problem is that while I can grow wiry ginger-blonde stubble like nobody's business, after a week or so my masculine scruffiness tops out and refuses to cross the threshold into true beard and 'stache territory. (This is also around the time when my wife complains about how the stubble causes her to break out in hives when I give her a chaste peck on the cheek.)

So, Masculiner Co. of East Orange, New Jersey, can you and your MODOCRYLIC face toupees help me out of this frustrating dilemma? I'm putting my hopes and the contents of my piggy bank (eight bucks in total; I already have the sideburns covered the natural way) in your able hands.

Four to six weeks later.....


Hmmm... I was expecting a little something more from MODOCRYLIC, but it is certainly trimmable and easily styled with a pair of safety scissors. The verdict is still out on its net effect on my sense of manhood, though I have found myself experiencing random urges to swing by the local Harley dealership (and to send away fror literature about opening a southern fried chicken franchise). I also seem to have acquired a deep intuitive understanding of .38 Special's body of work, and have unconsciously found myself visiting online sporting goods stores to price gun racks for Super Lumina. It's a very curious phenom--

--HEY! ARE YOU LOOKING AT MY WOMAN? YOU BETTER NOT BE, LESS'N YOU FIND YOURSELF FACE DOWN IN THE PARKING LOT, BUSTER, LOOKIN' FOR YOUR MISSING TEETH.

Y'know, I think I'm better off just sticking with the peachfuzz Mother Nature gave me, along with those awkward pauses whenever a male neighbor or co-worker asks me if I caught the game last weekend.

Deee-Lite - You Sexy Thing (from the Dumb and Dumber OST, 1994) - I'd rather watch the Golf Channel than Dumb and Dumber (and I despise golf), but the soundtrack is better and more eclectic than it had any right to be. Echobelly? The Primitives? The Butthole Surfers? This trippy take on Hot Chocolate's signature song? Was there a mix-up in the post-production ADR between Dumb and Dumber and some psuedo-indie Gen X vehicle?

Sparks - Moustache (from Angst in My Pants, 1982) - Unforced idiosyncrasy and pop sensibility come so easily to the Mael Brothers, and make listening to this album a delightful, yet humbling, experience.

Desmond Dekker & The Aces - Fu Manchu (from Action! 1994) - Maybe that's the problem -- I should have checked the "Evil Overlord Variant" box on the order form. That version carries its own set of issues, however, such as the overwhelming compulsion to shout "Kill that meddling fool!" whenever someone pulls into a parking space before you or takes the last jelly donut during a staff meeting. Also: spontaneous outbreaks of maniacal chortling after getting back extra change from a vending machine purchase or unclogging the garbage disposal.

what reasons do you need

The first day back on the job is always the worst. I had such plans for today, too, but what wasn't burned out of me while playing catch-up fled to the blood-red beats of a whopping sinus headache.

The Boomtown Rats - I Don't Like Mondays (from The Fine Art of Surfacing, 1979) - Today especially, but unlike Brenda Spencer, I don't feel the need to inflict suffering on others because of it. Unless you happen to hate this song, that is.

clubbed to death

"It is such a quiet thing to fall…but far more terrible is to admit it." – Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

A lot of what I babble about here touches upon the associative power of music, especially the connection between music and memory. Sometimes the triggers are direct and/or nostalgia-related, like how listening to Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend,” excruciatingly trite as it may be, unleashes a torrent of non-specific memories of childhood summers in North Woburn. Other times, it’s a more subtle process, where upon hearing a song for the first time, a random half-forgotten chunk of memory gets shaken loose from my internal data store. It’s a bit like the IPCRESS process, but accidental and through pop music, rather than deliberate and through starvation and psychedelic light shows.

The specific instance which spawned this post was a case of the latter, more subtle, process. After coming across a track on Retro Music Snob (which if you aren’t a frequent visitor to, you ought to be – and I’m not saying that because RMS frequently links to me) by The Holograms, an all-female bubblegum punk pop band from Los Angeles, I headed on over to eMusic and picked up a copy of their album. Their music is an entertaining, and somewhat raunchy, crazy quilt of influences ranging from the Shangri-La’s to The Pandoras to the Lunachicks to the Go-Go’s early stuff, and I recommend it highly.

About thirty seconds into “Scene Whore,” I suffered a major flashback to an incident from about five years back. After I started driving again in the fall of 2001, Maura and I quickly settled into certain day-specific routines. Fridays became pizza and animal supplies days. We’d drive to the Pet Supplies Plus in Wellington Circle, stock up on all the necessities for the critters, then head off to pick up our food order at Antonio’s over by the Fellsway. The place was a traffic nightmare, so I used to park in the Johnny’s Foodmaster lot and just walk over to the pizza parlor. It was also handy because my bank had an ATM booth at the far end of the lot, and I could get some weekend cash there without having to make another stop.

On this particular occasion, I stepped inside the booth and the person ahead of me in line was a woman around my age (though it was a tough call) dressed to the nines in one of those over-the-top short, frilly dresses that were de rigueur for Route 1 dance clubs or the Class of 1986’s senior prom. Her bottle-copper hair was piled high and permed within an inch of its life, and her dark eye shadow ran in teary rivulets down her cheeks. In one shaky hand she held a cigarette and in the other a stack of credit cards, which she fed one at a time into the machine. Each rejected bid for a cash advance was met with a muffled sob and another deep drag.

As thick as the air was with tobacco smoke, the stink of wild desperation was thicker still. Witnessing the scene gave me repeated synaesthetic flashes of a gallows lever being pulled, the platform dropping, and the terminal snap of the vertebrae. To have dug a hole for one’s self that deep, where 9/10ths of the surface area of one’s personal Wheel of Potential Futures is filled with results like “overdose” or “murdered body found in an East Boston dumpster”…it boggles and depresses me immensely. Maybe I should stop by Keno Mart to cheer myself up.

Here’s the song that inspired today’s post, along with a similarly-themed slice of NYC “mutant disco” to round things out:

The Holograms – Scene Whore (from Night of 1000 Ex-Boyfriends, 2005)

Cristina – What’s a Girl to Do? (from Sleep It Off, 1984)

hurting runs off my shoulder

My mother passed away in November 1988, when I was sixteen years old. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it, but those thoughts tend to be more about the social and familiar upheavals that came in the wake of her death, rather than of my mother as a person.

I’ve spent decades coming to grips with my relationship with my father and the way in which he loomed large as both a positive and negative role model during my formative years. With my mother, though, it’s different. I can joke about being my father’s son (which can be the blackest of black humor, indeed), but the question of what it means to be the son of Ruthann Weiss has never been decisively resolved.

This is partially due to the passing of time, and the richness and vibrancy of my memories of the woman gradually fading over the years. I can remember specific events and incidents, but the overall picture of who my mother was as a person has gotten hazy. There was a degree of deliberate intent in that; right after my mother passed away, I made a conscious decision to pardon her shortcomings and problematic aspects of her personality. Which brings me to the other reason why I can’t get a decent handle on the role my mother played in shaping my life: her last eight years on earth were a downward spiral of obsessive behavior that crossed the line into outright insanity near the end.

As much as I tried to bury the memories related to her slide into increasing erratic and dysfunctional behavior, they still remain the strongest impressions I have, and color the rest of my memories, good and bad, of her. It confounds my attempts to piece together an accurate picture of who she was and what she meant to me, except…

…I remember something that happened a few weeks before her death. I was in my room drifting in and out of sleep. The house was cold, which may or may not have been because we stiffed the oil people one too many times (again). My mother came into my room. She was a little unsteady on her feet -- but not completely blitzed on port wine -- and said “You must be cold.” She took my army surplus jacket off the doorknob and spread it over me like a blanket, kissed me on the forehead, then trundled off upstairs.

Sometimes a single recollection can be more than enough.

Roger McGuinn – It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) (from the Easy Rider OST, 1969) – I posted this track before, on the anniversary of my mother’s death, but what the hell. My mom gave/lent me this record, and a turntable to play it with (which I still own, but is in dire need of a new stylus) when I was fourteen.

Me First and The Gimme Gimmes – Sweet Caroline (from Have a Ball, 1997) – My mom loved Neil Diamond (and Rod McKuen – I think there’s a correlation there), which led to some really miserable times when I discovered that his genius was not universally appreciated by my Kiss-loving peers in primary school.

the original sinners are religiously praying

I can’t remember the exact circumstances why, but a while back I made a list of the most depressing places I’ve ever had the misfortune of visiting. It’s all relative, of course. I’ve never set foot inside a hospice for terminally ill children, for example, so my definition of “depressing” could very well differ from yours. I just wanted to get that out up front, lest someone think I’m a callous son of a bitch.

Some of the places on the list are self-explanatory, like the psych ward of the Bedford VA hospital or the nursing home for head trauma patients where my grandfather spent the last couple years of his life. Others require some clarification, like the reception area for my previous dentist (before I lucked onto a job with a dental plan), a man who built his practice around ruthless efficiency and affordable rates. As a result, his patients tended to be a wide cross-section of folks who had been kicked in the teeth, literally and figuratively, by the American Dream -- purple haired punk rockers (take a guess who that was), haggard looking middle aged women wearing too much makeup, non-English speaking immigrants, and impoverished senior citizens.

And then there is Keno Mart.

“Keno Mart” is the nickname the wife and I use for the convenience store a couple blocks over from our house. I don’t even know what the place’s real name is, though it gets regular mention in the police blotter of the local paper. It’s a pretty standard suburban convenience store in most respects, selling discounted cigarettes, microwaveable junk food, and overpriced household essentials to folks with neither the time nor inclination to travel to the supermarket a mile down the road. That in itself wouldn’t qualify it for my list, but as the nickname suggests, Keno Mart also happens to function as the local Commonwealth-sanctioned betting parlor.

As it’s just a stone’s throw from my house, I visit the place often enough to pick up the paper or a bottle of tonic. The parking lot is always full of cars, from immaculate black Cadillacs, to dinged up minivans, to older model European luxury jobbers whose status symbol luster has since rubbed off through a lengthy succession of owners. It’s not a gallon of milk or a pack of Camels their owners have all come for, though. They’ve come for the chance against all reason that this will be the day that their dreams come true.

I’ve spent enough time around aspiring creative-types to be familiar with the stink of desperation, but nothing could prepare me for the pure, uncut variety that permeates the atmosphere inside the store like an ionized mist. The crowd is diverse; soccer moms and chubby retirees rub shoulders with long-haired biker dudes and skinny guys wearing unlaced sneakers and sweat-stained work clothes emblazoned with the logo of a company that went under five years ago. (Yesterday, I was in line behind a gentleman in his sixties with a massive facial tumor who peeled several twenties off a decent sized roll to pay for a bundle of Daily Numbers quick picks.) They all radiate the same aura of hunger, and possess the same willingness to drop a hundred bucks on scratch tickets (the very essence of a “loser’s game”) while still managing to keep one eye on the big screen that projects the Keno results.

It’s an insatiable hunger, too. The rare winner never cashes out and leaves happy, but always chooses to let it ride, plowing their meager winnings back into the grand game. As someone with a staunch aversion to gambling (the only bit of Protestantism that has stuck with me over the years, unless you count my judgmental and elitist tendencies), I find the environment fascinating even as I feel my soul start to erode within its confines.

Keno Mart, where the American Dream, reduced to a means without end, goes to die (taking as many desperate souls as it can with it when it finally croaks). If you weren’t too lazy to drive the extra mile to the grocery store, you’d never even encounter the rotting smell.

For today’s musical bill, here are some other tales of quiet desperation:

Nick Lowe – Marie Provost (from Jesus of Cool, 1978) – Based on the sad story of this actress, this song perfectly balances pathos with black humor with sparkling pop music.

Anti-Nowhere League – Streets of London (from The Complete Singles Collection, 1999) – They look like they could be Vyvyan Basterd’s favorite band ever, but the tough exterior masks a sensitive side, honest.

Carter USM – A Prince in a Pauper’s Grave (from 30 Something, 1991) – They should have been the biggest pop band in the world, and at one point, it seemed like the could have been, yet something went wrong somewhere. (Also see this.)