You May Want to Skip This One

I’ve made it my practice to not just get on here and blog for no apparent reason. (Maybe that would be called “blahgging”). But here I sit with nothing in particular to say. Paul Simon said that “You Can Call Me Al” was largely a stream-of-consciousness exercise, which explains how he could get from “a man walks down the street” to “Mr. Beerbelly Beerbelly get these mutts away from me” in the space of one verse. I guess when you’re Paul Simon you can make everything work. I have some friends who are going to the Patty Griffin show tomorrow and they're as excited about that as I am about Simon & Garfunkel and Over The Rhine in July. (They're not together.) What is it about a live show that so much more fun than listening to the same songs on the record? Better not to try to nail it down--sometimes that's a good way to ruin something. Ruthie and I cleaned out my (large) box of cassette tapes from when I was a kid. That was good for some laughs. We only kept a dozen or so of them--the rest went into the trash can without any hesitation. Did I really listen to all that stuff? Some of them we threw out because I've replaced those tapes with CD's of the same album, but some of it was just bad. Not to mention any names. Jack will be here tomorrow morning to put the rail on our deck for us. The existing part of the deck went up a year and a half ago and we've been living with it like that (rail-less) ever since. It's been driving Ruthie crazy, but no one's come close to falling off, so I'm cool with it. This approach is pretty typical for me. Mmm...half-assed. The new job contiues to go well, though having spent a week at a different store I'm more aware now than ever how much help our desk needs. There's a dearth of professionalism at our store (in this particular department) that's more crippling than I knew. And what difference does it make? I have friend who's writing a novel. I think that's nifty. I've never been able to sit down and make a credible run at fiction. I get distracted by names and dialogue. That and the lack of story ideas. Why am I doing this? Because I don't have the balls to blog what's really on my mind this morning. Why not? There are like six people who read this thing and I'm likely to tell each of you individually, so why can't I just throw it out on what Shawn insists we call "The Net"? I'm tempted to delete the last line, because the truth is I intend to keep it to myself, (Oh how mysterious I am,) but I like the part about Shawn so it stays. Maybe I'm just doing this to avoid putting the dishes away and cleaning this room. Maybe I've set blogging back ten years. Is that possible? Maybe he ducked back down the alley with some roly-poly little bat-faced girl.

I warned you.