Believe it or not, I have been very active lately. I have been working at summer camp for almost five weeks now (that's half the summer already), and I've worked at two different facilities. We've put on a camper-written version of Alice in Wonderland, complete with dancing. It was dynamite. Everyone loved it, even the three-year-olds who were totally lost at the performance last year of Jack and Jill.
In my personal life, which still exists somewhat, I have been writing new music and working a lot of my singing and electric bass playing. Vibraphones are for people who want to hear, "What's that?" when they say what instrument they play. And so, as a result of my lyrics writing and improved singing ability, there is yet another new song on my First Regrets Myspace page for you all to enjoy called "My Dear." Inspired by the story of a friend of mine. Here's the link. Listen. Get blown away. Or not.
Mainly what I have been doing while I've managed to be awake is to write and write and write. And by "write" I mean "rewrite," because that's truthfully all I'm doing. Today you can all see the fruits of one of my few new ideas.
But before that I have to spill a few words about the new music that rocks my socks, seeing as it's mid-year. And it's been a strong year so far, so there's a lot to talk about. You probably don't care. I don't blame you.
Sam's Recommended Music of This Half of 2009 (in no particular order)
1) White Rabbits: It's Frightening
In terms of number of listens, this CD is the number 1 of the year for me so far. After the first hundred listens, though, the magic starts to fade a little. But only a little. There is a spontaneous charm to this straight-ahead rock band that sets it apart from the others. The fact that the grooves are put together piece by piece. Sometimes this means that it sounds like the instruments aren't playing together, though in the end it's obvious that the fragmented effect was just what they were going for. Pleasant surprises are eminent throughout the record as the band tricks your ears left and right, yet offers familiarity in a conservatory-style usage of rock and roll motifs. "Lionesse" is such an exciting song and a perfect example of this method of development, as is the more straightforward yet still dominant opener, "Percussion Gun." Speaking of percussion, the twin floor toms add a primal rhythmic presence that pulls everything together. This CD is wonderful. Buy it.
Now.
2) Abdullah Ibrahim: Senzo
This CD is perfect in just about every way. This is hard for me to say as I am disgusted more and more by jazz music, but this CD is divine. In fact, the only better music I have heard this year so far has probably been the live performance of this record. Elderly pianist Abdulla Ibrahim plays about an hour of constant solo piano music, which is another reason I'm surprised I love this record so much: I don't like solo piano records, and I'm lukewarm at best towards pianos in general! I certainly refuse to write my own music for them often times. Ibrahim's seasoned fingers are recorded flawlessly, filling up the room with the rich tones of the piano. There is a patient virtuosity that is omnipresent throughout the record, filled with lyrical and proficient movement. The one drawback one might expect from such a project, that the hour of solo music could get old after a while, is actually the opposite. After the music is over it feels like the ears have gone through a catharsis, and the feeling is the same even after the 15th listen. Once you are ten or fifteen minutes through the CD there is no turning back. It's too beautiful to turn off.
There are others, of course. I think my top ten for this half-year is already better than last year's top ten. And The Dodo's, last year's #1, are still yet to release their new CD (though it's online for free at ), as is Joe Henry, Flying Lotus, and maybe even Jason Lindner. Point being: there is a lot of good music out there right now!
And now, on to the story
But before I do, I have to clear a few things up.
1) Just because I haven't updated in a while doesn't mean I'm not writing. I have been re-writing like a maniac, and in the process I have discovered that the stories I have posted online have been poorly revised. I hope this one is an exception. For the others, I have been working to make them somewhat presentable in a formal context. I have just started giving "The One Tale From College" and "A Fascinating Line" to readers for criticism before I start to - gasp! - submit them places. But the internet crowd is less refined, I know, so I will post another tale-in-progress.
2) Mom comes out to be pretty bad in this story, but it's not her fault. Originally it was about Dad, but the job didn't coincide with his majors in "The One Tale From College," so I switched the genders. Mom will be the first to tell you that my mother characters are almost evil enough for Disney (okay, maybe not that bad). So I want to say here and now: Mom, I love you, okay? Someday I'll write a story about how wonderful you are.
3) This is based off of true events, sort of. It's based off what Joel's cat would do if she had opposible thumbs.
4) Enjoy!
The Secret Desire of the Cats
1845 words
When my mother was fresh out of college, she fell in love with a cat. It was the first cat she ever had. Her father had horrible allergies and would swell up like a red pumpkin if she so much as looked at one, so my mother rarely had the chance to meet cats when growing up. She had a childhood friend, Stacy, who had a cat they would play with together. He was a fat, old thing, and their games with him were mostly practical jokes, but still my mother felt naturally connected to him. Then he passed away, and cats faded even more deeply into the background of my mother’s life.
My mother would probably never have had the thought to get a cat except that a boy she particularly liked at the time was a cat aficionado. It was an almost whimsical thing, to adopt a cat as soon as she moved into her new apartment, and she would be the first to admit that it was meant more to impress the boy than to take care of an animal. Taking the boy’s obsession with Alice in Wonderland into account, she gave her new pet the name “Dinah.” Dinah was bright orange, the boy’s favorite color by my mother’s least favorite. My mother had no idea how to look after another living thing, but the boy had three all by himself, so how hard could it be? My mother did a few days of internet research, bought the food bowl, and was good to go.
In an ironic twist of fate, the boy moved to Idaho to study food politics, and my mother fell in love with the cat instead. Like any love it was totally irrational, and if asked, my mother would have no valid excuse for loving this terror of a cat in particular. Dinah had a knack for tearing thin strips of wood and cloth off furniture while leaving the scratching post untouched. She would run about all night, knocking things over and keeping my mother awake until should didn’t even have the strength to lift her eyelids with her fingers. When my mother took too long to fill the food bowl she defecated, making sure to aim for whatever was most important and irreplaceable to my mother at the time. Once it was the Oriental rug she inherited from her beloved grandmother; another time it was her brand new video camera. But worst of all, Dinah never paid the slightest attention to my mother whatsoever, and she refused to be approached, viciously lashing out whenever my mother reached over to pet her. A teaching assistant in a local high school at the time, my mother would often arrive to the classroom in with deep scars on her forearms that raised eyebrows of the students as well as concern from the head teacher. Only unbounded love could possible explain why my mother refused to give up the cat after all these horrors.
My mother took Dinah’s hisses, scratches, vandalism, and violence personally, like insults from an abusive lover. This was especially the case when the cat showed unreserved kindness to the next man she started to go out with. The situation reeked of elementary unfairness. How maddening it was that my mother was powerlessly, inexplicably in love with this vicious creature who exhibited only antisocial disgust in return! The new man didn’t believe my mother’s stories or feline rebellion. “You’re just saying bad things about her because you’re jealous,” he teased as the cat purred in his lap. “I know she’s nothing but a sweetie, isn’t that right, Dinah?” Nine months later the new man became her husband.
I never had the opportunity to meet Dinah. She died snubbing my mother from her cat box, even as the vet put in the needle, and a few months later I was born. So I, too, began life with an animal free house. Besides Dinah’s death, it was a wonderful time for my mother. The television advertisement she produced for Cola got so much attention that the company was soon sending her to negotiate with clients all over the world. She had a special talent for sensing effective audio-visual imagery for manipulating rooted desires of other human beings, and this talent was becoming recognized on a massive scale. This intellectual success was met by enormous financial success, and my father was able to quit his job to raise me, giving a few guest lectures here and there for his personal amusement. My mother’s mind was awake and cranking away, her passion for her work expanding and whisking her to places far beyond the simplicity of her rabbit hole. Truly it was a terrific beginning for her, but for me it was worse, much worse. I grew up mostly without a mother because of this success. It dragged her away from the house since the time I stopped breastfeeding. She never seemed to mind taking month-long vacations to leave me with my more than capable father. But I minded. When she returned I would try to act like I didn’t care. I turned on my internal air conditioner when she told stories or showed pictures from her expeditions, always keeping cool. I still don’t know if she ever saw through the façade.
As a part of my loneliness, I begged my mother from an early age to adopt a cat, but she refused. “Dinah was the only cat for me,” she said with conviction. I was furious with her, but eventually with the help of my father I changed her mind, and soon after that the family had adopted its first cat. The new cat was Dinah’s opposite. She had to, my mother insisted, because she not bear another small orange cat clawing its way into her heart. So this animal was much larger, made to look even larger by poofy, dark fur. The pleasantly lethargic creature slept on the windowsill and purred all day long – the vet told us to leave the room so he could hear her heartbeat. She always seemed to be smiling, 100% of the time, so, much to my mother’s chagrin, we named her “Cheshire.” Cheshire was tranquil and never bothered anyone no matter the situation. We never had a urine or feces problem with her seeing as she was housebroken the minute we adopted her. She didn’t even shed very much.
And, to top it off, she worshiped my mother unconditionally. Sure, she was warm enough towards my father and me, but for some reason my mother set her soul on fire. Whenever my mother would come home, Cheshire would jump off the windowsill with frightening alacrity, rub up against her legs, and talk to her. Yes, she talked. It was a series of chirps reserved only for my mother, coupled with the unambiguous body language of rolling seductively on the ground in front of her. My mother would bend down and rub her belly for a second, then walk off to the refrigerator, drawing the unsatisfied cat behind her heels, chirping like a bird. Whenever my mother would sit down to listen to my father’s retelling of the one tale from college or watch rented movies with the two of us, Cheshire was always on her lap, her purring an omnipresent part of the ambiance. She never left my mother alone. She would have snuck in her suitcase and happily died on the flight to Chicago if she could.
Cheshire was a good sport about my mother’s lengthy disappearances, but anyone could tell she wasn’t quite the same. It’s hard to explain. She was always such a pleasant cat without even trying, and she always had her charismatic grin, but without my mother around she lacked true vitality. She was tired and lazy. She ate less. She took no interest in play, and she never sought out our affection or even basic attention. Generally, it seemed she had given in to a mundane life of routine boredom, and she was determined not to let her fate be the bane of anyone else in the house. Of course this whole attitude would disappear once my mother returned, but on a regular basis the cat had the air of being only half alive.
When I was eight or nine years old I had a strange recurring dream about my mother and the cat. My mother was preparing for a big conference, something overseas that was to keep her there for a long time. Then she was gone, and life was as per normal when she was away. But this time she didn’t come back. We waited 365 days for her, and then my father remarried. My new mother looked a lot like my old one, except that she was my height and had silver hair. We did things together as a family, the way our life should have been all along. Everything was going swimmingly, even though it didn’t feel like it. There was this unshakable emptiness, the guilt that I was supposed to be feeling an absent remorse.
Then one day, I opened the closet door to see Cheshire – whose indefinite disappearance had gone unnoticed until now – purring as she lay in my mother’s lap, rubbing her head against her belly, eyes closed in ecstasy. My mother was bound to the wall by duct tape, her hands and legs tied permanently in the position best suited to passively admit a cat onto one’s lap. Her mouth was taped shut, but I could tell she was smiling from the shape of the wrinkles near her eerily vacant eyes. The fat slip of duct tape covering her lips arched upward ever so slightly. She should have been dead after a year or so of this imprisonment, but she showed all the signs of life, such as blinking and breathing. Her irises were fixed on me with immortal fascination, eternally unmoving, eternally loving, sunken in eternal stasis. Together the cat and my mother gave their painted grins that meant nothing at all. It made me think of the cosmos: how the Andromeda galaxy was careening at unimaginable speed towards the Milky Way, how the sun was eventually going to explode and wipe out all life as we know it, how a black hole at the center of the galaxy was sucking everything unstoppably towards a fate of suffocating implosion. I got the feeling that after everything was obliterated and existence was a part of the past, my mother and the cat would still be there in my closet with those same smiles. It creeped me out every time I dreamt it, no matter how far in advance I saw it coming, and I woke up.
Then, after staring at the ceiling for a few moments and catching my breath, I would always come to the same realization. Cheshire never existed. Neither did Dinah. Both felines only experienced existence through my subconscious. But even now sometimes I have to remind myself of that.
-Sam goldsmith
