Mountain Trip To Japan, 1959 / Mr. Spaceman

Isn't it wierd how numbers align sometimes? Just before I hit the "new post" button I noticed my stats lined up in a column. Eighty posts to Dark-Eyed Gypsy (including this one), forty to Songs the Lonesome Sparrow Sings, and five to My Crappy Poetry. How strange.

The concert Friday night was ridiculous, by the way. The band was called--I think this is it--the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. Their gimmick was that they bought slides from auctions and things of dead people during their lives and wrote stories about them and then set them to music. The dad played keyboard and guitar and the daughter drummed while the mom ran the slide projector. The daughter was eleven and extremely cute and quite a good drummer, but the parents were really, really wierd.

The guy had huge glasses and dissheveled fifties hair and muddy-colored pants and a two-button sweater and the mother dressed in severe purple and blue from head to toe. The guy had a stutter and some other kind of speech impediment that I can't quite put my finger on, but he insisted on talking more than he played. The whole thing was almost painful. And yet... I'm glad I went, because it was such a bizarre experience. One of their songs (title) was so catchy that it's still banging around behind my forehead and it won't go away.

There was a Q&A session and my mom asked, "Are all the people in the slides diseased?" Silence fell. The whole room stared at her. "You mean deceased," I whispered. "Yeah. Diseased."

And you all wonder why I mispronounce things sometimes.

After the show we did the usual talk-on-my-bed-until-one-or-two thing and then Elena and Harry left and I went to bed. Renata was sleeping over at a friend's house, so when I woke up in the middle of the ngiht I could read Albert Camus for a full hour before I fell asleep again and almost forgot about the whole thing in the morning.

Saturday was a "family day," so I spent my morning obsessively distinguishing every unread book on my newly-organized bookshelf with a white reinforcement sticker. This posed a problem for white books, but it was otherwise effective. It's also quite interesting. I find that there are very few white labels on the Biography, Shakespeare, Poetry and Science-Fiction shelves and quite a few on the Russian & German, Plays and Misc. shelves.

Not that I checked or anything.

So once I stopped labelling we went to some thrift shops and some camera shops, because Harry wants to buy me an old manual camera for my birthday, and I found a really great deal at Alkit, where I intend to return today. I had a light dinner with H. during his lunch break and the woman at the table next to us freaked out and had breakdown while we tried not to look. Mom bought me a bunch of jewelry and I bought myself a really cool old copy of Wuthering Heights for a quarter.

My mom has become obsessed with these Mexican cookbooks in a series based on local regions. She thinks they're the most authentic recipes she's found yet. She dragged me to a Spanish bookstore (okay, okay, I wanted to go) to look for more of them. Everything was ridiculously expensive, so I didn't buy anything, but she made a really great Mexican dinner and purposely left the chiles out for me. Elena came over and we watched Wargames and I got all excited about it (it's SO GOOD!) and then I changed and we left to pick up Harry from work.

We'd intended to go see Karwreck, Fish's band (it's so close to being a palindrome!) but when Nestor told us that it'd already started and that we couldn't make it in time anyway, we decided to get shaved ices at Otafuku instead and made it back just in time for my curfew.

When we got back, of course, we had no choice but to stuff ourselves with low-fat ice cream all night ("I'm making a Healthy Choice again!" -Elena) and talk about high school and college for hours until Harry got kicked out and Elena decided to sleep over even though she lives two blocks away. We pulled a mattress out between Renata's and my beds (grmr?) and promptly dropped like metaphysical rocks into our seperate slumbers.

And now it's morning and I'm blogging over a cup of warm, sugarless coffee (although I haven't weaned myself off of the milk just yet) and Elena just woke up and she's putting her contacts on behind me and Mom's sitting at the table in her rollers painting her toenails and Renata's sleeping with a guitar by her feet and everything in this room is cozy, from the piano bench I'm sitting on to the coffee pot to the guitar stands to the books to the shoes to the towel over the piano so Tweedy won't chew it up to the piles of jewelry and contact lens cases to the empty ice cream bowls and mugs that wait for me on every flat surface.

And my mom started playing the Byrd's Fifth Dimension to wake us up, and the song Mr. Spaceman started playing and I remembered, suddenly, how about four years ago we all went up to Renata's friend Tory's country house, but since I don't really like Tory's rich, preppy, yacht-club parents, and I don't really like Tory all that much, I locked myself in a room for four days and read a huge volume entitled The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Martin Gardener and Isaac Asimov and listened to the Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, Judy Collins, the Beatles and Jefferson Airplane and knit a shawl for myself. I consumed ridiculous amounts of Nestea and only went outside once during the whole four-day weekend. I remember thinking that this song was so cool and so funny and witty and all.

It's not. But I can't help liking it anyway.

Oh, and I'm getting good at identifying bands by sound. I just named CCR, the Byrds, Steve Winwood and Stevie Ray Vaughn by sound on songs I hadn't heard before. Victory!

I read a few of my old posts yesterday. This blog used to be pretty awesome. What happened?

Oh, well. Coffee, shower and Elena time.