prematurely grey

OK, I am beyond behind. Liz’s wedding, getting ready to go out of town, traveling, Thanksgiving, more traveling, catching up. You all do it. Life gets going and the routine is blown.In my life, usually, this is the time I go and get a new job. Take on another volunteer gig. Buy more yarn. This is the time when I say, “Fuck it,” to everything that I need to catch up on. I suck at catching up. I believe in complete renewal via reversal and retreat.

But it turns out that I actually MISS writing SOTD. That I continued to collect songs and think about them. I even tried to write (hey, take out that “tried,”–I woke up early one morning and wrote for forty-five minutes in L.A. It was all about being in L.A, and the fog and my parents-in-law’s new house and I FORGOT ABOUT THE SONG! Hmmm, sound familiar?) And not only did I miss it, my little readership missed it as well.

What?

You mean people are reading this thing? Well, it turns out that five people can in fact be considered a readership. I’m considering it a readership. And one of those anonymous readers, the one named Edie who is perhaps the most consistent supporter of my premature greying, asked me about it yesterday (which in SOTD time may eventually amount to a light year–has the Iraq War ended yet?). She asked me in the most perfect way:

“Did you stop writing in your blog because John Aielli has stopped playing music to talk about SUMAC all the time?”

If anyone out there has been listening to Eklektikos this week, you know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the Autumn Leaves (good song)/the leaves are turning/there’s this really colorful tree called a Chinese Pistash (bad name) over by Camp Mabry thread that HIGHJACKED Monday and Tuesday mornings.

It’s time to catch up. Screw my Enneagram Type 7 tendencies, only exacerbated by my Cancer Dragon rise from the ashes Phoenix fixation. Let’s recap the past nine SOTD’s and see if I can remember the two that are lost right now. (Last weekend was a bit of a bust–too much folding and unfolding and laundering and refolding of clothes for music to have sunk in–but Mr. Stevie Wonder may once again be called in to play his by now customary role as Savior and Redeemer.)

So, “Lose Control” by Miss Missy Misdemeanor Elliott. Yes, Misdemeanor said so.

For those of you aren’t big rap fans, or who aren’t eight or nine year old girls, you should listen to the iTunes clip right now. “Lose Control” has the perfect electronic hook. I crank it whenever it’s on KISS FM. We were driving to what would become an extremely traumatic lunch a couple of Saturdays ago, and Chris was making us listen to something like reggae on KGSR and the backseat rebels were getting vocal: “Daddy, this is terrible. Why can’t we listen to OUR music. This is bad for your eardrums, Daddy. Daddy, I hate this. Daddy, put it on KISS FM.” Sometimes, those girls are like my little bewitched minions, doing my dirty work for me. I might have liked the song that was playing; it might not have been reggae. But I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter because watching Chris’s dance moves while driving up Shoal Creek and hearing the complete rejection (”Stop that, Daddy! You can’t do that! Daddy! DADDY STOP THAT”) was better than any song by Pearl Jam or Nirvana (it may have been Nirvana) or the Band that Chris would might allow to cross his ears from the polluting agent known as the car radio when not tuned to NPR could ever be. Period.

But when he said, “Is this Missy Elliott?” I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Thank God for Lunch Box and Bobby Bones and the crap Emma and Mazie are exposed to for 17 minutes every morning. They’re growing up with a father who asks the right questions.