Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Busted

As loyal readers and friends know, I love to peek in dumpsters. So today after the gym I swung behind the shopping center to peruse the interior of my favorite receptacle at the rear of Office Max. There was a motherload of office supplies in there, MIB as they say on Ebay. So I got my dumpster tool and started stacking the post-it notes, envelopes and notebooks on the hood of my car.

I've been doing this for years, undisturbed by the suits.

But the manager came out today and assured me that all the contents of the dumpster belong in our county landfill. I cannot have them. Neither can any charity or school in town. No, the landfill needs unopened blister packs of perfectly fine merchandise. Thus spoke the Office Max gods.

So I agreed, he went back inside, and I loaded up everything stacked on my car into the trunk and drove off.

NTD

Monday, January 21, 2008

Spitting on Dan Fogelberg's Grave

This morning in my inbox, I found an alarming sort of critique from a stranger. A Mister Wenick wrote the following:

Profiteering from Dan Fogelberg's death by charging ridiculous prices for his CDs is sickening. You have no conscience, just a lust for money. You might as well spit on his grave.

My first thought was - this man is really grieving over Dan Fogelberg's demise.

My second thought was - what a weirdo.

Here's the backstory on this sad tale of musical avarice: I sell a few rarities on Amazon the way that other people have joined the Tribe of eBay. And yes, I got a little misty upon the news of Fogelberg's recent death and even watched a few sentimental performances of ol' Dan via YouTube. But then the practical girl within grabbed a mediocre early nineties Dan Fogelberg album - The Wild Places - and listed that sucker on Amazon. Surprisingly, the other sellers had priced their copies of The Wild Places in the thirty-forty dollar range. So I did too, and looked at this as a compliment to Fogelberg. Desirability is the name of the collectable game, right? To me, an opening price of one cent is sad. Now that's an insult to the music recorded on that CD.

Apparently I have offended at least one member of the Same Auld Lang Syne contingent of Dan Fogelberg mourners.

The point here is far more worrisome than one man's angry letter to a total stranger. It is the disturbing internet tendency to spew utter bile as often as possible. Look at message boards - most of the whiners are people who appear to wake up mad at the world with trigger-happy fingers on the keyboard, searching for an available target.

Some people need a seminar in gratefulness. When I read about starving babies being killed and dismembered in Darfur, for instance, I am so happy to be safe and warm and comfortable every day. When I hear about the houses reduced to rubble in Iraq, or the plight of Palestinians, or the continuing saga of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, I think that most of us Americans should give thanks to the universe for an embarrassment of utter blessings. We don't have a whole lot to complain about.

Dan Fogelberg's music was so sweet, in that earnest seventies/eighties manner that I have grown to miss in these cynical, mean times. He never was a favorite of mine although I wouldn't turn the station if a song of his was playing. Not too long ago, it was okay to be sensitive; now we live in an age of snarkiness and anger. I sort of miss that kinder, gentler time.

Listen, I don't spit on anybody's grave. And profiteering? Mr. Wenick, I suggest you look up Halliburton or Blackwater on your computer if you are interested in current random acts of profiteering. I can't think of any used music dealers who park their Hummers next to their McMansions. It's odd how a person feels so comfortable insulting me and sizing up my motivation in order to allegedly defend a dead man who certainly seemed way too nice to care about the price of his used CDs on the internet. It doesn't make me angry so much as it makes me feel strange, as if a world full of pissed-off e-mailers is not the world I hoped to grow middle-aged in. But hey, I'm grateful. God bless America and all that.

And now, a few choice lyrics from Dan Fogelberg:

Capture the moment/Carry the day/Stay with the chase/As long as you may
Follow the dreamer/The fool, and the sage/Back to the days of/ the innocent age

NTD

Sunday, January 20, 2008

An Exclamatory Post

While I continue to obsess about my upcoming trip to Florida, everyday reality marches on. So all weekend I have been doing the work which requires squinting and reluctant wearing of drugstore reading glasses and sitting on nice soft surfaces - for instance, addressing fifty envelopes and rewriting a vendor application to stuff in those fifty envelopes along with a perky cover letter since I have taken the job of this year's vendor coordinator for the FRM Festival. Although I can behave slightly hysterically when I am talking to folks face to face - I have been known to giggle nervously and overemote and blather on with the best of 'em - I hate using exclamation points and appearing to overflow with perk when I write.

Let me tell you, those FRMF women love their exclamation points. So I have excised the majority of them as gently as possible from the existing application, and managed to type a single ! in the cover letter. I hope that this will fulfill the exclamatory requirements.

I realize that !!! is a matter of taste. My friend Srini would only write his name for years with three !!! on either side - !!!Srini!!! But Srini is kind of a hyperactive shouter type, even though you might not suspect this from an Indian with a Stanford degree. But I have found that perkiness can rear its bouncy little head where you might least suspect it.

Because I am a southern woman, I sometimes wonder how the mega-perk gene became absent from my genome. Like I say, it's not as if I can't muster some smiley nervous energy at times. But my daughter Anna and I often go out and the blondefaketanandpearlssororitygirl
SQUEAL - like a rebel yell for a Sweet Potato Queen convention - that squeal, it is rampant in our southern college town. It crawls up my spine and then does the kundalini Dixie dance inside my brain. And General Lee does not beckon me to join in. He raises his musket and threatens me with a migraine.

So I try to remain free of the personal !!! in most of my public life. I might jump on the bed in my bathrobe while singing a medley of Ramones Meets Rodgers and Hammerstein, but that's the private world that only the lucky(?) few personally know and try to love. Generally phlegmatic, but at least I'm not one of those Type A overachievers.

And exclamation marks are kind of Type A - bossy and demanding of your attention. So I hope that the lack thereof as demonstrated on the updated applications will not subliminally turn the vendor hopefuls into overly relaxed slackers who do not bother to mail in their apps until the last possible minute.

I envision a world with perfect and meaningful punctuation. Long live the humble period.

NTD

Saturday, January 19, 2008

The weather outside is frightful...

... and the snow up north in Asheville closed down my shop early today.

Next weekend, however, we'll be down south in Florida for trade shows. Orlando, Daytona, St. Augustine... blue skies and sunshine, I hope. A walk on the beach, shrimp, mojitos, someone who is paid to make up my bed, an indoor pool, no real work, warm weather, no internet to check incessantly - a real vacation.

I can hardly wait.

NTD

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries. – Wendell Berry

NTD
Thanks to Wonkette, I have found a winner for the musical torture CD:

http://wonkette.com/342986/the-day-the-music-died

I am officially ashamed to be a white person now.

God, I hope that "Stuck on Huck" doesn't linger in my head the way that John Ashcroft's "Let the Eagle Soar" did awhile back.

NTD

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Joni Saves the Day

Just when I was getting lost on vintage Tammy Faye - Oops, there goes a Smile! and other children's classics - I got a hankering for some quality tones. So it's been a half hour of the great Joni Mitchell, making me smile with her impeccable songwriting and complicated chords (what the hell is she playing? Sixths? Minor Sevenths? Thirteenths? Can't follow any of it.) and lovely voice. It's the perfect antidote to an Annoying Music Search.

My recommendations:

Free Man in Paris
Coyote
The Last Time I Saw Richard
A Case of You

NTD

Torture Music

My daughter Anna is trying to make a torture CD. So far, all she has come up with is the song "Muskrat Love", the Captain and Tennille version. Of course, this is a perfect choice. So I suggested listening to a couple of my personal albums - Soft, Safe and Sanitized, and of course Pat Boone's In A Metal Mood. But she doesn't want terrible covers so much as terrible originals, which makes the work more challenging.

But any good mother wants to rise to the challenge. So I have been digging through YouTube and Amazon, looking for genuinely horrible memories - not new discoveries, but those repressed tunes which were long forgotten until now.

Here's eight songs which were actual hits which I experienced (except one, which I first heard as an eighties cover) back in the day. I can't wait to show them to Anna after school:

1. They're Coming to Take Me Away by Napoleon XIV
2. An Open Letter to My Teenage Son by Victor Lundberg
3. He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) by The Crystals
4. This Girl is a Woman Now by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap
5. Once You Understand by Think
6. Mercy Rewrote My Life by Tammy Faye Bakker
7. You Never Done It Like That by Captain and Tennille
8. Never Been to Me by Charlene

All of these golden memories, by the way, can be relived via YouTube.

NTD

Monday, January 7, 2008

The Primitive Shopkeeper

I never incorporated my business for several reasons - laziness, uncertainty, and the armchair thrill of never limiting my personal liability. I can't stand lawyers, and until recently managed my extensive tax returns without an accountant. Sole proprietorship means never having to include those extra, pesky IRS forms.

So last night I suddenly realized that my income went up alarmingly in 2007. Most people might have noticed this before January; however, I only write myself a paycheck when it is absolutely necessary. But the Christmas influx of deposits shot my business account into impressive and unprecedented territory, and I am scrambling to protect my money from climbing into the next tax bracket.

It's too late to buy a 2007 Hummer... but I'm digging around to find any extra mileage that was overlooked, any daughter labor that wasn't compensated, any meal bought for a sales rep. Sometimes it seems harder to be on one's own than to let the attorneys and CPAs do what Congress designed them to do, i.e. allow the corporation to live large while avoiding taxes.

I suffer from an obsession with an anarcho-primitive neo-Luddite pencil-and-graph paper itty-bitty shopkeeping model. I grew up watching my grandfather nap on a naugahyde recliner at his non-air conditioned furniture store, sometimes only waking up when a customer needed assistance. He made it look easy, and by the time I was climbing on the stacks of warehouse mattresses, it probably was. Granddaddy was my small business guru.

I don't particularly want my shop to grow in sales so much as figure out how to cut costs and make enough money to not worry. I lack ambition, but in this nation that worships industrial growth and the stock market, I feel positively subversive.

But enough of this. It's time to go recline on my futon and handwrite the rest of my checkbook expenses.

NTD

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Although Dennis Kucinich has been my man whenever anyone has asked these last several weeks, I am perfectly willing to play political slut here. Obama? Edwards? Any of the above. I don't know why I cannot yet warm up to Hillary... self-loathing feminism dancing in my head, perhaps. But like supporting John Kerry in '04, which I managed to do with reasonable enthusiasm back in those days - I can get my mind around H.C. if she's the one. I am just hopeful that Barack Obama will take the nomination.

I am due to write my next political column by Wednesday, but cannot muster any deep thoughts about current politics. It's so much easier to read Britney gossip than to think.

Must... think... original... stuff... SOON.

NTD

Friday, January 4, 2008

It's been AWOL for my blogging life for days now... perhaps this is a good sign, being busy in the real world?

Actually - other than working - Stewart and I spent time sitting around trying to restructure those same old resolutions in the form of newly-created words, which began with great promise when I proposed that we also make those words sound like tasty alcoholic beverages. Gymnotonic! It makes mere exercise sound like my very favorite cocktail! The next dozen or so resolutions would be a snap. I envisioned a New Age-like article on changing one's life through a bartender's vocabulary. We could chat up Oprah, telling her that this is a post-The Secret world, and we have the scoop on the sequel, which is this: make virtuous changes by rephrasing them to sound like something fun and bubbly.

Of course, we couldn't think of a damned thing for Resolution Number Two. So we wrote clever made-up words which pleased us very much - and yes, I really do plan to Unlard and all the rest - but the original theme fell by the wayside.

But special thanks to Wells, who was buying cigarettes at my counter and tossed off "Artini" in honor of the painterly Stewart.

Most of our evenings were spent watching old movies, which included: Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, a pair of Hitchcock films, Strangers on a Train and Vertigo, a terrible biker film called Black Angels, a boring stoner video called Scrapple, and the undefinable eighties fantasy Teen Witch.

By tomorrow, the Real Changes begin. I hope.

NTD