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

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

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

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

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