Thursday, January 8, 2009

and another thing

I have to say one last thing about my new apartment and then I promise I'll find something else to talk about (just a heads up, though, that "something else" might be Joan of Arcadia, a TV show I've become addicted to this holiday season about a teenage American girl who talks to God).

As I type, somebody up there (as in my upstairs neighbor, not God) is learning to play "Killing Me Softly" on a saxophone. This is so wonderful words almost fail me. "Strumming my pain with his fingers/Singing my life with his words." It doesn't work on any level - you can't strum a saxophone (and yes, that is the voice of sad experience talking) nor can you sing and play one simultaneously. This may be the most inappropriate song for saxophone ever, second only to "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" or "Piano Man."

And just when I thought things were as good as they could possibly get, his DOG started HOWLING along! Clearly, that puppy has been the victim of a love gone wrong.

This is all greatly preferable to the ambient noise in my old apartment, which consisted of all the other people in the building getting along smashingly because they were all RELATED. The hallways echoed their happy family chatter, the footsteps of children running upstairs to visit Grandpa (whose old Hustler magazines were stacked merrily in the hallway outside his door, awaiting some lucky recycler), the clink of glasses as they picnicked in the verdant backyard, the buzz of the circular saw from their in-house sawmill - it was like an entire village crammed into one building.

They were killing me softly with their sheer propinquity.

And yes, that's a word you'll be seeing more of in 2009.

2 comments:

Tokyo Sexwale said...

bark at myself in the mirror

filling sidewalks with my turds

sniffing him softly in his crotch

sniffing him softly...in his crotch

thinkin' 'bout wet food, not dry food

(i'll stop now. those were lyrics i imagine the dog was thinking he was saying when he was howling, in case that wasn't clear to anyone.)

maire said...

now i'm howling. i had no idea you spoke dog.