Tom Waits, whose voice, someone (maybe Tom Waits) said, sounds "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car" is what I'm listening to. Specifically "Swordfishtrombone" We are at track 3 in which Dave is both a butcher and instrumental. I don't know if Tom Waits has killed anyone, but I assume he has and it happened sometime in the evening when the sun made the river look like whiskey poured out by Nell, whose silver wrists clank when she sets a shot on the bar, but the boys there don't mind. They say it's part of her charm while next door a circus rages until 4 am and Bill, the cyclops, bursts out of his cage and sets the lions running through a line of chorus girls. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Tom Waits kills a sorry boy from Ireland whose ticket was stamped "No entry," and later kisses a girl with a crooked lip. His dreams are colored yellow as he dreams that he dreamed about her in her sea shell house pulling all the shadows in.
"Is there anyone cooler than Tom Waits?" asked a Eugene friend. Except it wasn't a question because that could never be a question and he continued: "I don't think there is" (in kind of amused wonderment, like: What a beautiful world we live in, said Jimmy Stewart, It's just the most gosh-darn wonderful old world. And you're a peach, Mary. This old ramshackly house, all these kids. Wh-wh-why, Mary, how you ever came to marry such a left footed guy like me I'll never know. And MERRY CHRISTMAS!)
We are now at "Town With No Cheer":
This tiny Victorian rhubarb
kept the watering hole open for sixty five years
now it's boilin' in a miserable March 21 st
wrapped the hills in a blanket of Patterson's curse
the train smokes down the xylophone
there'll be no stopping here
all ya can be is thirsty in a town with no cheer
Banjo Patterson? Maybe? Waltzing that matilda out from Snowy River, hey Clancy. Etc.
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Wow. Just rambling with no restraint.
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Tom Waits might be the scariest man alive. Which reminds me of a story someone told me recently.
It starts like this:
A woman who runs a graveyard was approached by a man In Charge of Things because the two of them had to formulate disaster plans: natural, pandemic, epidemic, etc. The essential question being: How would you bury a whole lot of people quickly?
You know, just your average local government business. So they formulate this plan and have a schematic of the graveyard and she remarks, casually, "Well, Uncle Adolf would certainly be proud."
"What???" asks the man In Charge of Things.
"Adolf Hitler," she replies. "He's a distant uncle on my mother's side."
True story.
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Today I met the three dogs I'll be house-sitting at the end of April: lean, goofy, loving hound-mutts. I came home smelling of dog and covered in dog hair.
It's beautiful outside. I'm going to wander down to the Columbia, yes, just saunter down to the Columbia River and wallow in how amazing it is to live where I live, where continent ends and river runs to ocean and cliffs stack up like building blocks and people lay gillnets out in the front yard to dry off under the sun.
