Requisite Statement to Criminal Records Guy
We had a deal: You don’t look up at me or say anything as you ring up my cds.
I give you money.

Hey, I didn’t set this standard; I only agreed to it.

And so when I brought my purchase up to the counter this time, it seemed we were going by protocal.
“That it?”
“Yeah.”
“Credit or debit?”
Etcetera-blah.

But then, right there in Cooler Than Thou Record Shop, you tried to get all freaking upsell-y me. Not very well, either, I might add. When I declined the ten-dollar DVD that accompanies Medulla, your subsequent “Fourteen-ninety-nine, then,” came with a sneer.

I used to work at Waldenbooks, where we had to try to sell people more stuff, and I can tell you: it will not work if you don’t make an attempt—even if it’s a lie-- at rising from disdain at some point in the transaction.

Oh well. I know why you tried: you’d thought me one of those Bjork fans. One of those Bjork!xoxoxo-Bjork fans.

Nah. This cd in particular had just been a find. Spoke to me from the listening stand, and all that. Promised to get me through the months ahead - that I’d just found out the forecast for, earlier that evening: Harder and harder.

And there was Bjork, singing to me in her Lars-Van-Trier –ingenue against-adversity-voice: I’d get through it, I would, I would, I would! And be ever-so-much-stronger, tra-la!
Tra-la to you, punk.

All hell
Okay. Might’ve spoken too soon about old Ivan. The storm wasn’t so bad throughout the day, yesterday, but then around 4:30, all hell broke loose. I should know, because I was in the passenger-seat of Hunter’s car with a pizza from Johnny’s in my lap.

We were trying to drive down Euclid Avenue like normal people, when suddenly the car was in water that reached the top of the tires. Thank God for the Suburu Legacy – Hunter’s fortress of a new car that looks more like a Mom-Mobile that my sister’s minivan. Thank god for that car’s beautiful All-Wheel-Drive-y-ness!

We made it out of the River Euclid and over to Moreland, where it looked like more of the same river gushing down the hill. We turned into a gas station and considered our options. Every route really seemed impossible. Just about every street between that gas station and our house is narrow, hilly, tree-lined. No big deal unless the ocean’s falling from the sky and those streets don’t have gutters. And the trees and power lines are falling into them.

It was strangely exciting to think of a city – a real city, planned (though not so much) by real adults – rendered so completely chaotic. All was Fend for Yourself. And for a flash of a second, I imagined this was permanent and felt scared and wildly optimistic all at once. Imagined joining some band of people as we floated into a new primitive age.

Then we managed to make it down Dekalb Avenue, and home. Ate pizza in the dark while watching The Office on my laptop.

Later on when there was a lull, we took a walk with Otis through our neighborhood. Extreme quiet except for some rumbling thunder. Trees down everywhere and soft candlelight whispering out front windows of every house. Yes, I’m a ridiculously, foolishly incurable romantic about these things, but last night was the first time I’ve felt completely relaxed in months.

Rock you
No. Not unlike a hurricane at all, now that you mention it.

Today Small Publication has that sort of Snow Day feeling, even though we’re the ones you might think would be the most busy during all this Ivan hullabaloo. Well, we were busy, earlier on, but now my boss says to “Watch and Wait.”

We have the local news on tv, where scripted panic has ensued. Schools are closed - and outside, guys who look a lot like my boss, save their unruly beards, are walking the streets handing out brochures about the end of the world. Not to downplay the severity of this hurricane for those who are actually feeling its acute effects, but Atlanta-

Atlanta makes me laugh. Atlanta that closes its schools when there’s frost on the ground. I swear I remember crawling through snow to get to my bus-stop in Pittsburgh as a lassie, and then standing there for a half-hour, my snot freezing under three layers of scarf. Finally the bus would come up the hill, snow-chains rattling – We’d all rush the bus and try to sit close to the front, where the heater was. (Yes. Cool operated in reverse on our school buses in February.) And school would go on as usual.

They say Atlanta is a city of transplants, so you’d think people wouldn’t be so freaking wimpy about the Elements. Maybe it’s because all the wimpiest people have left their hardier towns to come here.

(Okay, so I’m conflating matters and yes it’s true this city also has roads that flood after a half hour of rain, let alone two days of it, so there might be some cause for concern, there.)

Telling the devil
I think part of it is that (knock wood), I have led an extremely lucky life so far, in terms of random, devastating events like these. Forecasters’ projections make Ivan look like it’s going to wend its way around Atlanta, as if the city had some kind of force-field around it, and this does not surprise me.

Yes, I just typed “knock wood” up there, but I don’t actually believe in luck, per se.

Except I do, I guess, in small ways. For example, I believe I am not the type of person who ever wins raffles or other random-drawings.
My coworker is eerily lucky in this way. He’s won like, $300 in the Pick Three Lottery, five times in the last three months. After the third time he won, I started buying Pick Three tickets myself. To no avail.

I’m more of the Lucky type in terms of hitting rewind on a cassette tape, and hitting stop at exactly the spot before the song I want to hear.

Really, I know none of this “lucky” or “unlucky” business is true. Every one of us lives guided by more superstition than we care to believe. It’s weird, the little patterns and parameters we set up for ourselves, the things we say are so, just so we don’t have to see all that scary uncertainty that’s out there. And all that scary freedom.

Ringo was the catchy one.
I know some people who never get songs stuck in their heads. These people amaze me; it’s like I’ve discovered people who envision what I think of as the color blue, when I say “chocolate-brown.”

So I am meant to believe that these folks pass their days and never, ever find themselves humming the verses of “Yellow Submarine” under their breaths some mornings? Never, while walking from car-to-desk at nine a.m. (or to 10th floor of skeletal construction site at 6 a.m.;), mutter, without really thinking about it:
“Dum-dah-Duuuhhhhm
Da-dum-da-dum…”

And then again midmorning, while walking to corner coffeeshop, thinking about doing a load of laundry after work or the third verse of the sonnet he or she is composing that day, or that lazy underling he/she has to fire-Never, suddenly, into one’s head, underneath/over all this, bursts the chorus of said, catchiest-of Beatles-tunes:
“Doo-doo-doo-
doo-ti-do-do-do-do-doo…”

Never, never, never??

These are the same sorts of people who give you blank stares when you talk about not knowing what to make for supper tonight, or losing socks in the dryer.

It just doesn’t happen to them, you see.

There are some gaps you can bridge, but I think this one would be quite a toughie for someone at the skill level of, say, Jimmy Carter.

We’ll take a boat to the land of dreams
Anyway. There are some songs I would really, really like to erase from my memory forever: have sort of an Eternal Sunshine of the Annoying-Song-Free Mind kind of operation performed, if you will. No qualms at all; put me under that brain-ray, I beg of you, so I can lose the profusion of middle-school chorus songs that were carved - in indelible marker - into my head by those hours of rehearsal back when I was 12.

No more “Singin’ the Red, White and Blues!” Medley from 7th grade that will still run from start to finish, I swear to you, some nights while I’m walking my dog in the otherwise sweet, sweet silence of the evening.

I sang a solo in that medley, you see: part of “The Basin Street Blues.”
(((Sassoon.)))
And I can sing it still.

And when I’m 95 years old (and knock wood, someday I will be), I won’t know what year it is. I’ll have no idea who my own nieces or their children are. But if you go up to that wizened woman with the ancient (stretched-out beyond any hope of identification) tattoo on her wrinkled chest and sing, softly, into her ear,
“Won’t you come along with me-?”
You’ll get an answer I can predict now, 69 years ahead of that moment:
“To the Mississippi?”

Politics, Money and the Almighty
Political trends are like the stock market: intangible
and meaningless until it comes down to the final
moment when you either have money or don’t. Meaningless until either you have
say, adequate civil liberties at some moment in your own
life--or you don’t. Pundits and news reporters are
all influenced by what one or the other decides
something means. They declare The Great Tide of Public
Opinion to have turned, and then for a time, So it Is.

Listening to the news this time of year is like
listening to chickens with their damn heads cut off –
if they only could talk.

Political trends are like the stock market, and the
stock market is like religion: based totally in faith
and feeling, not in fact. Talismans, signs and
symbols are paramount.