MAKING ITSELF HEARD

Disincentive to get up.

Another Saturday morning, but this one is clear and cool. Al Green is crooning Love and Happiness. Cats are sleeping elsewhere now as I stripped the bed so that I could get those sheets a-dryin' in the sunshine. In the long run, they will be good with this as I let them hang about the yard as I hang up the sheets.

Making a mix for the first time in ages. Melinda and John just bought a new car last week. Melinda and I had a total blast for two days cruising around, singing oldies and hitting thrift stores and the beach. Turns out you are never too old to blast a new car audio system and holler your lungs out as you drive to the beach. I suggest you try it (new car not essential). Seemed like a good occasion to make a driving mix, no?

As per usual, I am having trouble figuring out what to do with my day. So many options! Sew! Read! Bead! Watch movies! Cook! I'm going with cleaning up my room and listening to music ...

(enjoying Nicky Hopkins banging on the piano and Mick Taylor squeezing out some choice licks on Sympathy for the Devil. ... That is Mick Taylor, right? Not Keith? Doesn't sound fuzzy and dumpy enough for Keith, but I could well be wrong. ... and wouldn't you know it, there's a whole discussion board on it here. At least my question is a good one. Nope, no Mick Taylor on that record. Brian Jones and Dave Mason. I vote for Dave Mason. Other opinions?)

Okay, on to Ace Frehley (New York Groove) ... which is maybe kinda apt. We'll see. Could happen that I end up back in Brooklyn with a job. And on to Tom Petty (I Need to Know).  Is it possible to sit still during the song? Only if you are driving and can accelerate. I think I need to pogo for a bit ... 

I can sit down and write to Marvin Gaye (Let's Get It On) ... sigh. Sure wish I had a decent sound system. Then again I wish I had a job and health care.

So, as I was saying the other day, this Proust, The Guermantes Way, is a bit easier to read than the previous volumes ... it's frothier. I still have 400 pages to read in the next month, but if I do a bit a day I should be able to manage that and some other things, too. Two of our peeps are reading it in French which is interesting for comparison purposes (neither of them is me). 

"For the fact of the matter is that, since we are determined to always keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them. And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making itself heard, whose tones may inspire as much alarm in the person who receives the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible communication of one's defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and outlandishly proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing to a murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty.

- Marcel Proust

And just to add synchronicity to all of this, The English Beat's I Confess came up as soon as I started to quote Proust.

Clothes on the line. I am dismayed to find that my iTunes only has one or two Prince songs. How can that be? I am ashamed. Fortunately, one of them is Little Red Corvette. Funny (and great) how a song can take you right back to a moment. I was going to UC Berkeley at the time. The alarm went off and KALX played Little Red Corvette. It was the first time I had ever heard it. I think I sat bolt upright in bed,  astonished at the genius of the song. The amazement has not worn off. 

Okay, I need to finish cleaning my room. Going out to Stonybrook tonight to make pizzas with Emily and Chris who I have not seen since Christmas. That should be fun.