Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
(scene: Peter and co-worker giggling maniacally in the hallway in front of our manager’s office)
Manager: What are you doing out there?
Me: If we tell you, you have to promise to not fire us for doing it.
Manager: Sure.
Me: We’re making a human pyramid in the middle of the hallway.
Manager: Why?
Co-worker: So we can take a picture of us in a human pyramid. I’ll be on top! [strikes a legitimate cheerleading pose.]
Manager: Cool! Can I watch?
(scene.)
Last night I dreamed a song. It was not the first time.
I used to brag in grade school that I could memorize my bible verses by osmosis. I’d just practice them before bed and then sleep with the bible open next to my pillow.
I was joking, of course. It was just the good luck of a procrastinator whose talent for memorization outstripped his clear distaste of repeating maxims from centuries old dead guys.
Well, it turned out that I wasn’t entirely joking. My subconscious studying continued into college, as I would compose French essays in my head while asleep and then jot them down in the morning before class.
Ultimately, the brain – or, at least, my brain – has a lot of extra wiring that our (my) conscious thought can get in the way of. Resting opens those circuits, and when it came to bible verses and French homework it was installing a new stick of RAM into my biological computer.
I don’t recall when I first started dreaming songs. I know the first success was “Standing” which came in so powerfully that it literally woke me up! It also surprised the hell out of me, because the genesis of it occurred entirely while I was asleep. I didn’t have the basic lyrics or a melody worked out, resting next to my head like my erstwhile bible. Like asexual production or spontaneous combustion, “Standing” wrote itself.
If that sounds weird and implausible to you… well, it is, but I’m not the only weird and implausible songwriter out there. Allow me to present exhibit A, Sir. Paul McCartney, describing the genesis of “Yesterday“:
“I woke up with a lovely tune in my head,” Paul McCartney recalled to his biographer, Barry Miles. “I thought, ‘That’s great. I wonder what that is?'” He got up that morning in May 1965, went to the piano, and began playing the melody that would become “Yesterday.” At first, lacking lyrics, he improvised with ” Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs.” While he really liked the tune, he had some reservations: “Because I’d dreamed it, I couldn’t believe I’d written it.” – Betsy Querna, US News
There you go. It’s not totally unprecedented, because a Beatle did it, too.
Dream songs don’t always write themselves. Sometimes a dream person writes them for me. In one instance, Madonna sang me a song while playing it on an acoustic guitar, claiming it was a cover by REM or Wilco. I woke up really wanting to hear the song, but searching it’s lyrics and melody yielded nothing. Or, in the words of Sir Paul:
So first of all I checked this melody out, and people said to me, ‘No, it’s lovely, and I’m sure it’s all yours.’ It took me a little while to allow myself to claim it, but then like a prospector I finally staked my claim; stuck a little sign on it and said, ‘Okay, it’s mine!’ It had no words. I used to call it ‘Scrambled Eggs’. – Paul in Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now
Of course, Paul didn’t have Madonna singing the song to him in his sleep claiming it was a cover! For a precedent on that, I turn to my resident loon muse, Tori Amos, talking about her ballad “Hey Jupiter” from Boys for Pele on VH1 Storytellers:
Let’s see, I was lying in bed. Um, strange things happened to you on tour, Like strange Englishman start sitting at the end of your bed – apparitions of dead guys. And they start singing songs to you. And this guy was definitely dead, and he was definitely singing to me. So I’m confused about the copyright laws. I’m not sure if I need to call his ex-wife and give him part of the song or not. But why should I do that! She’s rich, she’s not nice. So … I kept the copyright, and the song’s mine.
Thus, I didn’t have to credit my imagined Madonna (or anyone else) for the tune, and so the yet-to-be-recorded “Message” became mine.
I’m not sure about last night’s song, yet. It didn’t come with lyrics like “Standing” or “Message,” possibly because in my dream I was distracted by the effort of walking on stilts while I was singing it. However, it did provide a full, two-handed piano arrangement. I literally woke up, walked to the keyboard, and played the song without much pause.
I wonder, what is it I have to put into my brain to have it pop out songs like tiny ping pong balls from a lotto machine? Can it be predicted? Is it something I ingested yesterday? I’m pretty sure I’m not ingesting some of the things Paul and Tori have ingested…
Or, are Paul and Tori and I just wired that way?
Is one of your favorite singer-songwriters also a songdreamer? Please point me towards their story!
Where I last left our intrepid first-time home-buying heroes (i.e., E and I) we went on a financial fact-finding outing that unexpectedly also found a house that met all of our requirements.
That was two Tuesdays ago.
On Wednesday morning our Realtor checked in with us to share some newly-acquired intelligence – the house was being shown frequently (even within her office), and had received an offer while we were looking at it! Did we want to submit a competing bid?
Being the logical-negative (AKA defeatist) person I am in situations involving tens of thousands of dollars, I had talked myself out of it in a matter of minutes. I sent E a series of emails deflating her hopes and lamenting that it just wasn’t meant to be. Too soon, too competitive.
Being the logical-positive person I married, she pushed back – if it wasn’t meant to be, would it have been so oddly perfect for us, with its new fireplace and kitchen of butcher block and stainless steel? Did it matter that there was another bid on the table?
Her bottom line: there was certainly no harm in putting in a competing bid, as long as we were comfortable with it. But were we really going to make an offer having seen the house only once?
(Meanwhile, I was having an intense conversation with Drew via text message and one of my most beloved co-workers unexpectedly gave her two week notice. Between that and the house decision, by 1pm the day had reached a three-ring circus level of crazy.)
I had such a huge list of house-buying best practices I planned to execute – staking out the house for an entire day to observe the neighborhood, interviewing all of the neighbors, creating a photo & video walkthrough to show friends, measuring each room for potential mapping, singing and playing guitar throughout the house…
All of you home-owners out there are probably having a chuckle at my expense, but my internal Godzilla runs 24/7 on a proverbial OCD hamster wheel to generate these levels of obsessive-compulsiveness. Despite the implied rush from the frequent showings and competing bid, I couldn’t entirely quell my giant, imaginary, bipedal lizard without engaging in at least a portion of his proscribed OCD investigations.
Since the idea of all of that was crazy and the day was crazy (and, frankly, I’m crazy enough for the both of us), we decided to put the house to the insanity test – cramming as many of my Godzilla metrics into three hours as possible.
It was with that mission that we returned to the house 24 hours after our initial visit, armed with a camera, flip cams, tape measures, graph paper, my electric guitar, and Gina’s overpoweringly loud Fender guitar amp.
We knocked on every neighbor’s door and chatted up anyone we could find. We measured, photographed, and videoed every room. I sat in the attic with Gina’s amp on 8 – so loud I could barely bear to play it, while E walked down the stairs and out of the house.
Her report? Mild amp sounds in the living room, but outside you couldn’t hear a thing.
We made up our minds – a bid was going in.
What followed was exciting, but not in a recapituable way – three hours of amortization schedules, drawing on whiteboards, and eating Twizzlers – resulting in putting in our first offer on our first potential home.
The excitement did not end there, but my ability to sleep through the night did. More on that in the next post.
My tweets of the last week:
“Oh, because I’m always looking for neon colored things to put in my vagina.”
Seriously, if I was a woman I don’t think I’d be cruising the feminine products aisle looking for a box of tampons that resembles a pack of highlighters. I get the packaging of a tampon being a fun color so it’s unobtrusive in your purse, but the actual applicator? Are we seriously selling this to young women?
Can anyone with a vagina offer some insight?
(Because all tampons are “Tampax” to me, I had to use the interwebs to figure out the brand I encountered, and I must say that the Kotex “How to Insert a Tampon” video is refreshingly frank and personal for something coming from a major brand.)