Not just for the birds

Author: Bob McMichael

  • Last Train to Clarksville

    I was on the treadmill at the YMCA today and this song came on my Shuffle. For some reason it hit me like a ton of bricks.

    Why? I’d heard Cassandra Wilson’s cover before, but never in inescapable circumstances like this. Earphones. Long stretch of time ahead. Getting nailed by music has always been a perk of life for me, but it has been a while. Today was as good a surprise as any. But still, why this song?

    As so often happens with this the kind of surprise attack, today I was able to get sucked deep inside the sound. With each beat, I felt the syncopated brushes and distorted guitar washes and Wilson’s scattish vamping crossing the bridge of my nose from the center of my skull and out both ears with the same pulses going down the solar plexus. Yeah, feedback, reflection, penetration, fulfillment, joy. I caught myself smiling from ear to ear, and soon I was laughing as I pounded the belt on the treadmill and staring at the mothers floating their babies in the swimming pool. I love getting taken this way. Hit and run.

    The Monkees’ debut single and number one hit in August 1966, the tune resonated with soldiers heading to Vietnam. They wanted to spend their last possible hours with their loved ones, unsure if they’d survive the war. As a child, hearing and watching the Monkees do this on their Saturday morning show, I had no idea. Today I didn’t, either, until I got home and looked it up. But something in me must have known. Collective memory?

    I used to write about music a lot. I haven’t for over a decade. This song is too good. It brings some stuff back that got too hard for me to deal with. Most difficult is the discovery that emotionally provocative songs (we all have our own) paint visceral images of an ideal world. I could speculate on why this song got me today (the day after the mid-term elections went sour for the Democrats), but it doesn’t matter. The toughness of this – which partly led me to stop writing about music – is that the ideal world you get in the ecstasy of music is only that, and usually it’s painted in stark opposition to reality. The irony of the joy I heard in the Clarksville song today is obvious, and what have we learned since Vietnam?

    So what? Keep listening and be nice to people.

  • Running with dogs

    [Going through the early days of this blog, I found a bunch of posts that never got published for some reason, so I thought, “Why not?” This one’s from 7/23/2010]

    Angus running free
    Angus running free

    In my oh so valiant effort to “stay fit” (an exaggeration of what really is a vain, terror-filled, half-assed attempt to keep the hounds of flab at bay), sometimes I choose to “run.” This is another exaggeration, based on my inability to forget that I was once, decades ago, a decent runner of longer distances. Now, “jog” would be a generous word to describe the plodding, death-shuffle reluctantly executed by the fat and minimal muscle hanging onto my skeleton for dear life.

    Regardless of how it may be described, once or twice a week I do this thing. The dogs play a part in it. Guilt continues to be a great motivator of mediocre action. I could say that I do it for the dogs. They probably need exercise more than I do, although I’m not certain about that. There’s really no way to know, and it doesn’t matter anyhow. The running with dogs happens, sort of, of its own volition.

    Glenna on leash
    Glenna on leash

    Dogs is plural. Running with a certain one dog, Angus, would negate any reason for writing this post. It’s Glenna’s part of this stupid equation that makes me want to complain about all this. And I must make it clear that I do not blame her for any of this; anything any dog does is wholly the responsibility of its owner. Glenna is smart, knows this, and takes full advantage of it.

    I drive up to a trail in the foothills to get away from cars and to let Angus run free off leash. Glenna comes along but must stay on the leash because she is a chronic disappearer. You never know when she’ll come back. Sometimes I have to go find her, hours after I last saw her.

    Each time I do this I wonder why in the hell I’m doing it. Running hurts. Then there’s the added annoyance of Glenna exacting a constant strain on my arm by straining to go faster than I can run. I end up screaming at her to “heel,” which sometimes causes her to slow slightly and very briefly. By the time I get back to the truck my thirty minutes of exercise has so stressed me out that I wonder if it would have been better to stay home and eat several cubes of butter while watching Jerry Springer.