Tuesday, August 24, 2004

On Getting Lost in a Tsunami

Today Magnetic Fields’ Get Lost is hitting the spot, on repeat. The day I bought this album was infinitely rainy and I cried satisfyingly, and I was impressed by the grammar in track 4: "I’m looking for somebody with whom to dance." Most people would just say, sing, or write, "I’m looking for someone to dance with." But not Stephen Merritt. He went the extra mile and sailed fluidly through the highly grammatical finish line. Way to go, my man. While I’m keen on grammar, I don’t always think it’s worthwhile to go that extra mile—sometimes it just sounds stiff. And who’s going to make friends being a grammatical stiff, except with other grammatical stiffs? A lonely crew, I suspect, or isolated. In this case, it pleases me that Stephen Merritt went the extra mile. Otherwise the song might have just been a dull one about being lonely and wanting to dance with somebody. Anyone could write that.

Yesterday I heard on the radio about the potential for a volcano in the Canary Islands, off the coast of West Africa, erupting, causing the biggest tsunami ever, waters traveling at 500 miles per hour, creating waves of up to 330 feet, rippling up into the eastern U.S. coast and 20 or so miles in up here in the northeast. Luckily I’m 40 miles in, so I guess I’ll pop out onto the porch one morning, in my terry cloth robe I don’t yet own, mug of hot coffee in hand, and look out at the people swimming, because, yes, I can see for twenty miles on a clear day. Apparently this is nothing to scare about for decades or even a century, but something to at least keep in the back of the mind. And apparently the Sahara Desert will get the brunt of the raging ocean. Isn't that just fascinating? A big desert totally saturated by ocean. For more information on this potential tsunami and vast natural destruction business, go here: http://www.cdnn.info/article/tsunami/tsunami.html.

Today it occurs to me again that life is really funny. I have returned to the point on the sine wave where life is really funny, and the configurations of people, their relations, nature’s faces, celebrity, posturing, traffic, the self-absorbed, and bikini-wearing in public, are so flimsily defined--yet sometimes seem concretized in the daily--that they could be nothing but funny. This is after a week or two being weighed down by the drudgery. What does any of it matter? Grammar, tsunami. Much and little, little and much. It’s comical and salty.

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