She set off later with mismatched shoes. Both of the new, old shoes were too hard to walk in, she said, so after they hugged and waved goodbye, she strode off into the neighborhood dusk with two different sounds for her steps. The sky was still in its paler regalia, but the street lamps that always looked to Hugh like stilted glowing orbs cradled in iron vines were beginning to paint the brick and pavement and the lower portion of the buildings with a warm cast. He hung by the doorway a bit to watch the first bats as they took their breakfast in silhouette, and then turned back into the hummingly illuminated townhouse corridor and closed the door behind him. Verity rarely accepted any offer of his to walk her to the cable car stop, and it wasn’t that far away, really. He worried nonetheless.
One of the things he worried about was the toe. It wouldn’t be too hard to hide, he supposed, especially now that she was living alone, and if he knew her -which he did very well- he knew that she would in all likelihood have adapted to the new situation entirely by the time she got to her apartment. Those were not very big concerns of his. The burr that pricked at him and stuck in his mind was that, in his experience, once there was one strange occurrence, all the improbabilities, the peculiarities that weren’t openly talked about, the little twists and tweaks of the real, began to queue themselves up, and they often didn’t have the manners to wait their turn.
He supposed it was a problem for another day. He was tired. It had been an eventful time with Verity, and before that a long morning and early afternoon of organization, a few deliveries, and some arduous conversations with the recipients. The clientele of Margaux’s Medicines were mostly older, frequently grumpy folks, many of whom had known the pharmacy’s namesake back when she was still alive, some fifteen years ago. Hugh’s boss -or “master,” if the old man was one to take the apprenticeship seriously- knew most of them as old acquaintances, or friends in the rare cases, but he had work to do, and his knees were not what they used to be, and his late wife had been the one with the pair’s share of charisma, so he was wont to send Hugh on the delivery runs instead. The man himself, Lewis Munks, was brushing his teeth very loudly in the building’s one bathroom under the stairs.
“You remembered Miss Marigold’s delivery this time?” Mr. Munks called up from the doorway that was throwing light onto the wall opposite, after the sounds of a light splash and some porcelain tapping. He had heard Hugh close the door and step up the first stairs, and he knew Verity was gone, as she usually left before it was full dark. The pharmacist had a habit of starting conversations in their middle.
“Yes, I did her delivery first,” said Hugh, a little exasperated- one of his earliest jobs for the pharmacist, several years ago, before Hugh was living in the building, he had forgotten Miss Marigold’s prescription. Not a once had Lewis forgotten to ask about it since then.
“And Mister Tappings?” Lewis turned the light off in the bathroom and stepped out, in full uniform of striped pajamas and nightcap, looking up at his apprentice past the banister.
“I gave him the run-down as you asked,” said Hugh, counting the next couple steps up the stairs as hard-won trophies.
“Which was…” Mr. Munks had an eyebrow raised in expectation. Hugh suppressed a sigh and took off his glasses to wipe his face with a hand.
“‘Take two daily, with or without food, but be sure to burn sandalwood or frankincense just before ingestion, and make sure not to take it after nightfall,’” Hugh recited dutifully. Lewis looked pleased. The old man waited a beat, the look vacated, and then a mischievous grin took up residence.
“And did you find his daughter?”
Hugh could feel his face go pinkish, and much as he tried to smother it, a smile of his own swimming up from below. “Oh, go sit on one,” he coughed out from a smirk, and continued up toward his room as his boss chuckled all the way to his own bed.
The man did have some residual charisma, Hugh would concede, it was just that it was reserved for, or only accessible by the people closest to him.
He was also very perceptive at times, which was especially bothersome considering his fanciful romanticism. No other partners for him than his dearly departed, but for Hugh, anyone and everyone the young man’s age was a possible match made in heaven. He had an eye on Hugh’s love life like a tender gardener on a cherished, growing rutabaga. Thankfully the time had passed when his inquisition focused on Verity, but it had moved on since to many others.
Mr. Tappings’s daughter was very pretty, and she always made a point of greeting Hugh every time he came around with her father’s various tinctures, pills, and poultices. Hugh had noticed that she was one of a few girls his age or thereabouts that would look into his eyes a lot, and sometimes laugh and put a hand on his shoulder or forearm just for a moment. It was nice, but very confusing, and a little frightening. He wondered whether they weren’t worried that he’d get the wrong idea. So he stammered his little stammers and niced his little niceties and then fancied his little fancies within the aegis of his own home, and in his lonesome thought about how lovely it would be to hold her hand. He wasn’t sure if he had always had it or if he had picked it up from his old-man stand-in, but his romantic streak was well developed.
So he made it to his room at the apex of the spindly building and took his glasses off and laid with his face up toward the middle seam of the ceiling and thought about girls and responsibilities and little slivers of magic.
The next day started as any other- the early morning conversations of crows above the shingles, coffee in the hourglass decanter, and attending to the pharmacist's much grumpier, dawn-rattled version of himself.
"I thought I told you to make sure those windows were closed before you went to bed," his crotchety voice almost sounded like a different person. His lilting flights of vicarious fancy always died off before the morning, Hugh supposed.
"I did close them, Lewis," he said. "I was just up earlier than you this morning and I heard it was supposed to be warm today." And indeed it was. Sunlight glinted blindingly off of houses' metal trims and gutters, and dewdrops from the previous night disappeared like a million shiny bugs all skittering away at the same time. Lewis begrudgingly grunted approval, if under protest.
"You have your list for today?" Lewis spoke after a moment.
"Yes, I have it," said Hugh, trying not to sound dismissive. After speaking, though, he realized he'd picked up on something unusual in the man's tone; speaking words like a high-wire artist taking steps across the midair in-between rooftops- deliberately, in a more balanced fashion than usual. Hugh tried to tune his voice away from sounding like he had any stake in the matter -though he was unsuccessful- and spoke again, "Why do you ask?"
There was a silence that was longer than what he was used to.
"I've had some… stranger calls, of late," said Lewis. Hugh waited. The silence had become colored with a new tension. "You've been taking our notes, yes?"
This time, the question didn't seem like its purpose was just to badger him. It was more questing, with less of an implied consequence. Hugh felt like he could say no, and wouldn't bear any admonishment, just that he might miss some sort of opportunity. Then again, he didn't have to answer in the negative, he had been taking notes. Early on, when Hugh was probably fourteen, his master had drilled into him the importance of keeping a notebook. He had been given a little spiral-bound pad, and commanded -"Mr. Munks," as Hugh had been made to call him at that time, had been a much harsher authority- to write in it, to use it for a different form of recording or art each time, to fill a page every single day, for three weeks. The slightly less-old man had insisted that once it had been done for three weeks, it would have become a habit. And he was right, Hugh had kept one ever since. Admittedly, the frequency of writing had fluctuated, but the presence of paper and pen reasonably near himself had become something he couldn't live without. It figured- the quaint little building that the pharmacist had spent half his life in, had armoires and chests and bookcases filled with not just Lewis', but Margaux's notebooks as well. None of them were in the attic.
"I have been, yes."
There was another bit of silence, and then the old man seemed to make his mind up about something. "On your house calls today," he said, the verbal deliberation hitting a more determined chord, "make sure to write down anything… unusual."
"Unusual?" It was a descriptive word that was significantly more nebulous than was in character.
"Yes. Today I will have you running your usual rounds, but also one of the house calls that I usually do. Before you protest, yes, you are ready." Hugh hadn't been about to say anything- normally he would have interjected with a concern or a misgiving, but something in his master's demeanor made him simply wait and listen. Lewis also seemed more like Hugh's "master" today than he had seemed for a long while, and thus the younger man was rapt.
"You just have to make sure of a few things. I know that you have trouble with acting, but your demeanor here is what is most important. These people may be upset, will definitely be confused, and will need some sort of solid presence to ground them in reality. People don't like thinking about this sort of thing, generally, and they will have been putting off doing so for a while, but if they see you, a professional," Hugh's chest felt lighter- that was one of the Pharmacist's rarely-uttered almost-compliments, "keeping his cool, they will be much calmer, and therefore much easier to interact with," said Lewis. "That is about a much as you have to do, though. Be steadfast, be calm, and take notes about the patient." A beat. "And also their house. Take notes about their house as well." Hugh nodded.
"All right, my boy," Mr. Munks said with an almost-smile, "Those are the guidelines for these new house calls from now on- go, use those watchman's eyes of yours, take notes, and then read them to me when you return. Now I'll tell you about what to expect when you get there."
Verity had an extra toe. It was not the envy of her peers, nor an abomination whispered about by the lavishly dressed. It was not her most closely guarded secret, and she had not grown up with the habit of always wearing socks or never going swimming even if the opportunity was nearly unavoidable. In fact, no one, not even her family, knew about it. This was because, until yesterday, she had been in possession of a perfectly ordinary number.
Hugh decided he could spare her a pair of his old shoes. They were sitting on the two uncomfortable wooden chairs that made up half of the sparse furnishing of his attic apartment, him on the one closer to the wall, leaning to keep his head from hitting the slanted ceiling. Though she was over frequently, he always gave her the guest’s seat- in the center of the room where the A-frame was highest. He only had two chairs up there because of her company, after all.
The attic smelled of the wooden walls (or ceiling, considering their angle) and the boxes of overstock pharmaceuticals that had to be stored up there for lack of space downstairs in the shop, but the pair had been in there long enough that they scarce noticed it, as usual. One of Verity’s leather lace-ups was lying sideways on the rug, knee-high sock discarded on the floor nearby, and she was tugging single-mindedly at the other, grunting as she did so. Her face was pinched into a frown of concentration- this shoe proving to be a much tougher adversary.
The whole scenario, the two of them alone together, even without the risque detail of a young woman’s lack of footwear, appropriate or otherwise, would have conjured, at the very least, a gasp of reproach from any self-respecting, god-fearing lady of the upper crust, but Hugh had learned long ago that to think of things in terms of what those who garbed themselves in money and disgust found acceptable, was like hitting yourself against the inside of a cage that you had built on your own. The person who had taught him that had just wrestled her other shoe off.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t kept a good grip upon it, and the ultimate yank sent it whizzing directly into Hugh’s desk, bidding his lamp and pencils a swift journey to the floor.
“See?!” Verity wiggled her toes, ignoring the mild destruction she had caused. Her feet were side by side, her knees pulled up toward her face and her hands hooked around the edge of the chair’s seat, as best to display the numerical disparity of her digits. Her expression wasn’t distraught, or horrified, necessarily- more like mildly annoyed, like one might feel upon finding a new blemish on their face before an important appearance at a dinner party- thinking ahead to the ways she might have to endeavor to hide it. Sure enough, the other foot was unaffected by whatever had suddenly deigned to give her that peculiar gift.
“I mean, you showed me the foot with the extra toe first. I didn’t think you were lying about it being only on the one side,” said Hugh, still a little shocked, but taking it in stride, as he did with most things related to Verity.
No sense trying to argue away the anomaly- there it was. Almost like it was trying to be a thumb for her right foot, sprouting off the inside edge of the ball. It seemed to him she was able to wiggle it with just as much dexterity as the others. He got up and walked over to the desk in order to right his fallen posessions.
“Yeah, well, I almost had to check to make sure another one hadn’t appeared suddenly in the time since I was last looking.” Verity moved to appraise it up close, bending her right leg so that her ankle was resting on her left thigh. “It wasn’t even like I woke up and noticed it, I swear it wasn’t there this morning! I mean, to be fair, I didn’t wake up and immediately count them-”
“What, you don’t regularly take inventory?”
“Yes ‘ha ha,’” she responded with sarcasm, “after this, maybe I’ll have to start. I knew you had to count the old sawbones’ pills, I didn’t know that responsibility extended to your body parts.”
“Oh, you know how it is.” He paused. “Wait, hold on- you’re saying it appeared partway through the day? Did one shoe suddenly become really uncomfortable or something?” The shock was wearing off. He was starting to actually pay attention to her story.
“I mean, I’m pretty well sure, as long as I’m not losing it- don’t .” Hugh closed his mouth and put his hand down. “It was more of a… slowly growing discomfort, I suppose? But yeah- I had to take my shoe off, give it a look without taking too much time, stifle whatever reaction would have been appropriate for a spare bloody toe -no it wasn’t bleeding, you know what I mean- and then get my damn shoe back on over it. You saw how hard it was to get this one off, imagine me doing the opposite while in a rush.”
He didn’t need to be prompted, the mental image was already tugging at the corners of his mouth. “How did you manage to take a look at it while on the job? For being a lady, don’t they berate you for, like, having feet at all?”
She laughed. “Feet are like opinions, Hugh. They don’t mind me having them as long as they can’t see them. And to answer your question, I had to pop into a phone booth.”
“How do you see an opinion?”
“What?” A beat, and then she rolled her eyes. “Oh, come off it, let me wax philosophical in peace.”
“Fair enough.”
Hugh stood up, careful not to bump the ceiling, and moved to close the small, if incongruously ornate window above his bed. Summer had ended, and Autumn was beginning to whine for attention by habitually dropping the temperature of the drafty little room.
The neighborhood pharmacy that he lived above and apprenticed for was, like the majority of the buildings around, a strange shape. Though it was one of the shorter structures on the street, it was still two-and-a-half stories -Hugh’s room being the “and-a-half” in question- with a silhouette like someone had grabbed the pointy top of a child’s drawing of a house and stretched it skyward, without much caring for whether they pulled straight up. The street that it sat quietly next to, curved in just such a way that the young man’s window looked out longways down the drag, and if one were to peer to the empty space not blocked by steep slopes of neighboring shingles in dull, cool colors, and little metal pipe chimneys bent at angles seemingly disadvantageous for their function, guests might be treated to a scene of commercial bustle and hustle all the way down to the next bend in the road. That is, if he were to have any guests of esteem at all. Verity didn’t count.
Hugh took a cursory glance outside before he pulled the window shut, checking to see if the neighbor’s cat was sitting in the window across the alley. It wasn’t.
“It has to be magic, right?” He left the windowsill and rocked arduously down to his knees to look under the bed. His legs were long enough that shifts in altitude were tough. “I mean, Meera had that thing with the fishes last year and your mum sees that witch doctor or whatever sometimes.”
“My aunt does. Did. Definitely not my mum. And don’t say ‘witch-doctor’ out and about, you’ll have some poor gramp in conniptions.” said Verity behind him.
“Oh, sorry, yeah, your mom would never do that, actually- I misremembered.” He tried to stop remembering the correct alternative as he dug around in the boxes under the bed frame. Verity’s mother was like a glistening steel scythe, in mind and body. Not that she was necessarily very “sharp,” as it were, just that any bit of wheat that stuck out a bit too far to the side was labeled a weed and violently harvested. “How is your aunt now, by the way?”
“Dunno, haven’t seen her since I moved out, and I barely knew what was up with her when I saw her more. I bet Da’s kept in touch, but she was always a sight too weird for the old lady to invite ‘round the old Revel.”
“I suppose you take after her, then, yeah?” He found what he was looking for as she chuckled. A old pair of shoes he hadn’t thrown out, not fitting her dapper, leather sensibilities, but good enough to hide an extra digit on a smaller foot than his. He wiped the dust off them, straightened his back, and turned around.”I always liked her stories, though- wha-”
She was leaning back, extending the leg with the new addition as far as it could go toward one shoe, the one close enough to be on the carpet. The tip of her tongue was poking out of her mouth in concentration, and the chair was suggesting that it may be inclined to fall over.
My housemate and I have been working on a story, me writing and them illustrating, and I'm extremely excited about it. Here is the first chapter with one of her drawings!
Taking Inventory (<that's the chapter title)
Verity had an extra toe. It was not the envy of her peers, nor an abomination whispered about by the lavishly dressed. It was not her most closely guarded secret, she had not grown up with the habit of always wearing socks or never going swimming even if the opportunity was nearly unavoidable. In fact, no one, not even her family, knew about it. This was because, until yesterday, she had been in possession of a perfectly ordinary number.
Hugh decided he could spare her one of his old shoes.They were sitting on the two uncomfortable wooden chairs that made up half of the sparse furnishing of his attic apartment, him on the one closer to the wall, leaning to keep his head from hitting the slanted ceiling. Though she was over frequently, he always gave her the guest’s seat- in the center of the room where the A-frame was highest. He only had two chairs up there because of her company, after all.
The attic smelled of the wooden walls (or ceiling, considering their angle) and the boxes of overstock pharmaceuticals that had to be stored up in there for lack of space downstairs in the shop, but the pair had been in there long enough that they scarce noticed it, as usual. One of Verity’s leather dress shoes was lying sideways on the rug, knee-high sock discarded on the floor nearby, and she was tugging single-mindedly at the other, grunting as she did so. Her face was pinched into a frown, not of anguish, necessarily, but of concentration- this shoe proving to be a much tougher adversary.
The whole scenario, the two of them alone together, even without the risque detail of a young woman’s lack of footwear, appropriate or otherwise, would have conjured, at the very least, a gasp of reproach from any self-respecting, god-fearing lady of the upper crust, but Hugh had learned long ago that to think of things in terms of what those who garbed themselves in money and disgust found acceptable, was like hitting yourself against the inside of a cage that you had built on your own. The person who had taught him that had just wrestled her other shoe off.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t kept a good grip upon it, and the ultimate yank sent it whizzing directly into Hugh’s desk, bidding his lamp and pencils a swift journey to the floor.
“See?!” Verity wiggled her toes, ignoring the mild destruction she had caused. Her feet were side by side, her knees pulled up toward her face and her hands hooked around the edge of the chair’s seat, as best to display the numerical disparity of her digits. Her expression wasn’t distraught, or horrified, necessarily- more like mildly annoyed, like one might feel upon finding a new blemish on their face before an important appearance at a dinner party- thinking ahead to the ways she might have to endeavor to hide it. Sure enough, the other foot was unaffected by whatever had suddenly deigned to give her that peculiar gift.
“I mean, you showed me the foot with the extra toe first. I didn’t think you were lying about it being only on the one side,” said Hugh, still a little shocked, but taking it in stride, as he did with most things related to Verity. No sense trying to argue away the anomaly- there it was. Almost like it was trying to be a thumb for her right foot, sprouting off the inside edge of the ball. It seemed to him she was able to wiggle it with just as much dexterity as the others.
“Yeah, well, I almost had to check to make sure another one hadn’t appeared suddenly in the time since I was last looking.” Verity moved to appraise it up close, bending her right leg so that her ankle was resting on her left thigh. “It wasn’t even like I woke up and noticed it, I swear it wasn’t there this morning! I mean, to be fair, I didn’t wake up and immediately count them-”
“What, you don’t regularly take inventory?”
“Yes ‘ha ha,’” she responded with absentminded sarcasm, “after this, maybe I’ll have to start. I knew you had to count the old sawbones’ pills, I didn’t know that responsibility extended to your body parts.”
“Oh, you know how it is.” He paused. “Wait, hold on- you’re saying it appeared partway through the day? Did one shoe suddenly become really uncomfortable or something?” The shock was wearing off. He was starting to actually pay attention to her story.
“I mean, I’m pretty well sure, as long as I’m not losing it- don’t .” Hugh closed his mouth and put his hand down. “It was more of a… slowly growing discomfort, I suppose? But yeah- I had to take my shoe off, give it a look without taking too much time, stifle whatever reaction would have been appropriate for a spare bloody toe -no it wasn’t bleeding, you know what I mean- and then get my damn shoe back on over it. You saw how hard it was to get this one off, imagine me doing the opposite while in a rush.”
He didn’t need to be prompted, the mental image was already tugging at the corners of his mouth. “How did you manage to take a look at it while on the job? For being a lady, don’t they berate you for, like, having feet at all?”
She laughed. “Feet are like opinions, Hugh. They don’t mind me having them as long as they can’t see them. And to answer your question, I had to pop into a phone booth.”
“How do you see an opinion?”
“What?” A beat, and then she rolled her eyes. “Oh, come off it, let me wax philosophical in peace.”
“Fair enough.”
Hugh stood up, careful not to bump the ceiling, and moved to close the small, if incongruously ornate window above his bed. Summer had ended, and Autumn was beginning to whine for attention by habitually dropping the temperature of the drafty little room.
The neighborhood pharmacy that he lived above and apprenticed for was, like the majority of the buildings around, a strange shape. Though it was one of the shorter structures on the street, it was still two-and-a-half stories -Hugh’s room being the “and-a-half” in question- with a silhouette like someone had grabbed the pointy top of a child’s drawing of a house and stretched it skyward, without much caring for whether they pulled straight up. The street that it sat quietly next to, curved in just such a way that the young man’s window looked out longways down the drag, and if one were to peer to the empty space not blocked by steep slopes of neighboring shingles in dull, cool colors, and little metal pipe chimneys bent at angles seemingly disadvantageous for their function, guests might be treated to a scene of commercial bustle and hustle all the way down to the next bend in the road. That is, if he were to have any guests of esteem at all. Verity didn’t count.
Hugh took a cursory glance outside before he pulled the window shut, checking to see if the neighbor’s cat was sitting in the window across the alley. It wasn’t.
“It has to be magic, right?” He left the windowsill and rocked arduously down to his knees to look under the bed. His legs were long enough that shifts in altitude were tough. “I mean, Meera had that thing with the fishes last year and your mum sees that witch doctor or whatever sometimes.”
“My aunt does. Did. Definitely not my mum. And don’t say ‘witch-doctor’ out and about, you’ll have some poor gramp in conniptions. You know how they like to pretend everything’s straight-and-narrow,” said Verity behind him.
“Oh, sorry, yeah, your mom would never do that, actually- I misremembered.” He tried to stop remembering the correct alternative as he dug around in the boxes under the bed frame. Verity’s mother was like a glistening steel scythe, in mind and body. Not that she was necessarily very “sharp,” as it were, just that any bit of wheat that stuck out a bit too far to the side was labeled a weed and violently harvested. “How is your aunt now, by the way?”
“Dunno, haven’t seen her since I moved out, and I barely knew what was up with her when I saw her more. I bed Da’s kept in touch, but she was always a sight too weird for the old lady to invite ‘round the old Revel.”
“I suppose you take after her, then, yeah?” He found what he was looking for as she chuckled. A old pair of shoes he hadn’t thrown out, not fitting her dapper, leather sensibilities, but good enough to hide an extra digit on a smaller foot than his. He wiped the dust off them, straightened his back, and turned around.”I always liked her stories, though- wha-”
She was leaning back, extending the leg with the new addition as far as it could go toward one shoe, the one close enough to be on the carpet. The tip of her tongue was poking out of her mouth in concentration, and the chair was suggesting that it may be inclined to fall over.
Beginning of a SHORT STORY about Fighting in a Colosseum
Tony Maccariat, one of -if not the, if he had anything to say about it- greatest swordsmen in the realm, was walking down a very dim tunnel toward a very bright opening. There were no hot, buzzing lightbulbs on the walls, and no oil lamps or torches- the only light came from the room he had just walked out of, and the entrance, up ahead, to the main stage of the colosseum. He couldn’t see out of it just yet, the opening in front of him awash with the bright white of Summer, the only noticeable indication of his stage being the muffled clamor of hundreds of giddy onlookers and the thus-far unintelligible squawk of the announcer’s microphone echoing down the tunnel toward him, so he decided to use his next few seconds of walking to drum up the persona and attitude of the fighter that is also a public entertainer, and to speculate about what kind of challenge he may be placed in front of today. This time, he had not been afforded a weapon.
He would be up against other gladiators, that much was certain. A fight was what the many colorful and colorfully garbed denizens of the city would be there to see- but there was sure to be some sort of innovation. Port Cape Romero was a hub of civilized culture that deeply valued industry and design, almost as much as it valued violence.
Admittedly, what Tony had signed up for was very vague. At the Port Cape Romero Colosseum, which was known as “the Square” colloquially, by virtue of its shape (a name that served as a sort of hazing for tourists and their attempts to navigate the city, often trying to locate the commercial center of town and ending up overlooking a jeering crowd seated above a grizzly scene), “creativity” took center stage.
Everyone and their family tree had seen your run-of-the-mill disembowelment by tired and hungry contestants- sun-grilled vagrants struggling in the vacuum of a square of sun-bleached dust until one of them fell, leaking their red ichor and looking positively anguished. Frankly, it was boring. And, if only said in private company, perhaps even a little bit dreary.The general public had been on the edge of their bleachers for some barbarity of a more stimulating kind. Some battery for the contemporary, upstanding, cream-of-the-crop class.
Thus had come the invention of the “Variety Bout,” a fight, once-ish a week, where the gladiators had just about no idea what they were in for. Of course there was blood, human versus human or versus beast was a given, but the setting, ah, that was where things became more … stimulating for the fashionable observer.
So it was with considerable apprehension that Tony “The Razor” Maccariat, three-time Romero Patrician Swordship Tourney victor, with eyes reeling to adjust and shoulders set back in a cultivated confidence, strode out of the tunnel’s exit. Though the transition to full sunlight was near-blinding, he refrained from raising his hand to block the sun, as he knew it would be seen as amateurish to the darling spectators. Cheers, now clearly defined, in contrast to their echoed suggestion earlier, reconstituted with his arrival, though his fans’ praises only added briefly to the constant buzz of the crowd. The announcer said an overlong sentence to commemorate, but Tony only really caught his name and epithet before the rest of the introduction was drowned out by the crowd and his own mind, quickly flipping through observations.
He had fought in this colosseum before, but never in a Variety Bout until now, so there was some internal sense of urgency to pick up on what had changed in the space since his last bloody foray into it. Unfortunately for whatever plans he may have thought up with new sensory information, the bottom floor (where the killing happened) of the Square seemed almost entirely as usual.
Bleachers steep enough to be as walls leaned up and away from the dirt floor stage like geometrically placed canyon cliffs, their clay-tan stone covered in the varied reds and blues of garments covering the innumerable onlookers, all shouting or talking to a neighbor or arguing in true Romero fashion. The clothes made a sort of purplish gradient all together, colors dulling toward the seats at the top, which you might see if you craned your neck upward, by virtue of the more expensive seats being right around the action. The further away from the blood a spectator was, the less they had payed for their seat, and usually, their clothes. Around the top of the massive structure, behind the poorest patrons, stood grand stone walls and arches, looking as if they were intended to hold in the bloodlust generated by the throng of ticketed citizens, to prevent it from leaking out into the carefully protected, idealized culture of the sometimes-regal city. In this it was unsuccessful.
At the bottoms of the bleachers, where the upper-crust of the city could be seen in full detail -acuity of the average eyeball providing- the most brightly plumed sat in fluttering conversation above a truly vertical wall some three people-lengths high. Some of the faces peering over were framed by deeply dyed hats that looked like exotic sea jellies, frills or lace in all manner of hues, golden binoculars and draped metals glinting in the sun, any of the various ways that the rich had decided to nonverbally declare their richness to the other spectators, in the manner of their choice, caste, or culture. Many had large, luggage-filled trunks with them or behind them, attended by more or less sophisticated-looking servants. Tony was almost sure he could smell the -not unfamiliar- generously-applied perfumes.
There was a tunnel opening, like the one Tony had just walked out of, in each corner of the stage, and between them was a wide expanse of exactly what there always was in the more traditional battles: flat, beige dirt.
“-and time-and-again victor of the very prestigious, sometimes-weekly, sometimes-biweekly, shall we say- ‘Impromptu Inebriate Altercation Championship’,” the announcer paused for a response from the crowd, and there was a smattering of laughter around the Square’s seats. Sounding mildly chagrined, she added, “Barfighting, for the layman,” and this time there was a much bigger laugh. She continued, satisfied, “down at an establishment that will not be named today because they did not pay for an advertisement!” Her diction was precise but with a faint buzz of colloquial familiarity.
Tony, for his part, would not be caught dead in a barfight. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find him in a bar at all. Alcohol, as far as he was concerned, was a waste of time, unless it was elegant in presentation and imbibed upon by civilized people in beautiful, pristine halls. He felt very similarly about fighting.
Therefore, the announcer, perched as she was a few levels above the postured folk of the bottommost seats, on a platform at the midpoint of one of the Square’s sides, must be announcing someone else. There were several more contestants standing in designated places around the stage (more than four, certainly), and Tony would have counted them and, perhaps, sized them up, if not for the advent of a loud rumbling.
“Ah, folks, now we come to one of the several moments that you have presumably been waiting for,” the announcer’s microphone seemed to make her smirk echo off the stone, and the crowd’s commotion raised in volume, “the setting of the stage!” In the middle of each of the floor’s four walls, two black, vertical lines appeared in the stone, possibly a large carriage’s length apart, from the dirt below to just shy of the top of the wall, where giddy onlookers quickly pulled their hands away. The lines became connected by a third one going across at the top, which then began to expand, as what was now clear to be a large section of the wall, previously indistinguishable from the rest of the stone, began to slowly lower into the ground with a grinding murmur that shook the dust around Tony’s feet.
“The setting for today’s Variety Bout, all you cream-of-the-crop of the bloodthirstiest bastards around,” the announcer paused for effect, “is the Junkyard!”
Jitterbug Perfume - Immortality, Sex, and Discomfort
Originally posted January 31, 2024
As is apparently my preferred introduction: It has been quite a while since I have written anything on my computer, but as generally happens after I manage to read or, dare I say it, complete an actual, tangible book, I now am doing so. I type this knowing that Google docs is using my writing to train adolescent artificial intelligentsia, and theoretically I could make the switch to another software, but as is the case with Adobe, the monopoly’s Matrix-style robotic belly-button parasite keeps a firm hold on my psyche, with an extra bonding agent in the form of a powerful distaste for the effort that it would take to learn an entirely foreign user interface, just to marginally weaken the hold that Google has upon my intellectual property, when they are already in possession of basically all of my identifying information. They could probably construct an AI that would perfectly replicate my online presence, idiosyncrasies and ego included, and the only thing that they would have to do at this point to make convincing blog posts from my perspective is post them about as regularly as an agave flowers. If anything, if this particular post goes up on the internet at all, maybe that’s a red flag- I would have to be a mind outside of my own in order to return to a creative project even after my attention span’s honeymoon.
Whatever. I finished a book, and now I am compelled to write. Actually, I finished two books. The first was Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, the first of the Mistborn trilogy, one that i meant to read way back in high school because some youtuber that I liked at the time had recommended it for its magic system- magic systems, as a concept, I would continue to grow increasingly interested in; the books would remain untouched on my shelf. The second was lent to me by one of my housemates, though I can’t remember the conversation that led to that happening- Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.
Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, the declaration about me being compelled to write after reading books is only true in the barest sense. Yes, I do feel an urge to write after being exposed to writing that I like, but by no means does that mean that I actually end up, or even begin for that matter, writing anything at all! Also, that same urge doesn’t just apply to writing. I consume manga at a frightening pace, and though by saying this it may imply the opposite sentiment: I do not say that in order to brag- the speed at which I go through webcomics and manga alike is, frankly, detrimental to my experience of the media in question, as I end up retaining almost nothing of what I have had my head immersed in so much that my neck develops knots that hold it at a painful right angle to my torso. I don’t really stop and breathe in the images that the mangaka probably spent hours and hours drawing; if anything, I mostly pay attention to the words written on the page which, in turn, presents a palpable irony in that the reason I have felt unable to read traditional books in recent years is that my attention span balks at walls of text!
Hey, authors! I won’t read your book even though I’d probably like it, because it doesn’t have any pictures in it! Show me your work once you’ve learned to draw!
Oh, holy shit the irony goes even deeper. Even though I feel that creative urge when I read manga, all of my attempts at making comics or even working to be skilled enough at drawing to feel confident in my capacity to do so are stopped in their tracks by the thus far insurmountable obstacle of not being able or willing to pay attention to the thing that I’m drawing for long enough to finish anything. Good lord.
Anyway, the way Jitterbug Perfume was written really affected me. I still can’t tell if I liked it very much (the writing style), but to be fair, I really loved the way George Elliot’s Middlemarch was written, but I have been thus far unable to finish that book by virtue of its inexhaustibly prim density; therefore I suppose that the content of a book and its writing style tend to stay fairly separate considering my enjoyment, and the former aspect seems to have a stronger influence on whether or not I actually manage to make it to the back cover.
In this case, the content was excellent. Jitterbug Perfume was described to me as being about immortality, smell, sex, and beets, and I can’t honestly think of a better way to describe it. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of a story, if all of the pieces on the table were from different moments in time, and at the end, when the pieces fit, you are left with a complete picture that somehow shows an unbelievably cohesive, intimately personal tale, despite the massive scope, time-wise (there are very important events that take place before the advent of Christianity, and plot points of similar influence continue to happen all the way up until modern day).
Now that I think about it, the quality of maintaining a story’s characters and relationships, and especially keeping them as tantamount to the direction and tone of the piece, even when the scope of the story has expanded to include over two thousand years of history, even if that history is embellished upon or entirely invented, is an incredible achievement, and one that I think deserves unending praise. So frequently I find myself put off of pieces of media when, though I once enjoyed them for their characters’ dynamics or their dialogue or their writing styles, those aspects eventually were beaten out of the story by the growing scale of the events taking place. It becomes very difficult for me to continue to be invested in the little things that I like, and for that matter, for the author to continue stipulating on those little things’ presence, when suddenly the fate of the world is at stake, or the consequences of failure become so dire that there is no longer room in the work for mirth.
Jitterbug does this by keeping the story focused almost entirely upon a static set of characters. In all honesty, I do tend to find it a bit grating when a book throws pretty much all of the people that will be introduced over the duration at me all at once, and I also tend to get annoyed when a book switches perspectives back and forth frequently, as it is inevitable that I will be more interested in one of the followed points of view above all of the others (or vice versa, that one of the points of view is especially dull). Let it be known, though generally the book in question pays most attention to the characters that happen to be changing the most, it does do this.
The upside, though, is that even as the setting around the characters morphs drastically with all the changes associated with the world and culture since literally the year 1, the reader is still anchored in the everyday realities of the main characters. The tone of the story stays heavily reliant on each of their emotional states and their changing dynamics. The plot directly follows in the tracks of the characters’ desires and aspirations. As opposed to them being “interesting” people to be around in situations that they have no agency in, they are the driving force of the plot itself, and in this way the book can get away with a mind-boggling amount of in-universe time passing without it ever detaching the reader from the story, or impeding their willingness to care.
That feeling of detachment is exactly the sentiment behind me dropping To Your Eternity by Yoshitoki Oima, a manga that also tackles the concept of immortality, but in a way that I eventually found extraordinarily grating.
Some pieces of media, especially if they continue for a really long time, and even more especially if they are about characters that live much longer than a normal human lifespan, end up bestowing upon these characters a very particularly draining character arc: eventually becoming the most fucking boring people ever. This isn’t really, I don’t think, a product of repetition of personality beats -One Piece, for example, has a main cast that are each fairly one-note, but to me they remain compelling because of the unrelenting new situations, characters, and settings that they rotate through- rather, a common sentiment on the concept of immortality is that a person who is subjected to it will elect that it is a much smarter thing to avoid attachments and emotions as a way of staving off the pain of repeated loss. Combine that with the formula of introducing a bunch of new people, spending a lot of time with them, and then killing them off and meditating on how pointless it all was, and you will have on one hand: a philosophically engaging story about life’s purpose and value; and on the other: one that I will not be reading anymore. Fuck you.
Each time skip in To Your Eternity, my dejection would build, and even though I did enjoy the concepts therein quite a bit, I eventually quit reading when there was a time skip that jumped over so many years that the archaic setting I had been enjoying was gone, along with any characters aside from the protagonist that I may have liked, and I no longer had the will to continue.
Anyway, the point is that Jitterbug Perfume deftly avoids this problem by holding the human experience as an inalienable thru-line. Longer-lived characters don’t become harder to identify with- if anything they become more dear to the reader, as the sentiments that are the crux of their longevity are easily identified with. Their goals, whether they are aware of it or not, are the preservation of emotion and connection- things that the reader can presumably empathize with quite well.
The writing style I would describe as “irreverently confident and connotatively confusing.” The majority of the instances in which Robbins describes anything in this book are unrelentingly riddled with descriptors of every kind, and often of opposing kinds- many sentences use several adjectives to describe a single thing, and the adjectives often carry wildly different connotations. A single line may depict something as both gorgeous and disgusting, just by virtue of the words chosen. Jitterbug is more than willing to yank the reader back and forth like this, and the literary whiplash results in this sort of all-encompassing feeling of mild discomfort. The prose itself is captivating, but in less of the fashion of a ballet performance and more so like a lapdance that really walks the line between attractive and nauseating.
Regardless of whether or not I enjoy the style personally (I still can’t really tell, but I’m leaning toward the favorable side), it strikes me as being exactly what the author wanted. Off-putting, certainly, but one hundred percent intentional. A significant portion of the book’s subject matter consists of topics and sentiments that are at most culturally taboo, and at least playing fast and loose with modern morals and sentiments, especially when it comes to sex. This book, which I really enjoyed, which made me smile and frown and think and even write… will not shut the fuck up about sex.
Every character is steeped in it. Every metaphor is constructed with it. I feel like I could purchase a brand new copy of this fucking thing and its pages would already be stuck together. To get a sense of my feelings (historically) about this- one of my favorite quotes of a friend of mine is from when they asked me: “Hey [my name], would you rather have sex or be stabbed with a knife?”
My point about the “motion sickness” writing style being that it works in favor of the subject matter. The fact that the whole novel is written in a way that makes the reader a little nauseous, figuratively, creates a tone that is much more conducive to, well, not necessarily the intimate discussion of what our society views as crossing lines in the social sand or what should or should not be allowed, but rather the regular enunciation of kind of uncomfortable topics. Combined with a fairly unconcerned and playful tone, the book is able to deftly accept the discomfort that arises from a journey that holds sex as a central theme while progressing through several different settings -cultural and chronological- all with differing views and judgements about a traditionally awkward topic.
Anyway, I liked the book. There is a sentence in there that goes: “Like jugged bees, the funeral orations droned on (134).”
If you think you can make it past all of the disconcertingly flowery (ha, ha.) descriptions of bodily fluids for long enough to make it to that absolute banger of a quote, this may be one to check out.
Moving is hard. Moving is hard for a lot of different reasons, but one of them, and the one that I've been running into most often considering my relatively recent relocation, is making friends. I'm honestly pretty good at it, too- as much as I like the idea of being the strong, silent type, I tend to not shut up nearly enough which is, ironically, one of the best ways to get to know people.
My partner, having been so shy as to be nearly selectively mute for a while, has much more difficulty on that front, even though she goes to school, something that I have decided not to do for the time-being, under-achieving as I am known to be. School, in this case, provides the benefit of the time-honored shortcut to friend-making- going to the same place on a regular schedule (which is honestly the best advice that I can give on this subject; if you go back to some sort of public place daily or weekly, you will eventually make friends).
Regardless, the difficulty in question has impressed upon me of late the importance of being able to make conversation. I'm not talking about "small talk," as poorly-defined as it may be, as those conversations tend to hit the dirt within a few sentences, I mean I've gotten interested in questions that you can ask people that can actively prompt an entire conversation. Kind of a "get-to-know-you" kind of thing, but odd or off-beat enough that it feels less like an interrogation and more of a brainstorm.
Anyway, here are some good ones from the far-reaching depths of my samsung notes app:
(These will be structured with the question in bold above, and my own responses/examples just below.)
1) If you were to create a piece of media/story to reflect certain themes, which themes would they be, and why?
- Love that takes work
- How to live without regrets (without believing in fate)
- Breaking past the barrier of the self (creative resistance, cognitive distortions, time blindness, etc.)
- How cool it is that everyone is interested in different stuff
2) What is a topic that you have a special connection to because you did some sort of academic assignment about it; what did you learn?
- Tapirs
I don't remember too much, but I definitely did a big project about them in elementary school.
- Basking Sharks
How they're rad, giant , and harmless; how they used to travel in gigantic schools of hundreds of individuals; how fishermen got pissed at them because they would get stuck in nets all the time, so the people started putting giant blades on the fronts of their boats and ramming into the sharks, cutting them in half.
- The Satanic Panic and Dungeons & Dragons
I wrote a research paper that I was really proud of about how parents' fear of the roleplaying game in question at the time may have been misplaced concern about mental health issues.
3) What is a topic that you pretend to know less about than you actually do?
- Anime & Video Games
I am insecure and these feel embarrassing- I feel like I need to make sure people know about my personality before they make judgements based on the things I like, and how other people who enjoy similar things may act/be perceived.
- Herpetology (Reptiles & Amphibians) & Wildlife
I have a tendency to just start regurgitating information at a high speed; I need to make sure the others in the conversation are actually receptive to me verbally launching my interests at them.
4) What is something in pop culture that you would change the representation of?
- Committed Relationships
New love/infidelity is romanticized a lot and I think that it encourages dissatisfaction and a "grass-is-always-greener" attitude, I think solid partnerships built on mutual trust and effort should be romanticized more.
The only piece of media that I can think of that kind of does this (albeit imperfectly) is High Fidelity, and I don't like that movie very much.
5) What is something that you would tell your younger self that is only important to you? (Avoid things that would drastically alter your life trajectory)
- "What you think is Generalized Anxiety is actually OCD, what you think is a Depression symptom is actually an ADHD symptom, and it's called 'Executive Dysfunction.' The right people will understand more easily when you call it that."
- "You do not dislike mayonnaise- you like aioli and those two are the same fucking thing, one just sounds better. The bread you're eating with savory sandwiches is too sweet and your parents are not bothered by it, but you are. Switch to sourdough and put olive oil on it."
6) What habits/motions/idiosyncrasies do you notice about your friends/the other people in the conversation?
- My partner does a thing when she plays video games where she scrunches up her face and relaxes it in quick succession. It is adorable.
- A friend of mine will sometimes tilt his head to one side and then the other when he is about to respond to a question.
(This is best when you can imitate the motion or manner of speaking, but be sure that everyone involved is comfortable with the topic, as this can be a sensitive subject for some people.)
7) In what ways are you glad that you're different from how you used to be?
- I've always been really prone to showing off how much I know about specific things, but I used to be way more insufferable about it. Now, I try to be really transparent and genuine about the things that interest me, and practice Intellectual Humility whenever I can.
- I used to be really concerned about my sexuality and making sure my gender identity was solidly masculine. I no longer give a shit, and thank god for that.
8) Which albums were the most influential in your life? What are some memories that you have of them?
- Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder
- Say I Am You by The Weepies
- Random Access Memories by Daft Punk
- Awaken, My Love by Childish Gambino
9) What are your favorites of the compliments that you've received?
- "I've never once felt judged by you."
- "You make it feel really easy to jump in." (In reference to playing music and improvising)
- "Your sweeping form is impeccable."
10) What crime would you be most likely to be arrested for?
These next ones are bonuses because I did not come up with them, rather I've found them on the internet over the years. The list on my phone is more of a compilation than a canvas:
If anything, what would you change about the way you were raised?
- More emphasis on the results of hard work as opposed to talent
- More fluid views on gender
"WAT R UR ADJECTIVES"
Thank you, Skweezy.
Para mi: lanky, nerdy, effeminate, no driver license
What are your tiny hobbies?
- Wire-wrapping rocks and pieces of sea glass for jewelry that may or may not get made; making little wire rings
- Taking cuttings from plants and seeing if I can get them to root
- Finding rocks that I like and putting them in a bag to give out to my friends when they hang out with me
Ideal rocks: ones that fit comfortably in your hand and pocket; soft enough to wear down after a long time of keeping them in your pocket and rubbing them when you need something to do with your hands (I check the hardness); rough enough to feel a difference when they start to get smooth, but not so rough as to be uncomfortable
- carrying around my notebook
- making lists in my phone's notes
Funny animal names
Band/song/album names
Things I like
Gamertag ideas
Story/Fantasy/DnD ideas
Restaurants of whatever area I'm in
Good movies/shows to watch with a group of friends
The title to this post was originally "Albums You May Enjoy," but I remembered after writing a bit under that phrase that I kind of hate it when the title of a piece addresses me directly like: "Things You Didn't Know About ___" or "If You Like ____, You Should Check Out ____" or "Four Things You Absolutely Need if You Don't Want to Look Like a Troglodyte to your Houseguests" -for whatever reason it feels manipulative. Like, chill- you don't know me and don't assume that your opinion has any bearing on me as a human being at all.
Whatever, here are albums I like right now, whether or not you choose to check them out, and if you disagree with me, that's great! Genuinely! Leave a comment and tell me your thoughts, if you like.
Also! I fucking despise numerical album ratings, if you're looking for those, you won't find any here.
Recommended Songs "New Music" "Big Pop" "What Gives?"
Though it may be a relaxing, acoustic listen, New Music and Big Pop has a quality to it that makes me stop what I'm doing in favor of experiencing the music on a deeper level. Comforting melodies, complex structures, and beautifully layered vocals, these songs give the impression of being produced to perfection- no aspect of them sticks out jarringly or feels out of place, the composition feels wonderfully aligned to a steady vision of the completed work. To me, the songs give a feeling of pensive calm but with a stylistic spin that is somehow evocative of garage rock or even punk. Also- listen to the whole thing.
Recommended Songs "Wanna Ride" "Interlude, Pt. 2" "Mona Lisa"
This one I was confused by when I found it. Dan & Drum make music that, while entirely entertaining and often melodically masterful, could really belong to a genre of its own just called 'Confusing.' Generally acoustically supported with some digital effects and various production quirks, the songs on Growl Pop can vary melodically so far within each song that it can be genuinely difficult to pin down what the main carrying melody may be, if there is one at all. The odd vocals and really cool harmonies also give each tune a very variable feeling.
Some of my favorite lyrics:
"I know better, it's mind over matter, yeah, it's mind if it's matter, it's a matter of time" - "Wanna Ride"
Recommended Songs "End of Beginning" "On and On" "Slither"
This is one of those albums where the "Recommended Songs" section above is pretty much irrelevant. I think the entirety of this one absolutely rocks. Reminiscent of Daft Punk, reminding me of STRFKR and Video Age and Hall & Oates and even David Bowie or the Talking Heads, it feels like Djo has listened to all of my favorite music and taken all of that as influence, and then confidently produced the most powerful possible usage of elements from all of the above. This album is appealing to me to the greatest degree- sometimes dark, sometimes passionate, sometimes bouncy, sometimes explosive, I absolutely love it. Honestly it's so appealing that it makes me wish Djo kind of went a little weirder with the songs here- the potential for something groundbreaking is present, but for now it's just rad in all the right, if familiar ways.
Recommended Songs "Still Waiting" "You Would Never" "Tonally Inconsistent?"
Comedy music can be a difficult genre for many to enjoy, especially when the current musical consumption climate makes each individual's music taste a point of scrutiny and something to base one's ego around- when any song you listen to has its main value in someone else hearing you listening to it and thinking highly of you, you tend not to want your sense of humor dissected as well. If you can't relate to that, congratulations and I'm happy for you. In any case, Jazz Emu has blessed us with a treasure trove of songs absolutely spine-tinglily funktastic, with lyrics that get me smiling every time. Emu has this way of weaving the comedy into the music as well as the lyrics, which is more than most others braving the genre are able to do, and I commend him heavily for that, as well as how this album deftly and ridiculously satirizes modern internet culture, even delving into issues of contemporary masculinity, insecurity, and the odd state of being a "content creator." The rare moment of sincerity is made even more powerful after you've heard the song that has a whole section of fart noises.
Genres Alternative, Indie Rock, Acoustic, Indie Folk
Time 37:54
Recommended Songs "Up Granville" "Look Out!" "Everything About You"
Peach Pit returns, in this album, with a pretty folk-y feel, much more than previous albums. It feels like if the songs from 2018's Being So Normal were teenagers, the songs from From 2 to 3 are adults. That parallel may just be me projecting, as the former album came out and had a great impact on me when I was, in fact, a teenager, and the latter arrives with similar importance in my burgeoning adulthood, but It's not totally without base. The songwriting in question has much less garage-rock angst (not that angst is a bad thing), the metaphors are much more refined, it really feels like Peach Pit's style has settled into a very comfortable era where nothing feels forced and the style is solid without being monotonous. An album like this could, in a very personal way, frame my decade.
Let it be known- almost every review of this album that I have seen has described it as Peach Pit's most "mature."
Genres Alternative, Indie, Indie Pop, Indie Rock, Rock, Dark
Time 44:13
Recommended Songs "lucy" "circle the drain" "royal screw up"
Dark and brooding, powerful and brooding, heartfelt and brooding, you get the idea- Color Theory falls in line with the movement in modern music of seemingly very sad, wonderful women, singing their hearts out in gut-wrenching rock and roll irreverence. Artistically, Soccer Mommy very regularly knocks it out of the park for me, I envy the raw ability that she has to convey feeling directly through the medium of sound, and this album is no exception. Many of the hits here were previously released as singles, but when put together in an arrangement like this, they are made all the more powerful.
Modern Johnny Sings (Songs in the Age of Live) - Theo Katzman
Genres Rock, Indie Rock, Pop Rock, Funk, Indie Funk, Jazz
Time 1hr 25min
Recommended Songs "My Heart is Dead (Live)" "The Death of Us (Live)" "Lily of Casablanca (Live)"
Modern Johnny Sings: Songs in the Age of Vibe, the 2020 studio album, is a masterpiece in its own right. In fact, I do even like some of the songs on it more than their versions in this Live album, but the reason that the latter is featured here is that to miss the back and forth of Katzman and the audience, the absolutely incredible keyboard solos, the times where the vocals match up perfectly to what would otherwise be called instrumental improvisation if it hadn't been immaculately practiced, and the absolutely vivid joy of performing would be a disservice to no one but yourself. A Live album like this, that makes the listener feel as though they can see the action in front of them, is a gift. There are a few too many vocal embellishments for my taste, but regardless this work is one you shouldn't pass up.
Not sure if anyone's still reading, but here's hoping I keep writing.
When I was very young and enjoyed things like the Alice in Wonderland remake, I remember I asked my mom what made something (I’m assuming that I asked about movies but for the purpose of whatever this is I’ll say all media, even though that is absolutely not something a child would say) “good.” I asked her because I had noticed that she usually wasn’t very fond of the movies that I liked, which I said were “good,” and I couldn’t really find much value in the old movies that she would talk about. In response, my mom said that she thought the way to tell was if the movie made you feel something. As I was, I took that definition and stored it in the important section of my brain and I’m sure I parroted it off to people who did and did not ask- this was before I recognized my own opinions.
In any case, the divide between knowing what most consider to be objective quality in any media versus just knowing that it made you feel something has become something of great import in my content-addled brain. I can say that a camera angle or shot is really cool or difficult to pull off while secretly holding the knowledge that I watched a video about something mildly related on youtube, and I had miraculously become a connoisseur of film after falling down an internet rabbit hole of people with all their own opinions, presenting them in a carefully crafted or just very loud manner. I can absolutely tell you a fun fact about a script in some movie that is considered “good” by the masses (that absolutely must be above my age- if the piece is popular among my peers, that is a big no-no) that I can’t tell if I actually enjoy or not because of all of the armchair cinema genius I have consumed over the years of lying on my stomach, arms draped over a pillow with a phone in hand.
This is not to say that I have learned nothing from the videos I have watched, in fact I hold a great respect for their creators in all learning domains- it is much more a Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of a young [My Name]- my younger self (but older than in the first paragraph- you get the idea) was due for a bit of a reconstruction in terms of my ability to form my own thoughts about the media that I present to myself. Even now, though I have more faith in my ability to actually know whatever the fuck I’m talking about, if i tried to fully separate my thoughts from the part of me that yearns for pop-culture centric admiration, I would have trouble finding the line between what I know because I know it myself and what I know because it relates to something that someone else said at me. I have not fully rid myself of the epigonic urge.
Anyway, I just finished watching Sonny Boy. As I’m writing this, I’m worried that I may have written more in the introduction than I will have written in this whole-ass thing because the surge of motivation to write after watching will have faded by the time I get to the godforsaken point; the point being: Sonny Boy is really quite good. I could say that the animation is beautiful and the music is powerful and the story is impactful but there are an extraordinary amount of anime like that that I haven’t bothered to watch, and if my goal is to get people to actually watch Sonny Boy and not just put it on their “plan to watch” list to die of neglect, I want to take a different route.
A haiku~
I don’t understand
What the fuck happened at all
But it made me feel.
I will also say that I actually understood the plot more than the friends who watched some of it with me, so there’s that, as well. Another thing: I’m usually not a fan of shows or movies that are incomprehensible- I tend to think that one of the most important challenges of the creation of these things is relaying information to the audience with as few barriers as possible (which, I’m now realizing, is super ironic, considering I’m an American who regularly watches Japanese television in Japanese with English subtitles, not to mention the state of the translation of the show in question, which I’ll get to later), while it may have been one of my favorite shows at the time, it is difficult for me to look back fondly on the last few episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion because I don’t really feel smart enough to either form a satisfying interpretation or piece together the jumbled information, gorgeous as it may be.
Sonny Boy, like many anime, is about high schoolers. The similarities with the other anime that I have seen mostly end there. One day the school is transported- actually, no. I think, honestly, it’s best if you go in blind. The sheer number of concepts -ideas that I hadn’t thought anyone would have the literary courage to expand upon- that are introduced is immense. Each episode feels like, at their least intense, an invitation to look back at your mind and your comfort zone- a philosophical stroll where you can choose how deeply you want to explore the themes through your own level of engagement. At most intense- a stupefying accusation where, in my case, my sentence was to sit in silence for several minutes after the episode ended, mind completely caught up in that painfully perfect outro song.
In all honesty my personal high school experience, externally, wasn’t that bad- there wasn’t really any social hierarchy at my school, I had a lot of good teachers, I found some really wonderful friends; but if I’d had bullies or social trauma or if most people actively disliked me instead of just thinking I was awkward and leaving me alone- I think Sonny Boy would have made me bawl my eyes out (it did get pretty close regardless). I don’t usually cry that often, but if you do, tread with caution.
It’s difficult for me to judge the show by comparing it to others, though, and I think that has something to do with its structure. Each episode is layed out/edited, it seems, not with narrative cohesion or continuity in mind, but with the flow of the emotions that it attempts to evoke. Scenes happen one after the other, but the first may be in the “present” and the next may be a memory, or a shot from the future. Honestly, using the word “present” doesn’t feel quite right because there often isn’t a continual flow at all- past and future and middle occurring side by side in seemingly random order. But it isn’t random. Somehow, I have no idea how, the editors or storyboard artists or whatever -I don’t know how it was made- put the whole thing together without making it feel jarring or really that disorganized, there’s just a shift from perceiving the show as a sequence of events to a strung-together series of feelings where, at the end of the episode, sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t.
It has some problems. Usually I can’t really comment (thankfully- I’m conceited enough with scripts in English) on anime scripts and dialogue because I can’t understand Japanese aside from your usual anime and manga phrases/words that are repeated ad nauseum. In this case, I will only say that the official English translation (for the subtitles- the show probably wasn’t popular enough to warrant a dubbed version) is not good when compared to the ones for most other seasonal anime. You can usually tell what the subtitles mean, but it’s a puzzle for the audience, not the creators- words are jumbled up, there are typos and grammatical errors, many phrases are just off enough to make you think about how they were probably translated by someone who just mostly understood English, and by that point there have been two more lines of dialogue.
Also, sometimes the editing does bug me. Maybe I would benefit from a rewatch, but there were definitely a couple times when I got to the end of an episode and just had even less of an idea of what was going on than what is required to get the desired emotional impact.
Sometimes I will read a review of something, and, as a human, I tend to most heavily remember the negative things that were listed, so I’ll say this: I adore this show. It hit me like an emotional truck. It has one of my favorite soundtracks in any piece of media. It has taught me things (not entirely sure what yet, but I’ll figure that out in time- I know that I learned) about the nature of will and familiarity. One of those shows that I will absolutely recommend, but it affected me so much that I might not want to watch it with you.
I don’t know. Maybe it just hit me harder for whatever reason. I realize that a lot of this analysis has just been me writing about my own experiences, but that’s what this show did to me. I was left with not just emotion, but the desire to look back on my own life. It made me actually create something, which, for me, is the ultimate compliment. If you can get this box of raw spaghetti to willingly get up and write, you have achieved more than the majority of my thirteen years of schooling.
It also has the best soundtrack of any I've ever heard.
In short, Sonny Boy was a very fulfilling drug trip of a show. I feel like I’ve undergone a change and had an intensely meaningful experience, but trying to wrap my head around how I got there is too much for me to handle. What I mean to say is that, though its inscrutability may be a deterrent to some, it happened to give me a clearer view of the show as a whole. I can’t tell you exactly why I love it so much, I can’t tell you why it was created or what definitely happened in the story or even what it’s really about, but for me I know, without a doubt in my mind, that it’s “good.”
This person, in the picture below, is Blaze Foley- a man that I had never heard of until a few days ago. He is also one of the most influential folk and country music singer-songwriters (arguably) that there ever has been.
At the Folk & Forage music festival this past weekend, my good friend Jenner Fox, the incredible musician and veritable jukebox of a human being, began playing a song that I recognized, right as I was leaving the fire to get ready for bed. Several of my very close family friends -essentially extended family- were warming themselves by the flames, instruments in hand; they had just been playing a medley of John Prine songs after a particularly Prine-centric evening (John Prine, for the uninitiated, is -unlike Foley- an extremely famous singer-songwriter. His music inspired nearly an entire generation of the folk genre, and he is credited with such masterpieces as "I Remember Everything," "Angel From Montgomery," "In Spite of Ourselves," and on and on and on), but I was tired and the darkness required I have resolve enough to make it through the nighttime woods back to the cabin.
In any case, the song that Jenner's dad had asked him to play quietly landed upon my ear snail, and it was "Clay Pigeons". Now, my experience with this song was limited. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I had only heard it played by Michael Cera, who, if you don't have your finger on the pulse of contemporary indie/comedy filmmaking, is a bit of a young people's darling after his roles in Arrested Development, Superbad, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, among other things, and he currently is (presumably) enjoying quite the successful indie music stint. The absolutely insufferable hipster buried in me might scoff at the prospect of listening to someone who gained even a bit of notoriety from something as... repugnant as being an actor, especially one that people near my age swoon for, but that part of me sucks and I hate it and I wish it would shut up.
In any case, I was under the impression that the song in question, one that I had always really loved for a lot of reasons- its simultaneous simplicity, understated yet heartfelt lyrics and its confusingly ever-appealing melody (there isn't really a good way to explain something like that, but it manages to hit you right in the heart with only, like, three notes per line) was written by Cera, as i hadn't really heard or known to go looking for any other recordings of it. I listened to Jenner pick the rest of the tune, me quietly singing the harmonies as if subconsciously to prove my music-knowing chops to the people around me -people I need not prove anything to, as if there are any people like that at all- and asked: a) whether it bothers him that I like every song that he plays so much that I end up copying him and learning them all myself, and b) who wrote that one. I had noticed some differences in the lyrics between his and Cera's versions, and I guess I deduced that the latter was not, in fact, their author. He said "Blaze Foley" and I wrote that down in my notebook, joked to him about my musical/composorial confusion, said my good-nights, and went to bed with the melody still dancing around my brain.
It was still dancing several days after I got back to my house, and I went looking for another recording, worrying that the one I would like best may end up being the one that I'd heard first by nature of its earlier discovery. The first three versions that I found were the one by Michael Cera from the 2014 album True That, the Blaze Foley one on Sittin' by the Road from 2010, and the John Prine recording on 2005's Fair and Square. I immediately grew several sizes larger than my pants. The texts I sent to Jenner immediately after that go thusly, without grammatical correction:
well what do you know, clay pigeons isnt originally by blaze foley, it's by JOHN PRINE
*It is now, as I am writing this, that I am immensely grateful for the fact that Jenner was not entirely knowledgeable about the origins of the song.*
wait nevermind what
ok the info on the internet is very confusing
god i was so confident too
All that confidence had dissipated as soon as I took more than a cursory glance at any other part of the internet than the first few results on Spotify that come up when you type in "clay pig." What probably tipped me off was learning that Blaze Foley died in 1989, so there was absolutely no way that the recordings could correspond with their listed dates.
I then went down the proverbial rabbit hole as the title implies, and through several stages of knowledge about the timeline of this almost mythical man and his music, so instead of taking the reader down the same, needlessly complex path that I took to get to what I know now, I'll just start telling you about the guy as chronicled by his album releases, particularly as they are listed on Spotify. I won't pretend to know by what system Spotify dates their albums, considering in this case it is wildly inaccurate, but for storytelling reasons I'll go through them in terms of their oldest to newest (seemingly arbitrary) dates. Let it be known, also, that one thing I've found all over the internet in researching him is that compared to other artists of similar time and renown, his music is "frustratingly scarce" (Spotify), as he only has a few studio albums, and his most reliable recordings are ones from when he was playing live. There are a few other reasons, but you'll learn about them in a bit.
Actually that sounds kind of boring and made me stop writing for like two days because it didn't interest me, so I rescind that previous statement about writing about each album and will now be doing whatever I want.
Anyway, the album above is In Tribute and Loving Memory... Volume #1, released in 1998- essentially a testament to just how much of an incredible impact Blaze Foley had on the musicians of his time, with covers of his songs from fifteen different artists, including several recordings from his personal friend and fellow musician Townes Van Zandt. It does not include, however, the covers done by even more famous artists (Merle Haggard & Willie Nelson, Joe Nichols & Lee Ann Womack, Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, John Prine, Michael Cera, and Whitney) recorded before or after, or the songs that they wrote about Blaze (Townes Van Zandt's "Blaze's Blues," Lucinda Williams's "Drunken Angel," Gurf Morlix's "Music You Mighta Made," and Kings of Leon's "Reverend"). The point is, either his songwriting or his personality or both had a lasting effect on anyone he met, and continue to have one on the people that learn about him, considering my current admiration.
The things about his personality that made him endearing to so many are wild to hear about- he was an absolute enigma, an alcoholic, a troublemaker, regularly engaging in self-destructive behavior, writing a fair amount of songs that actively made people uncomfortable, what with their scathing political satire or their just straight up sometimes gross lyrics. He was seemingly familiar with homeless shelters, regularly destitute, wore shoes and clothes so old that they were almost more duct tape than leather or fabric -his affinity for duct tape was widely known- but he also had a reputation for being amicable, oddly charismatic, and above all, a good friend.
In my opinion, he is best characterized by songs from one of the few recording sessions of his that are readily available, when he played a show at the Austin Outhouse, "one of the few music establishments in town that would tolerate him" (Spotify). The performance, which took place on his thirty-ninth birthday, was long enough that the songs were split onto two albums. The first is Live at the Austin Outhouse, released cassette-only in 1989 and then again in 1999, and the second is Oval Room, released in 2004.
In many of the songs from the former, oddly at the end of the songs, you can hear a monologue from Foley about the tune he is about to play next (these days, if there is a monologue at all, it would normally happen in the same "song" as the song, but that is most likely a product of the album translating to streaming format in an unconventional manner). As it was played live, the listener is treated to the sounds of the audience, the interaction between the people on the stage, you can even tell when Blaze's jokes land and get the audience hooting and hollering, or sometimes don't land and the crowd doesn't laugh. It is an absolutely wonderful portrait of a man just slightly more weird than the people around him, and I think that is a beautiful thing.
Some of my favorite of his unhinged sermons, that I have attempted to transcribe in his exact manner of speech:
"*strum* And uh, ahm on' send it to Merle Haggard, I'un know if he'll read it, or not, but if anybody wants 's say hello t' Merle say 'hello' now. *'Hello, Merle!/Hey, Merle!' from audience* Hey, Merle. (presumably Foley, impersonating Kermit the Frog) Uh, Merle, this is Kermit, yeah. *Audience''s continued greetings, one woman laughing, strum* Uh, have you seen Miss Piggy uh last I heard she w's on yer buss. I'm kinda miffed, uh, Merle, know what I mean? *silence, strum* Cuz it's not easy being green- *strum* (no longer Kermit:) This's call' 'Our Little Town.'"
-Blaze Foley on the track "New Slow Boat to China," before playing "Our Little Town," Live at the Austin Outhouse, 1989
"This's call' Officer Norris. *chord strum* ihs' about a, cop that, put me in jail one time fer'... I was with a, married wom'n an' her, child. An' her husban' wun'n there and the cop didn' like that an' we were all friends, n' it ws', on the up-an'-up kinda. *slow chord strum* But anyway a cop stopped us fer', swervin'... after leavin' a Burger King parking lot an' goin' ten feet an' the car was like fourteen feet long. An' ih's like 'well, how could we swerve? Car's, not that short.' But anyway, 'Shut up, boy.' An' they put me in jail an' I had tinnis shoes on an' they had a concrete floor, it's'uh night kinna like t'night n' my guitar w's in the back of a truck, an' I w's afraid it was gettin' rained on n' the case wuhdn'n good *chord* so I wrote this song. But anny'way, I kep' stompin' on'n concrete floor w' my tinnis shoes n' they never heard me n'... my feet paid. *two strums, picking* So I, now I wear taps on my tinnis shoes."
-Blaze Foley on the track "Our Little Town," before playing "Officer Norris," Live at the Austin Outhouse, 1989
And on Oval Room, the other album made from that one show at the Outhouse, where most of the monologues are removed, there is one song called "20 Years Introduction," which is just Blaze speaking about the next song he's going to play (possibly "Someday," which is the next song on the album, but it's unclear if the songs are actually in the order that he played them that night). A portion of the same monologue appears before the track "Our Little Town" on In Tribute and Loving Memory... Volume #1.
"A lot of people say I'm, half sick, most uh' the time. *strum* But I can tell you that I'm... mostly not sick, most uh' the time. *strum* But anyway, uh... (unintelligible) this might not end up on'nuh record I hope not 'cuz I soun' like a hillbilly, *two strums* but uh, this talkin' part (chuckle). But anyway I'm jus' g'nna see what, what happens, like twen'y years from now I might still be haun'ted by this. *strum* Or, maybe not."
-Blaze Foley on the track "20 Years Introduction," Oval Room, 2004
Blaze Foley was shot and killed on February 1, 1989, a month and a half after he played that show. He had wanted the proceeds of the album to go to a homeless shelter, but they were used to pay for his funeral costs instead (Spotify). His friends wrapped his coffin in duct tape.
The next part is about where all his music went. Thankfully, we happen to be living in the age of peak musical availability, and several of the "lost" albums have been found, but I think it's worth taking a look at just how much trouble it took to get it all back. Normally, in a situation like this where some media is gone or missing, I feel like there's generally some sort of motive from someone that keeps it from resurfacing, like a crooked producer or a greedy company, but in this case, it just seems as though the Universe was adamantly determined to hide whatever the man in question wrote.
I think Foley's Wikipedia page puts it best:
"The master tapes from his first studio album were confiscated by the DEA when the executive producer was caught in a drug bust. Another studio album disappeared when the master copies were stolen with his belongings from a station wagon that Foley had been given and lived in. A third studio album, Wanted More Dead Than Alive, was thought to have disappeared until, many years after Blaze died, a friend who was cleaning out his car discovered what sounded like the Bee Creek recording sessions on which he and other musicians had performed. This was Foley's last studio album, and he was scheduled to tour the UK with Townes Van Zandt in support of the album. When Foley died, his attorney immediately nullified the recording contract and the master tapes subsequently disappeared (reportedly lost in a flood)" (Wikipedia).
Anyway, I now adore his songwriting. I love the simple chord progressions, and as someone who struggles with needing to feel wholly original when I try to write a song, it's a powerful reminder that a song can be what feels like a masterpiece without being a ridiculous, jazzy scalebreaker. I love, in "Clay Pigeons," how the final verse is made up of parts from the first and last verses. I love his tendency to sometimes add a part of the melody at the end of a line that sounds like it's preparing to loop back around, that doesn't complete the melody but is like the lyrical equivalent of a sus chord. I love how the words he uses never feel forced or out of place. I love how I can't quite understand what he's saying metaphorically in his songs, it feels like it makes it simultaneously more personal and easier to listen to.
It makes me happy that we have what we have left of his work.
In conclusion, I think that artists should say the name of the original composer in the title of covers that they release.
