Things Keeping Us Alive, May ’17

I started roller skating because one of my friends just wouldn’t stop inviting me. Turns out, I’m pretty good at it. Owing in no small part to spending many adolescent years at the roller skating rink just wishing some cute boy would invite me to couple-skate with him. It’s impossible to be sad when I have a pair of roller skates on my feet. We even picked up a pair of Pumas and turned them into skate-shoes. I go out almost every Thursday night and it’s basically therapy, but only costs $7. It’s a pretty great deal.

Listening to roller skating music. While roller skating, I’m reminded of embarrassing life stories. For instance, I know all the words to “Funky Cold Medina.” It’s played almost every week. I also now like the song “Pony.” The song that’s my new favorite is “Them Changes” by Thundercat. You know how some people who sing karaoke listen to music on the radio and think, “Oh, I could karaoke that!” Dude, that’s effing crazy. I would never participate in karaoke unless I’m super drunk. However, I do often think, “Oh, that would be a great song to roller skate to!” when I’m listening to the radio these days.

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Wine and fries. This came about by happy accident. We went to Mass the Saturday evening before Mother’s Day, and the priest suggested that we all go home, pour a glass of wine, and toast our mothers. One of my older daughters was also joining us for Mass for the first time in a while. This clearly called for a celebration, but of the it’s-6:00-on-Saturday-night-and-everything-is-crowded-and-expensive-and-we’re-already-tired variety. Lucky for us, there’s a McDonald’s right around the corner and a seedy boozerarium on the way home. I declared it a new Mother’s Day tradition, just to make sure it doesn’t die here—this combination is too good. I highly recommend Red Velvet Cupcake with McD fries, but feel free to improvise.

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The Necks – an experimental Australian jazz trio that have been at this for 30 years. All of their sets are 45 minutes of strict minimalist improv that draw from the acoustics of the room. They are the best kind of experimental jazz: non-didactic, erudite about the forebears without being beholden to them, and curious about where younger acts are taking the sound. Check out their album Aether for immersion into music that, when I first heard it, felt completely alien yet existentially familiar all at once. Check out a video of their show here. That’s me in the front row.

Books. I’ve always been a bibliophile, but that has meant different things at different times. Sometimes life doesn’t lend itself to reading new books and I reread the same Terry Pratchett and Madeleine L’Engle books over and over. This spring has found me reading lots of new books all at once: poems and essays and philosophy and books about dog training. It’s nice to be reading new things again.

Fungus. No really. It’s been an unusually rainy spring in our area and mushrooms and toadstools have been popping up everywhere. Almost every day there are mushrooms in a new place. My favorites are the clusters of tiny brown mushrooms that are only the size of pencil erasers. I’m fascinated by the fact that they’re entirely fragile but nonetheless spring up from not just the ground but also from solid wood. I can’t help thinking of Merlin trapped inside the oak or Ariel in the cloven pine.

Brian Jocks is Sick Pilgrim’s Dark Devotional illustrator, but his crowning achievement is that he once played the Tin Man in a school play, though he is actually a cowardly lion. [He is as unpredictable as Dr. Cox.]

The Leftovers, an HBO show that is wrapping up its 3rd and final season in the next few weeks and I will miss it dearly. It takes place after a worldwide rapture-like event and focuses on broken people trying to cope with unexplainable loss. There’s a strong focus on faith with a few other religious themes such as prophesy, resurrection, and the afterlife (also, there’s a chain-smoking cult that communicates using only paper and sharpie, thrown in for flavor.) The music on the show is fantastic with original pieces by composer Max Richter and an amazing, eclectic assortment of tracks chosen by music supervisor Liza Richardson.

That’s a quote by JD because of course it is.