Ruminations

I went to see the Hall and Oates concert last night at the Ford center. It was pretty wild. They performed a bunch of thier hits but they also cranked out a bunch of old soul tunes. It was odd watching a band that used to be popular performing for a bunch of people that used to be young.
There's this laid back ease to a band that was hot years and years ago and is still touring. An effortless precision and easy going perfection. Likewise the appreciation from the crowd is honest and heartfelt. The people in the crowd, mostly in their late thirties and early forties, are a distilled crowd. The precipitate of true fandom. They were not there to appreciate the 'latest thing'. They were because they still loved what the band had to offer.

Check these out. Watch them from the beginning. Don't let the title put you off. It's awesome.

Puppet Rapist

After the Hall and Oates gig, I went to over to Michael's place to see The Dark Crystal for like the 20th time with Jhayne and George. I love that movie. One, because it's awesome but two, because it is a film the likes of which no one would even attempt these days. The sheer effort of creating an 'analogue' film that is all puppetry and with no computer generated visual effects in a totally separate and full realized world is daunting. The years of experience and patience needed to take that project on were numerous.
And of course, Jim Henson. RIP. He left behind an impressive body of work but I would have liked to see a little more. Always makes me sad.

Well here's something to cheer us all up.

Johnny Cash on Sesame Street.

Prince on Muppets Tonight.

Miss Piggy auditions.

Something happened on the weekend there. I'm not sure what it was but there was a shift of gears in my life. I read somewhere that all the cells in your body do an entire changeover once every seven years. Not like a sudden Ka-Bam shift but more like the very last cell of the person you were seven years ago is leaving.......now. Biologically you are completely different. I felt like that happened on the weekend. I am a man now, with almost no attachment to the ways of youth. I can't relate to having boundless energy. I take it easy out of necessity. I have more patience and less judgement. I'm also less sure of myself. I listen more. I'm content to be background from time to time. Content to be a witness. I'm not happy or sad about it but I could totally feel it.

Maybe I should start doing this:

Ass Pennies

I would like to give the reasons that I have for turning to darkness, for watching the light from a safe distance to the shadow kind. I would like to find the darKing and let her/him know of the plan. You are the flaw in the diamond. You soar and use the clouds for cover. The freckles on your skin connect to form a picture of my love.

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Ulterior motives in an alternate universe

Just a few inches off of the wing of the plane up, up, up on a child’s breath of icy wind. I’m keeping pace with the passenger airliner. My hair and cloak are whipping in the wind. I’m an airborne mirage come to give the Gift to these 812 souls. I can’t breathe up here but I don’t need to. A child wakes up and looks out of the windows and down the wing into the pitch black night time sky. His forehead crinkles. With every flash of the warning lights, he can see me hovering just off the edge of the wingtip, standing where it’s impossible to stand, looking back at him. He looks out the other window to see my sister standing near the far edge of the other wing. He can’t see my brother up by the tail section. He can’t see my other brother standing up on top of the plane near the front above the pilot’s windows like God’s own hood ornament carving into the wind.
The child looks back at me with a smile on his face, trusting round face framed in his little antiseptic pressurized lozenge of brightly lit safety glass. God bless the children. I feel less horror about killing them. They enjoy the hell out of life right up until the end. They don’t waste the last few minutes they have waiting for explanations or wallowing in fear. They just don’t know how. I put my finger to my lips and close one eye and wait for the flash of the plane’s wingtip warning light to give the boy a strobe light wink.
I hear the signal to begin.
I take a deep breath.
It begins.
My brother on the top of the plane turns his hands into metal spikes and punches them down through the roof on the plane and through the skulls of the captain and the co-pilot. The pressure doors come down and the windows shatter in the cockpit, shredding the already dead pilots. There’s not even a tremor. The rest of the plane hears and feels nothing. The cabin crew will notice that they can’t get into the cockpit in about five minutes. They’ll quietly panic but won’t alert the passengers for a while yet. An emergency signal is broadcast out to the airport ahead of them. The plane’s altitude will remain constant for the next eight hours.
Or rather, it would have.
My brother near the back focuses his narrow eyes out into the night. Red beams shine out from his pupils. He jerks his head in three precise arcs and the three fins at the rear of the plane leap off playfully into the jetstream. Now the plane jumps like a startled animal.
The child looks at me quizzically and cocks his head like a dog. All the adults grab their armrests in white-knuckle monkey fear.
I slowly glide forward. I drift up and over until I’m in front of one of the pair of gigantic turbines on my side of the plane. The sound of the engine swallows everything, even the storm around us. I stare into it. At the same time as I turn off my tracking and stop following the plane, I turn into fire and caress the engine as it rotates through me at 900 miles and hour. I angle back in flames and do the same to the other engine on the wing I’ve been assigned.
The plane veers right until my sister on the other side shoots out electricity from her fingertips and shorts the other engines out.
The four of us leap up as the plane dips, nosedives and finally starts to spiral down towards the dark ocean and the waiting mouths.
We hang there in the air.
We avoid each other’s eyes.
We were on planes too. It’s how we ended up in the Tonsil and how we were gifted. But the other passengers on our flights were killed in the trials. The tests don’t have a high survival rate. They need more of us.
We are Bermuda’s children.


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