disturbing the neighbors

01-04-00

Day off and I mostly relaxed. There was one moment of insanity when I tried to do laundry. John and I had spread out our 3D Millenium Falcon puzzle all over the table, and I just knew Fleck was going to wreak his own brand of kitty havoc on it the minute I left, so I covered it with a sheet. Bad idea. Fleck decided to play on/in/under the sheet, showering foam puzzle pieces onto the floor every time he twitched or wiggled in his little dining room cave.

I decided to screw it, and went to do the laundry. Got as far as my car when I realized John had put the detergent into his car the last time he did the laundry, so I didn't have any. Well, shit.

John was out helping a tuba friend move into a new apartment; in fact, the guy's moving into our building. This afternoon I was playing trombone etudes in the apartment, rather loud at times and rather silly at other times. John was giving me comments and we were generally fooling around, when the phone rang. It was our new Tuba Neighbor, a member of John's band, joking: "You know, other people live in this building and we don't want to listen to your stupid fart noises at all hours...."

Okay, hey dude, for one thing, it was about 4 in the afternoon. Another thing: he probably never would have called if he'd known it was me playing and not John. He was being funny, anyway, so we went up to check out his new apartment and he stepped into our house to meet Fleck the Great.

A really weird thing happened the other day when we were watching the Tournament of Roses Parade. We only watched it to see the Air Force Band, because three people we knew were in it: the tuba guy from upstairs, and two other people in John's band. As the band marched across the screen, the Fox reporter guy suddenly started talking about euphoniums. No shit. Something like this: "Here's the Blah Blah Air Force Band, there are 101 people marching, including four euphoniums." Totally surreal, because he skipped over everything else to say that. He went on to explain what a euphonium is, then he said something about tubas, and then the next band was on the screen. It was just plain weird.

My magnetic poetry calendar has a monthly assignment/challenge. This month's challenge was to create an Acrostic poem, where the first letter of each line spells something going down. I love these poems, they make me laugh. A girl in one of my poetry classes at Michigan wrote an assignment that way, but she didn't say anything about it as we discussed the poem in class. It was a pretty cool poem anyway, about smells from the kitchen and her goldfish swimming around, and weird psychedelic shit like that. After about 15 minutes of discussion, the professor started laughing his head off, and pointed out to the rest of us that the first letters of her lines spelled out: "stephanie loves cake mmm." It was just ridiculously funny.

So here's my first shot at the Magnetic Poetry January Challenge:

summer after spring
plums are a perfect feast
light comes soft as gold
ever warm like wine
not a strange storm song
dream dances morning sky steam
over shadow turns
relentless balmy-breath wind

there are lines in that poem I wouldn't mind cutting, but in the spirit of the whole acrostic thing, I've left them in for now. "Not" was the only word I could find that started with "n".