In honor of Global White Cat Week at Romeo The Cat’s blog, heeeeeeeere’s Derrick!
And ‘cause I stole the title from EJ, here’s one of my fave songs of his, back when he was da bomb. This little clip makes me so melancholy for a long-ago time and place I couldn’t have known anyway. Sigh.
A couple days before Christmas, I came across a post in my Facebook newsfeed from a pet ID tag company calling for haikus about dogs. But the haiku couldn’t be about just any old dog, it had to be someone else’s dog. No matter… could you say no to that? About 7 minutes and 17 syllables later, I’d posted my contribution, only to realize I had entered a haiku contest!
The subject of my haiku was Nina, my friend and manager’s dog (that’s her at top). Nina and I had recently met on my Seattle trip, and I’d been thinking about her a lot. She is this unknown-to-me mix of laid-back and driven—a bee-line maker to other dogs if she so desires, but calm and happy to wait in the car for her mom.
Is it an East Coast/West Coast thing? I’m used to NYC dogs, but Pacific Northwestern canines somehow seem so different they may as well be monkeys! True, I only encountered several—1. Nina, with whom I saw my first eagle and walked through a field of tall lion-colored grass, 2. a droolly tail-wagger on the beach, and 3. an exotic-looking mix who turned to look at us as he hot-to-trotted along with a major case of what I call “butt pride.” (Cats can have butt pride, too, btw. Puffer did.)
Anyway, I forgot about the whole haiku thing until last week, when another post from Fetching Tags came across my newsfeed. Hmmm…I wonder who won, I thought…probably some sappy, Hallmark-y sentiment about loyalty and best friends…
I was so excited that I read my haiku like 20-million times (well, it IS only 14 words)…but very soon doubt began to creep in. Does Nina really have one eye blue and one eye brown?
I emailed 2 of our coworkers, both of whom weren’t sure but didn’t remember Nina having different-colored eyes. So I looked at Sue’s Facebook photo albums and I couldn’t fight the truth. Both of Nina’s eyes are blue, which makes me…
A haiku liar.
I was instantly transported back to 3rd grade at Most Holy Trinity. Our class was having a bake sale, so all us kids brought in whatever our moms had slaved over the day before and sold it during lunchtime to the other grades. Chocolate chip cookies, brownies, sugar cookies with colored sprinkles, chocolate and vanilla cupcakes… everything was probably like 25 cents or something. There were also two cakes to raffle off, one of which everyone was obsessed with. It was pink and perfect, with swirly peaks of pinker frosting and smelling like Lip Smackers. Clearly from a bakery—someone’s mom must have forgotten about the sale and bought it at the last minute. I hadn’t purchased a chance for the raffle, but that cake was doing crazy things to my head.
Me: “I brought in those cupcakes and I was in charge of selling all the chances. I deserve a free one.”
Michael Hayes, handing me a piece of paper: “Here, just write your name on it and put it in the box.”
So, I slipped it in the box and well, wouldn’t ya know…
My name was called as the winner of the pink cake.
Michael’s eyes bugged out, and I was just about to ‘fess up when he looked at me and shook his head in a “Don’t say anything!” way. Looking back at it now, I realize he saw my winning the big pink cake as a good and fortuitous thing, not a scam on my part to cheat the class and everyone else who paid for their chances. Well, d’uh. Third-grade boys could care less about a pink cake. And in that moment, I didn’t care that I was a fraud…just give me my dang cake.
I'm going to shame myself in the eyes of New Order purists by saying 1) I like the 12-inch version better than the 7-inch, and 2) for a long time I got the title of this song confused with "Everything's Gone Green," because of all the eye-color references.
P.S. As I recall, the cake was awful. Not only was it sorta dry, but it may as well have been covered in BITTERcream frosting, what with the growing guilt and shame I felt. And I know it’s not the same thing as the haiku, but I also want to say--Nina, I’m sorry I inadvertently misrepresented you, but I do indeed think you are beautiful.
Am I bad feminist because this is one of my favorite album covers? It stirs me in some weird primal harem-girl way. But despite the oozy-boozy male gaze that’s implied here, trust me, she’s the one ultimately wearing the pants.
And if this cover’s in the “Wassup with that?” family, this song’s the wacky cousin. Does anyone else love it as much as I do?
Did you know that people grow big-a$$ pumpkins, hollow them out and race them across lakes? If I were to journey out to sea in such a vessel, I’d make sure there were two little holes in the back for Bing’s and Derrick’s tails, so they could use them as oars in a pinch.
But can a 1,000-pound punkin’ get you safely past the isle of the Sirens?
I was on the M16 bus last Friday—always a challenging scenario for me, especially since there’s a champion nose picker who sometimes gets on at 7th Avenue—when I looked up and saw something that immediately set my mind at ease. It was the back of a giant forest green dump truck-type vehicle, emblazoned with the word “PINE” in white stencil-y letters. It was snowing, flakes all swirly-twirly and filling up the little frame of outside that I could see from inside.
Why the heck should that make me so happy? Those scary marketers who determine that fast food restaurants should be orange because it makes you not only not notice what you eat but eat it faster probably would have a hypothesis. Was I reassured by the “lo-fi”-ness of the stencil font? It’s true that green is my favorite color as of, like, forever. I don’t know, but I think it’s a mistake for me to think about it too much, ‘cause when it happens again I don’t want to stop it by overanalyzing. I guess it’s like a visual pacifier, and everyone has their own personal Pine.
Some Pines are more universal, and can have a calming effect on a wide variety of people. Unless you’re a cat hater, how could this not make you feel like you have fuzzy socks on:
And other times, a Pine can be more, well, complicated. Just before I woke up this morning, I was dreaming about a giant pomegranate. Each individual seed contained a kitten, just about to be born. The idea of a purring, stirring, mythic pomegranate made me very, very happy—especially since I picked it up and looked closely inside one of the seeds, which contained a little black kitten with a Mohawk. Storybook, right? But just then somebody’s mother came along and, with a wicked look in her eye, popped 2 of the seed-kittens in her mouth. And no, it wasn’t Persephone. I’m pretty sure it was the mother of a childhood friend who once told everyone I ate like an elephant.
This one's a complicated Pine--despite the title, it may as well be called "Bad Feeling."
…it’s how you wiggle your worm. Today’s post is dedicated to the Blaster worm that infected my work computer earlier this week. Um, so sorry you had to leave in such a hurry.
