I find myself looking for Bing everywhere. It's normal, I guess, 'cause I'm more familiar with him being there than not. A couple times I've gone to the bedroom to say goodbye to him when I'm about to leave the apartment, and walking home in that safe/small heady trance that I often put myself in, I'll randomly say his name.
Binglet. Bear. B.
I realize now I used to do that all the time--like when my body got close enough to home to know I was going there, a message was sent to my brain. Home=Bing. And saying it out loud made it so.
The weirdest has got to be the urge to seek and find when I go online. Yes, I'm used to searching for all sorts of answers there--I mean, that's a huge part of my job, I'm programmed to do it--but I always want to type in those 4 little letters. Is he there? (Turns out he is, of course. So ahead of his time, and why didn't I buy that dang domain name?!)
And then there's the real world. You know, the one where matter is arranged in forms we sort of all agree on. I was cleaning the apartment the other day, and sure enough, he's all over the place. His little sweater, still in the size-small blue Sherpa bag. Little whiskers on the cat tree he used to climb up to get to the bed. Stray hairs--are they Bing's or Derrick's or both?--in the rug, on the comforter, in the dust bunnies I was sweeping up. When I've vacuumed them all up, when there's no longer physical evidence of Bing the cat, will that mean I won't be sad about him anymore?
Thinking about all this called to mind the photo at the top of this post. (Click on it and you can more easily see it's not what it first appears to be.) I took it on a morning walk in Alexandria last fall, 'cause i thought it was so beautiful--a painting left by something once growing and no longer there. A vine still clinging and singing. And the aural equivalent? An echo that's not the effect that comes after a cause, but just because. Something quiet and deep and sweet, like a backing track that's always there if you listen for it, because it's holding the whole song together.
Darn it! I'd wanted to use just the backing track for this next song 'cause I think it better explains what I'm trying to say--something about how what seems fragile (like memory or what's on the other side of this world) is actually steady and strong--but no one has posted it yet. So here's the entire song-and at least you can hear how the chorus swarms, bee-treeing up the wall, and then leaves behind the sweet honey of the verse, the what's-not-so-obvious. Listen for the "doing doing doings" on the verses--I love them so much I once used them as the message on my answering machine. Oh, that's a "doing" that rhymes with "boing." Not do-ing, like a verb. : )
Update: I found it! Classic bittersweet BW, makes you just wanna cry your eyes out:
This next one's pretty geeky, but it's cool 'cause you get to hear just the bass and, right after that, the entire song. And, sure, every white guy with a guitar has posted a video of himself playing the big old solo in this piece, but LJ kinda quietly albeit funkily holds it up and keeps it going. Ah, so maybe that's what they're doing on the other side?!
P.S. Title for this blog was inspired by the E.E. Cummings poem that goes, "ecco the ugliest sub suburban skyline on earth between whose dowdy houses looms an eggyellow smear of wintery sunset." I know that's not supposed to be one long snake-tail of a sentence, but since I didn't know the poem's name, I had to search via the phrase. The only place I could find it was without the correct line breaks, on a site full of people discussing how they hate poetry 'cause it has no balls.
