LEVITZ : THE AWFUL CHOICE BETWEEN MAGIC AND REALITY (I CHOOSE BOTH).

Shall I put on some music?

I did.

The opening plonkety-clunk anarchic piano chords of Grandaddy's 1997 gem Levitz broke through tiny speakers, and Magdelana busted out big grin:

Yesss...I LOVE THIS SONG! she said. And I was curious if she liked it a little, or a lot, or if she thought it was the Greatest Song Ever, but then I just said:

Me too. I love it too. It is a cacophonous mess of a pretty thing with atonal screeching combating soothing melody, and there seems to be buried in it some idea about...

...actually, I don't know what it's about, but I imagine it having to do something about the struggle between living between Reality and Imagination. When stuck with a hard choice like that, I choose

Both.

2013.01.07

Earlier, I walked through the Safeway parking lot and watched a 60-ish gentleman veer off course to grab an orphan grocery cart and slowly, slowly push it up through the automatic doors and carefully return it to its home, where it was happy again.

Then I walked into Safeway and saw a girl I have only seen in uniform as a barista, and she was buying yogurt as I passed and I said:

It's strange seeing you someplace other than Starbucks,

Which is the kind of thing I say to people in passing, and she smiled briefly and said

Yeah, I know!

and then looked as if she might be afraid I might stop and chat (which would have been a false assumption), adjusted her really cool black glasses and I smiled back and did not break stride,

and thought of a movie I should see sometime called Pitch Perfect,

which one of my students has seen five times in one day.

Five times in one day, she swears. I saw Dumb and Dumber three times in the theater, and one time I watched this great movie twice in a row called The Liberators because I was so inspired by this guy helping slaves escape, but I have never ever watched anything five times in a single day.

That is a strong endorsement for Pitch Perfect; I think I will have to see it. Probably just once.

There was some sad stuff at Becca's work today; it made me sad; we came home and ate curry and listened to Levitz some more. Becca started reading to the kids on the couch and I lied to her and said I was going to do something important, but really I wasn't: I sneaked around the corner and then stealthily crawled back until I could spy on them reading, but Magdelana counter-spied, and tackled me, and then Johannes did too and I almost got injured terribly when they leaped on my back, and Johannes said he was going to fight me like Darth Vader, and I started to tell him that Darth Vader lives on a different planet than us, but I didn't.

We shot the photograph above at some point in the afternoon, the exact time really does not matter. We were playing, or working, or some messy combination of the two. It was a pretty mess of a day, and a bunch of things happened that were little and unrelated, but they added up to a messy, pretty day. Sometimes little pieces end up fitting together in strange way and making a tiny day interesting. I am going to go listen to Grandaddy again now, goodbye.

****

Grandaddy

Levitz (Birdless)

Under the Western Freeway (Japanese bonus version track)

1997

(NOT ON SPOTIFY)