Unfinished Projects

Photos that I took at a wedding in Boulder last weekend…

This is a photograph of the door that swung shut, locking me in a garage this morning. (Yeah, it is clearly not shut in this picture, but that is because I wasn’t about to lock myself out twice in one day.)

And this is a photograph of the metal bracket which I removed from the wall and used to jimmy the door open!

What I am lacking is a photograph of the feeling of triumph that comes from conquering a worthy foe. Perhaps I will post that later.

I was born knowing exactly two words. This is unusual for babies, who generally awaken for the first time with no knowledge and only instinct. Of course, the way that I knew these words then is not the same as the way we know words now, with spellings and pronunciation. Back then, for instance, I had no idea that those two words were both nouns, because I didn’t know what a noun was.

One of the words is ‘beginning’. Perhaps this makes sense because the time of birth is a true beginning. Throughout our lives we discern other beginnings, such as the first day of school or the start of a new year. People wake up on January first with resolutions and the hope of a fresh start. But really, the seasons are cyclical. How can there be a start to anything that goes around in a circle? I think that birth is our only beginning.

The other word that I knew at birth is ‘cave’. You might think that the symbolism of this is easy to understand as well. Isn’t it part of the theories of Freud that, once we are born, we want only to return to the safety and comfort of our mother’s womb? That being pushed out into the world, naked, is a singular trauma from which we never recover? Well, that was not the case with me. I am quite sure that, at the time of my birth, I was perfectly ready to leave the enclosure of my mother’s belly. I can present, as further evidence, the fact that her labor was quite short, though rather intense. Once it began, I came out almost immediately. I found this out when I asked her about my birth one day in the car while she was taking me to school. My mother thought that it was strange for me to ask such a question (I was seven years old at the time) but she was able to easily supply all the accurate details. I suppose that childbirth is not the sort of thing one forgets. I am sure that her recollection is still as clear now as it was that morning in the car.

Because of my eagerness to leave the womb, I know that it wasn’t the cave which I knew from birth. When your entire knowledge consists of only two concepts, it would be a waste to devote one of them to the thing which youi are leaving behind, or fleeing. The conceptual cave which existed in my infant brain was deep in the ground. It was something that had to be reached by digging, or, better yet, by simply slipping down the natural crevices, along the striations of underground geological features, and even passing through the small spaces that exist between grains of dirt.

Almost certainly mindblowing: link, link.

Jenn and I got to go check out Marnie Stern (sorry no links to myspace pages) playing at the Abbey Pub the other night. I had been looking forward to this show pretty much constantly since it was announced back in the spring. The sound was pretty muddy, which was disappointing. Still, though, it was a total blast to see the songs which I have been listening to constantly for the last three or four months in a live setting.

There seems to be a constant refrain in every review I’ve read of this tour: that it is amazing to see someone on guitar who keeps up with Zach Hill’s force-of-nature drumming (yeah, Spencer Seim does a pretty good job of this as well). Well, here’s a pretty good live video of Marnie Stern playing all by herself (accompanied by pre-recorded tracks). I’ve also got a link to a video for the song ‘Every Single Line Means Something’.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKzjyx_4Bpk[/youtube]

The title of this post comes from the song ‘Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling’. I don’t have a good video clip of it, or an audio link, but it is almost certainly my favorite song off of ‘In Advance of the Broken Arm’. I mentioned it a bit in this previous post. Jenn has been pretty skeptical about this song (i.e. she didn’t like it), but the concert may have made a believer out of her.