Mockingbird

This morning on the radio I was listening to this song called “Mockingbird.” I’ve heard it a lot and never was that impressed, but this morning for some reason I paid closer attention to the plot, which is rather intriguing once you begin to delve into the subtext.

What’s happening is that some guy is attempting to impress his girlfriend, or I don’t know, maybe somebody else’s girlfriend--or wife for all I know, by telling her that he’s going to get her a mockingbird; and furthermore, that if the mockingbird fails to function correctly, that he will replace it with a diamond ring. My first thought was that there was no way the girl would fall for it, but that notion didn’t hold up under closer scrutiny, because it was the girl who was singing the song, and telling all her friends about her new bird, all excited like it was a really great thing to have a mockingbird, or maybe because she was confident that the bird wouldn’t live up to its contract, and that she’d be getting the ring after all. I couldn’t believe the audacity of this guy, or that he’d managed to pull it off.

I mean, it’s just a plain old bird, like live out in the yard. Sure, there might be some difficulty in snagging one, but it’d sure as hell be worth the effort to avoid having to buy a diamond ring. Of course, this guy claims that he bought the stupid bird too, rather than catching it, but I find that highly unlikely. He probably made up some huge price he paid for it too, and apparently she went for it hook, line and sinker. You couldn’t pull this off with a woman who knew much ornithology, but I suppose the guy knew that this was not her field of expertise, or else he’d have offered her something else, like a hissing cockroach, that she’d be less likely to know the value of. I called around a few pet shops, none of them had any mockingbirds, and most suggested that if I wanted one I should just go out in the yard and get it out of a bush or something.

This is a pretty old song I think, from a kinder, gentler era when women were more trusting and easier to trick. It’s been my experience that the sophisticated feminists of today are less prone to taking a lot of crap off a guy, and probably wouldn’t fall for something like this. If they were willing to accept a bird at all—which I doubt—they for sure wouldn’t settle for some yard bird, but would demand something like a scarlet macaw, and most likely would turn around and sell it on eBay and then buy a diamond ring with the proceeds. And probably sell some of your stuff too, while they were at it, like your guitar and your camcorder.

I’d like to know why he decided to go with a mockingbird in the first place, and not some other kind of locally-grown bird, like a pigeon. I wonder if he just thought of the mockingbird right off, or if he arrived at it after some experimentation. I bet he’s tried this thing before with other girls, and didn’t get it quite right, so they broke up and he had to get a new girlfriend and take another stab at it.

Here’s what I think happened, is that he just got in a bind one day and had to improvise a present at the last minute, because he’d forgotten some important gift-giving opportunity, probably an anniversary of some sort. Women have the ability to perceive a lot more anniversaries than men can, just like dogs can hear stuff we can’t. Most guys don’t realize that 4 months from the first time you went to a movie together is an anniversary, but it is. So he’s looking around the place for something he can pretend is an anniversary present, and not having much luck, and then he thinks maybe a pet, you know everybody loves a puppy.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any puppies to be had on such short notice, so he grabs up the first thing he can catch, which is, let’s say, a gray house mouse. So he wraps it up with a nice bow, but still he’s not feeling real confident about it, and comes up with this plan where he’ll tell her that if the mouse doesn’t work out for her, he’ll replace it with a sapphire necklace. That he was thinking about the sapphire necklace, and shopping around for one for a couple weeks, but then he saw this mouse and thought it was so cute, and that such a wonderful and unique girl deserved a present just as special as she was, rather than an ordinary old necklace, which is the sort of thing that anybody might use for a 4-month movie anniversary. But then—and this is the man’s genius—he establishes the criterion for determining whether the mouse stays or goes to be something he’s sure the little guy can handle. So he tells her, “And if that mouse won’t run on the wheel I’m going to pick up tomorrow at the pet store, I’ll take it back and swap it in for the necklace.”

Well, of course the mouse can run on a wheel, they’re famous for it. For a couple of days the girl sits around staring at the mouse running on its wheel and trying to determine if this is really in some obscure way an acceptable gift, because she’s probably never had to parse so much bullshit at one time before, but then she thinks “Screw it!”, and packs up and moves to L.A. to become an actress, without even bothering to feed the mouse.

So the guy comes home and sees that the mouse ploy didn’t work and that the mouse doesn't have any food, but still he did get laid a couple of times while she was figuring things out, which is probably better than he would have done with no present at all, so instead of totally abandoning the whole idea he works on perfecting it, and several girlfriends later he’s settled on mockingbirds, with a diamond ring as the backup gift in case the birds keep quiet.

Well, of course the bird’s gonna sing, cause it’s a member of the suborder Oscines of passerine birds, commonly referred to as songbirds, and not surprisingly that’s what they do, is sing. These particular ones are called mockingbirds due to the fact that they don’t write any of their own material, but only do covers of other birds’ songs. I don’t think they mean any disrespect, and they probably should call them coverbirds instead.

And I read somewhere that they don’t do them exactly the same, and each mockingbird has his own style and choice of repertoire. On American Idol they call that “making the song your own.” So if they had mockingbirds on American Idol, which they never do seem to, Paula would say “I felt like you really made that titlark song your own. I loved it.” and Simon would say something like “Paula, you birdbrained slut, that song sucked, and you suck. And Randy sucks, too.” And Randy’d say “Why do I suck? I didn’t like the bird either!” He’d probably call the mockingbird a dog too, cause Randy thinks that a lot of things are dogs that really aren’t.

That sort of harsh treatment is likely the reason you don’t see that many mockingbirds on American Idol, because they’re very sensitive creatures who, as I explained earlier, aren’t really mocking other birds, and don’t particularly appreciate being mocked themselves. (The truth is that even animals that do mock other animals aren’t often receptive to mockery that’s directed at them.) As a matter of fact, mockingbirds are pretty polite as birds go, not like those damn seagulls, for example. About the worst thing they do is to occasionally use copyrighted material without compensating the copyright holder, but that’s a very murky area, legally speaking.

You know, it just occurred to me that maybe those birds got together and decided to call themselves mockingbirds, so that they could contend that their performances were parodies, and get around the copyright issues. I guess those are some pretty clever birds. Not as smart as that guy in the song, though, who’s probably been through 10 or 12 girlfriends by now without ever having to buy any jewelry.

The more I thought about how well that little scheme had worked out for the song guy, the sorrier I was that I didn’t have a girlfriend that I could try it out on. If I had only analyzed this song sooner I probably would have a girlfriend, or at least wouldn’t have spent so much on rings and necklaces trying to keep the ones I had, and could use that money to buy a macaw to keep me company. They can imitate most anything, including human speech, so when I came home from work in the evening it could perch on stuff and mock me while I was trying to watch TV. It'd be almost the same as having a girlfriend.

Unfortunately, I don't have a girlfriend or a macaw, or the money to buy either. However, I do have a roomie who is a girl, and I figured the principle’s the same so I went into the kitchen where Linda was making her breakfast and I said, “You know what, I’m gonna buy you a feral cat.”

“Huh?” she replied, which is fairly noncommittal, but I could tell that I had piqued her interest.

“Yep,” I said, “a feral cat, a really nice one. And I tell you what—if by the end of the week, that cat has not lived up to your expectations, I’ll get out there and cut the grass.”

She was so overcome with emotion she couldn’t even say anything for several seconds, but just stood and looked at me. When she did speak, she tried to conceal how touched she was by feigning a cool, blase kind of attitude, with just a hint of gruffness. You know how some people do, when they have difficulty expressing their true feelings.

“What the hell are you talking about?” she said, but I could tell by the words that remained unspoken between us how much my thoughtful gesture had meant to her. It felt good to bring a bit of joy to Linda’s day, and it wasn’t a major inconvenience for me, as the whole neighborhood’s crawling with feral cats, and I had no intention of actually cutting the grass, no matter what.

The half-empty water bottle

I stopped off at the Gentle Strength Cooperative Store on my way home from work today to fill up the water bottles, but because I only had two quarters I had to go inside to the change machine first. Some water machines will give you change themselves, but this one won’t. It just does water, and sends all the change business to the other machine inside the store. I was happy enough to go inside anyway, cause it was 114 outside and the sun shines right on the water machine that time of day.

I’ve never had any trouble getting change there before, but this time I kept feeding one-dollar bills into that persnickety machine, and it kept spitting them back out. I don’t know, I guess maybe they were counterfeit or something. Finally I managed to find a couple that it was willing to accept, and I already had two quarters, so it came out just right for filling up the two 5-gallon bottles I had. You can work it out for yourself, or just take my word for it.

But then when I took the quarters it gave me and tried to put them in the water machine, it would only take six of those and spit the other two out. Seems to me it was pretty unprofessional of that change machine to be so pissy about the counterfeit dollars, and then turn around and give me a bunch of counterfeit quarters I couldn’t use. Especially when I inserted those dollars in good faith, having no prior knowledge that there was anything wrong with them, whereas the change machine had to have known full well it was giving me bum quarters.

And I probably sweated out at least 15 cents worth of water standing there in the heat trying to coax the water machine into taking those counterfeit quarters when it didn’t want to. This machine is already like the snootiest water machine in town, and will only take quarters, not other coins. The one down by Safeway will take all sorts of coins, even nickels, and it has a nice picture of a blue penguin on front.

Not pennies, though. None of them will take pennies. And the real people in the stores don’t much want to take the pennies either, not if you’ve got a lot of them. Why’d the government even bother making pennies, if they’re not good for anything? I bet you that they’re supposed to have to take those pennies, and the government wouldn’t be happy about it if it came out that they’re not doing it. It’s not like I’m the one responsible for the stupid pennies. It's the government that made them, and if anybody’s got a problem with them they should take it up with the government, and just go ahead and give me my groceries. There oughta be a number you could call, and the government’d send somebody out to make them take those pennies.

For all I know there is a number, and I just don’t know what it is. I wonder if there’s a number you can call and find out about the other numbers you don’t know about, that you could call for various things. It’s hard to keep up with all that stuff, especially when it takes this much time out of your day just trying to buy a few gallons of water. I think if there’s not a law about the pennies, the Senate ought to make a law, or at least apologize for not making one, like they did about the lynchings.

And, as luck would have it, the counterfeit quarters were the last two I tried, so I wound up having one bottle with five gallons of water in it, and one bottle with three, rather than two bottles each with four gallons, which would have been preferable. Cause if I’d known ahead of time that I was only going to get eight gallons of water all told, I could have divided it up like that and not had a 5-gallon bottle to lift up on the water dispenser, which is a pretty heavy bottle. Of course, I guess that means I’ll get a break when it comes time to lift the 3-gallon bottle, which won’t weigh as much as it would have otherwise, but who knows when that’ll be? I could get hit by a train before then, and get no benefit at all out of that 3-gallon bottle. All I know for sure is that when I lifted the 5-gallon bottle I threw my back out, and now it hurts whenever I move or don’t move.

I guess I should’ve done the lighter one first and saved the other one, in case I got in the way of the train I wouldn’t have had to lift it at all. The thing is that it’s hard to predict in advance when you’re going to have a bad back day and save the lighter water bottles for then, or if you’re going to get hit by the train, and should do the light one now and save the heavy one for somebody else to have to lift after you’re dead. I never could predict that sort of thing. All I can tell psychically is stuff like when a train is actually a Spirit Guide, nothing really practical like if it’s gonna run you over, or if you’re gonna hurt your back on a water bottle.

Funny Feet

I was in the shower the other night and I dropped the soap, and when I looked down to find it I noticed that my feet didn’t look quite right. Nothing in particular, they just seemed a little weird, different from how I remembered them. I don’t know if they got that way recently, or if it’s been a while and I just hadn’t noticed, because I don’t pay much attention to them normally.

I don’t have much to say about it, I just thought I’d mention it and see if anybody else had ever noticed that about their own feet, and if they had any idea what causes it.

The City of New Orleans

I was thinking this morning while I was waiting for the train to get on by just how much my life has improved since I stopped embracing negativity Friday before last. Not only am I so much more centered and at peace, but I also feel now that I have a satisfactory understanding of that song “Love Potion No. 9,” which has been bothering me off and on for years. Then all of a sudden—it was like this big flashbulb had gone off in my head—I realized that the train was not a train at all, but was really my Spirit Guide, and just looked like a train. Man, I couldn’t believe what a dummy I had been not to have realized that sooner, because once you do it’s so perfectly obvious, like one of those pictures that just look like a bunch of little dots until you stare at it a while and then whatever it’s a picture of comes out, and from then on you can see it right away. Or most people can. For some reason, I can’t do it and have to sit and stare at the dots again, even if I already know what it’s supposed to be.

I was pretty excited, as you can imagine, but then when I calmed down a little I got to thinking of practical stuff, like what my Spirit Guide’s name was, because Spirit Guide isn’t a name but only a generic term that covers a lot of different Spirit Guides. What I needed was my own Spirit Guide’s given name, so I wouldn’t keep calling him or her “the train,” which is not only much too impersonal, but not even strictly accurate. And maybe I need to know the sex, too, so I won’t have to keep saying him or her, which sounds dumb and doesn’t inspire much confidence in other people that you know what the hell you’re talking about. Before that I guess I need to know if Spirit Guides have any sex, or not.

First off, I looked to see if the name was printed on the side of the Spirit Guide like it sometimes is on a regular train, like the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, cause wouldn’t I feel stupid if I put a lot of effort into trying to figure it out, and then it turned out it was written there all the time. Unfortunately there were a lot of different things written on it, and they were so inconsistent from day to day that I figured they couldn’t be the name, but were most likely some kind of hidden messages that I should try to figure out what they meant some day when I had the time, after I had worked out what the name was, and the sex. Then I thought about the song “City of New Orleans” which was written by Steve Goodman, not Arlo Guthrie like a lot of people think. It just popped into my head, which I attribute to the mystical influence of the Spirit Guide, who could see that I wasn’t making a lot of headway figuring it out for myself.

I’m pretty pleased that the train’s Spirit Guide name turned out to be City of New Orleans, because henceforth whenever I hear that song it will remind me of my Spirit Guide, and of the efficacy of thinking good thoughts, rather than what it reminds me of now, which is the time I went to New Orleans with this girl Lydia I was madly in love with, and things didn’t go quite as I had hoped, nor as she had hoped. In fact, she was even more disappointed in the whole affair than I was, so much so that she felt compelled to make a great big etching, or a lithograph I guess it was, about four feet square, unfavorably contrasting the actual trip with her idea of how it ought to have gone. And both of those things differed from how I thought it should have been, and told my buddies that it had been. So there were three different versions going, altogether.

What I hadn’t counted on was that there would be a student art show, and that Lydia would put that big lithograph in the show, where the guys would see it, and that they would accept her account of the trip over mine. Well, that last part makes sense, but all the rest was just pure bad luck.

So then they thought it would be funny, which it really wasn’t so much, to make up new lyrics to sing to the tune of “City of New Orleans” pointing out that I was not only a loser but something of a liar as well, as though anyone needed reminding at this point, least of all me. I was a little hurt in addition that they didn’t put any more effort than they did into the new lyrics, which weren’t all that good, and mostly didn’t even rhyme.

The general consensus that emerged seemed to be that Lydia had been way too good for me to start with, and that it was an excess of self-esteem that had led me to try and fly too close to the sun, which had melted the wax off of my wings so they wouldn’t work properly, and that in turn’s what caused me to fall right into the bowl of punch at this student art show, with the attendant embarrassment. I didn’t really fall in the punch, you understand, and I don’t have any wings—it’s a metaphor, something we writers use from time to time to spice things up. The art show is the only part that’s real, other than the embarrassment.

If only I had had a Spirit Guide back then, when I was screwing up big time every single day, and most days more than once.

You know what? It just occurred to me that maybe I had that same Spirit Guide all along and just didn’t have sense enough to recognize it, cause we lived only half a block or so from the railroad track there on Mitchell St., and there were trains going by at 12 midnight, 3 a.m., 6 a.m., and other times during the day that I didn’t find as memorable. What if one of those trains was the City of New Orleans, and I was just too blind to hear what she was trying to tell me, due in no way to any lack of effort on the part of the City of New Orleans, who kicked up such a racket that she made the dishes rattle, and occasionally even knocked a picture off the wall. It’d be different pictures different times, but the only one that never fell off was my print—number 17 of 24—of the ill-fated New Orleans trip, which I now see as a sign or an omen, unless it was just because I used a bigger nail for that one than for the others.

Some people think it’s odd that I would even hang up a picture on my own wall that deals frankly with the sensitive subject matter of my being a loser—an alleged loser—but you know what I say “Keep your successes close, and your failures closer.” After the New Orleans debacle, I hoped to keep my self-esteem tamped down enough that I wouldn’t dare think about flying up close to that stupid sun again, or even going out in the sun. All things sun-related were off the agenda. In this way, I hoped to avoid making the same mistake again. In my youthful ignorance I didn’t realize at the time what I do now with my more mature form of ignorance, which is that there are so many mistakes out there waiting to be made—for all practical purposes an infinite number—that you might as well make the same ones over again as not, because if you don’t you’ll just be making some of the new ones instead, and odds are they’re even worse than the ones you’ve already tried. At least the old ones didn’t kill you outright, or you wouldn’t even be considering the matter now, but who knows what’s liable to happen with the new ones.

I can’t even believe now how I used to say “I hate that train”! It seems so long ago, but actually it was just a couple weeks. I was an altogether different person then, though I looked mostly the same and come to think of it I was wearing this same shirt, I’m pretty sure. And then it turns out that the train was really my Spirit Guide, the City of New Orleans. Wow! And that I just now realized it, after all these years that the CoNO has been patiently dogging me around the country trying to get me to come to my senses, often not even carrying any freight, which must have driven the train company crazy. Think how much better things would have gone if I had just embraced life right off instead of saying “I hate that train” and generally exuding negativity out of every pore. I think lots of people probably make that kind of mistake—though not commonly that exact one—and then later on realize how wrong they were, often after it’s too late, but sometimes before it’s too late, but after what would have been ideal.

For example, over the years I have encountered a number of women whose poor choices have kept them from experiencing the full richness of all that life has to offer, and kept me from it too, through no fault of my own, and gave me the chickflop disorder to boot. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if many of them now realize what a terrible mistake they made by exuding all that negativity, and deeply regret the lost years of joy and inner peace they might have had if they had only been a bit more receptive to the gentle spiritual energy of the universe. I hope they do. It serves them right.