Happy Mother’s Day to Me; or, Yet Another Reason I Can Never Have Children

Mother’s Day is usually fairly peaceful for me. I send my mom a card; I send my favorite aunt a card; I send my grandmother a card; I send John’s mother a card; I call my mom on Sunday. That’s usually it. Sometimes I visit, but considering that the half tank of gas required to get to my mom’s house and back now costs more than most presents I could get her, we have an understanding.

Yesterday, though, I got to be the mom.

I rounded up Spike last night to put Advantage Plus on him, as I do once a month. For those of you without pets, this involves squeezing the watery, chemical-smelling contents of what seems like a large tube onto the back of the pet’s neck, where he can’t lick it or scratch it away. Spike is pretty laid-back about this most of the time — I give him a treat immediately after I dose him, so it’s probably got good associations for him — but for some reason last night he went all squirmy on me, with the result that some of the chemical mix dribbled slightly down his neck.

I didn’t think much about this until 15 minutes later or so, when I caught him licking furiously at his shoulder, right where the stuff could have dripped. I should also point out that there are roughly 1,000 warnings on the box that say, “Do NOT let your pet ingest this liquid! He’ll burst into flame right in your living room! He’ll melt into a puddle of fur and fat! He’ll sprout wings and possibly another head, with enormous fangs, and will pursue you around your home for your negligence!”

(OK, I just made that last one up.)

I tried to dissuade or distract Spike from licking, but as anyone who’s ever met a cat knows, this just made him glare at me and lick harder. I envisioned my broke-ass self schlepping the cat to the emergency vet clinic, explaining that he’d licked up his Advantage Plus, and being charged $500 and sternly lectured for letting him do it. I saw, in my mind, Social Services coming to take Spike away from me, possibly blaming me for his amputated leg. I saw Judge Judy refusing to let me have custody of my cat again.

Yeah, I know, I really need to get out more.

So, on Mother’s Day, I did what any quick-thinking parent would most likely not do. I grabbed Spike up, plunked his furry little butt down in the bathroom sink, and proceeded to give him a half-body bath with Healing Garden Oatmeal Shower Gel, which was the first thing I saw that wasn’t made by Clinique.

I was pretty lucky. Spike likes water. At my old apartment, he would sometimes hop into the shower with me. He’s not wild about the bowl shape of the sink, though, because before I got the gel worked into his fur, he managed to knock a bottle of perfume, three kinds of hair product, some hand lotion, and my contact lens solution all the way across the bathroom. It’s a small bathroom, but this is a fairly advanced feat to perform on three legs.

Then he realized he was getting a water massage and settled in. He purred; Spike never purrs. He looked the way I probably do when my stylist is washing my hair and I’m thinking ahh, this is nice, and now getting the tangles out is all on YOU.

I’m no fool. After I rinsed him, I didn’t get the blow-dryer out. I toweled him and brushed him and generally did what felt like relieved-mom procedures, and then gave him a kitty treat for his troubles.

But it was about as close to being a mom as I’ll ever come, and that’s a good thing. If I wig out this much over my cat, can you imagine what kind of neurotic wreck I’d be if I took care of anything I’d given birth to? I’d be one of those parents who turn up as extras on medical dramas, hauling the kid into the ER every time he sneezes or stubs a toe.

So, from somebody who just lived it and that’s as close as I want to get to the real thing, happy belated Mother’s Day to all my mom friends, and all the friends with pets, too. Spike also says hello. He’s sitting next to me, probably wondering when I plan to buy him a rubber ducky.

McMansion on the Hill

I live in a neighborhood that’s probably too good for me. I moved here when I still had a chunk of savings from my high-paying but loathsome retail management job; I’d found a house available from a very, very nice landlord who could’ve charged a couple hundred dollars’ more rent than he wanted for it. It’s a small 2-bedroom house in an area where, less than a mile away, several football players whose summer training camp is in town have put up lovely mansions, with the team flags flying out front. Closer to home are more modest but still well-appointed houses of stone and brick, with Lexuses (Lexi?) and Mercedes Benzes in their driveways. These houses are clearly expensive, but not flashy or gauche: whoever owns them knows where the line lies between tacky and tasteful.

Except one.

Last year, one street uphill from mine, someone bought one or two of the smaller lots available, which had brick homes about the size of mine on them, with pretty white picket fences and gardens of tulips and irises out front. These houses were promptly razed to the ground, and then the grass was dug up with them, as if the new owner wanted to salt the earth to make sure no evil traces remained of the former owners and their relative broke-assedness.

It lay as a huge lot of red dirt, which swam onto the sidewalks when it rained; when I ran in the mornings, I left red footprints for half a block. Then the new foundation was laid, and Holy Saint Joseph was it huge. It was about the size of the pro football players’ homes, except it was on a street of more modest buildings. It looked like a gigantic ring on the finger of a street that normally wore little jewelry.

The framework went up, and clearly you could take my home and my next-door neighbor’s home (we rent from the same landlord; his house is about the same size as mine) and set them down inside this place, with a little border garden to spare. It stood for months on its garish swath of red dirt before the walls — stone, natch — went up over it.

I once mentioned it to an across-the-street neighbor, whose back yard borders the new monstrosity’s. He told me they’re putting in a pool.

“Where?” I asked. I couldn’t see any place for it, and frankly, if it had gone indoors I would not have been shocked.

“Practically in my back yard,” he said.

The house went up. The roof went on. Expensive window frames were put in. A stone walkway was laid in the front yard, where a fine dust of red earth covers it every morning. The construction company building the place stuck a sign in the front yard, which will probably have the effect of putting everybody else on the street off the business if they ever need anything built.

Last week I ran by it one morning and noticed a circular path in the front yard. What the hell? I thought. Then the next day a fountain went in. No fucking kidding. In keeping with everything else I’ve come to assume about these new homeowners, they chose the tackiest, cheesiest fountain available: a couple of bronze cherubs emptying an ewer. I ran by that with my mouth hanging open in shock. A little more cash, I thought, and they could do what that WorldCom jackass did and put in a sculpture of Michelangelo’s David, pissing water into the air.

From my living room window, my view, which was once of clouds above my neighbor’s house, is now almost entirely of the monstrosity home. I walk around my house naked or nearly so at times; now, if they want, these homeowners will be able to look out their decorative window and watch me do it. (I may end up on the internet in some non-written capacity.) I look at the roof and think of Sting’s song, “Island of Souls,” in which he describes a ship built in Newcastle, so large that “its great hull would block out the light of the sun.” In fact, I bet Sting’s house isn’t as big as this one. I feel certain it’s in better taste.

I don’t know the homeowners, but I have plenty of reasons not to like them. They planted this cuckoo’s egg in a street that could’ve been flashy but chose not to. Why didn’t they spend a little more money and live down the road, near the football players? Haven’t they seen that a fountain on this street will be as unnatural and ill-fitting as lipstick on a toddler? In fact, have they even seen the street they’re building on? It’s understated, quietly wealthy but not ostentatious. Now this tacky McMansion will dominate it like a giant pimple on the end of its nose.

Sometimes when I run past the house, there are men walking its red-dirt yard who are obviously not workmen. They look like they’re dressed for an executive job, or, on the weekends, a round of golf. They’re always yapping into cell phones, checking their watches, consulting their Day Runners. I don’t know if they’re the owners or the realtors. But when I pass the house, I usually smile and nod to the workmen, who reciprocate, and these business-boy types do not. That’s fine with me. These aren’t people I’m going to want to know.

Drive That Car Like You Rented It

Because I don’t have enough going on in my life, last week whatever powers are in the great beyond — and I believe in God, because old white men run everything — sent me a wreck.

No one who’s ever met me, online or in life, will believe this, but I was NOT flying down the highway at 100 miles an hour, swerving in and out of traffic (actually I don’t do that anyway), one hand on the wheel and the other changing CDs ( I DO this, but I wasn’t at the time). I was inching my way onto a road from the interstate, and the truck in front of me stopped a little sooner than I expected. I think I hit him at 5 or 10 miles an hour. The sound was certainly dramatic, though.

I was lucky on several counts. The guy’s truck was totally unhurt; the driver himself was the nicest guy in the world; my car wasn’t so totally disabled that I couldn’t get it home. I bashed the living bejeezus out of my passenger headlight, though, and knocked the grille in, and my car leaked something pink all the way home and all the next day. A few people who are more knowledgeable than me about cars — which is to say, everybody — seem to agree that it’s either brake fluid or power steering fluid. I’ll take their word for it. All I know is, it seemed like my car was bleeding.

So now I’m driving a rental, a very nice, very new American car that is totally inferior to my beloved Camry in all ways but one. Yesterday I knocked the ignition off with an accidental touch of my knee. The CD player keeps playing even when the key is OUT. It feels like it’s moving much more slowly than my car, which is making me speed even more than I would anyway. The mileage is about equal to my car’s mileage. Ironically, the only way this car is better than mine is its hypersensitive brakes, which means if I’d been driving this car instead of my own, I never would have had an accident.

So, to recap my last several weeks:

1. I still don’t have a job.

2. My rent is due next week.

3. My dryer broke and I’ve been going to a Laundromat. More to come on this. It’s a shame to have this experience and waste it by not writing about it.

4. My boyfriend found out he had an aneurysm in his heart, and is still recovering from the surgery to repair it.

5. Two people in my family are still gravely ill.

6. And now I’m stuck with a rental, for I-have-no-idea-how-long.

Stay tuned. Hurricane season starts shortly.

In Case Anybody Missed Me…

If you didn’t, well, I’ve been busy. My boyfriend of 11 years had an emergency trip to the hospital, to be followed by a procedure to repair an aneurysm next week. Trust me when I say I could get a dozen posts out of his hospital stay, with titles like “ICU Waiting Room or Psychiatric Floor Intake Area?” or “Ten Ways to Make Nurses Like You and One Way to Completely Ruin It.”

Anyway, I’ll be back with some actual interesting stuff (?) later this week or early next. I just didn’t want my army of fans to converge on my lawn with candles, singing “Kum-Ba-Ya.” For one thing, the grass needs cutting and someone would be bitten by an unidentified six-legged creature. For another, it would freak out the cat.

Anybody Miss Me?

If you didn’t, well, I’ve been busy. My boyfriend of 11 years had an emergency trip to the hospital, to be followed by a procedure to repair an aneurysm next week. Trust me when I say I could get a dozen posts out of his hospital stay, with titles like “ICU Waiting Room or Psychiatric Floor Intake Area?” or “Ten Ways to Make Nurses Like You and One Way to Completely Ruin It.”

Anyway, I’ll be back with some actual interesting stuff (?) later this week or early next. I just didn’t want my army of fans to converge on my lawn with candles, singing “Kum-Ba-Ya.” For one thing, the grass needs cutting and someone would be bitten by an unidentified six-legged creature. For another, it would freak out the cat.

S.N.L. D.N.R.

Sometimes you have to hand out Tough Love, folks.

I was five years old when Saturday Night Live first came onto the scene. Five years old. That show has outlasted all my cars, most of my friendships, my virginity, several beloved pets, and at least two school buildings. It was terrific at its inception, wretched for a couple of post-Eddie-Murphy years in the early ’80s, had the cast version of either an intervention or a quadruple bypass, and came out on the other side as good as ever. Then slowly that cast, born during the Reagan years, was replaced member by member, like a car having one engine component after another fall out onto the garage floor. And to continue that analogy, the mechanic picked it up, looked at what it used to be, and thought, “I got another’n of these in the shop somewhere,” and replaced it with a used but at least still-working part. Then gradually the whole car replaced itself with parts that weren’t as serviceable as the originals, and the cycle went on, and on, and on…

You see where I’m going here, right?

I can’t even watch SNL, as it’s now known — and it doesn’t deserve to have even that much similarity to the show it once was. It hurts. It hurts me in the brain and the funny and the writer, all at the same time, so I can only imagine the toll it’s taking on its last three remaining talented cast members, Amy Poehler, Darrell Hammond, and Kenan Thompson. They’re whirling in such a vortex of suckdom created by their fellow, oh, hell, just say actors whether it’s true or not, that I’m impressed they keep showing up. If I were Poehler or Hammond or Thompson, the urge to just sit backstage in my dressing room and swill Southern Comfort straight out of the bottle would be impossible to withstand by now. I think it’s why Darrell Hammond only shows up in one skit a week these days.

SNL is in a Green Eggs and Ham state of misery: they are not funny on a stage, they are not funny with Ellen Page, they wouldn’t be funny with Alan Ladd, or with Fat Boy From “Superbad.” (I just came up with those rhymes off the top of my head and they’re funnier than anything SNL has done in weeks.) IT JUST BLOWS GOATS, PEOPLE. It’s painful to watch. John keeps trying to make it through the show out of stubborn loyalty and the hots for Amy Poehler, and I cringe for him, week after wretched awful unfunny week. You’d think the writers’ strike would give them time to regroup, even if they weren’t allowed to fire every talentless schmuck in their repertoire, from smirking frat-boy dolt Andy Samberg or whatever the hell his name is, to Fred Something, whose only funny bit EVER was wearing a dress and pretending to be Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, to Kristen No One Knows Your Name and You’re Not Funny, who plays that sickening character that’s a total ripoff of John Lovitz’s Annoying Man, only less funny and oddly enough, less annoying. There’s some poor new girl in the cast who resembles Julia Sweeney. So far she’s not funny either, although it may or may not be her fault.

Who writes this crap they’re passing off to us as humor? Look, I don’t live in New York and I have no current income, and this stupid piece I’m writing at this moment has already made me smile a couple of times. That’s more than SNL has accomplished. And it’s not that they’re hurting for material — the governor of New York gets caught banging an expensive mannequin, the upcoming election is a gigantic mood swing in three acts, everyone who’s ever touched a baseball is caught pants-down and needle-in-thigh with steroids, yet they can’t capitalize on it? The Taliban allows more humor than SNL has delivered. They’ve had two presidential candidates and an Oscar nominee turn up this season, and that’s just on the shows I’ve seen bits and pieces of, but they haul Fred Armi-notfunny out to wreck the news with one of his failed recurring characters. The news is the only bright spot on the show, partly because of poor workhorse Amy Poehler and partly because all the would-be musical guests are taking one horrified look at the train wreck the show’s become and suddenly developing laryngitis. Hell, I bet they couldn’t book Britney Spears — and there’s another reason the show should be at least bearable for the first 30 minutes. America has given you Britney, SNL, and you’ve made her no fun. At long last, have you no decency?

So I’m sad to say it, but I’ve lived a little longer than the show and I’ve come up a lot wiser (not to mention a hell of a lot funnier), and someone has to call for it: just cancel SNL, guys. Just go gentle into that good night. You’re over. For reasons known only to God, Lorne Michaels refuses to fire the lot of his wretched, funereally unfunny cast (he could keep any or all of his three remaining decent players, if he can sober them up) and start from scratch. Doesn’t he remember what happened the last time he ditched the whole ship of fools and got newer, better fools? The show went from the televised armpit it had been with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Anthony Michael Hall and became the talk of Monday mornings again with players like Phil Hartman, Mike Myers, Jan Hooks, even Victoria Jackson, for God’s sake. Hey, maybe they could get Victoria back — it’s not like she’s busy with her comedy career, and at her worst she’d be the best they have now. Scrap that lousy, vocally irritating woman and the weird black stepmom of a white-trash teenage girl, and give Amy Poehler something funny to do. Put Darrell Hammond onstage as Barack Obama and retire Fred Whatshisname to commercials — he might be as funny as the other nerds in those annoying Alltel ads, if he puts his back into it. If you have to wipe the whole slate clean, Lorne, do it — Amy and Darrell and Kenan are talented enough to land on their feet, and they’ll more than likely thank you for the intervention. But for God’s sake, man, do something, whether it’s firing everyone (start with the writers!) or axeing the show. Put us out of our misery. Bring our long national nightmare to an end. Do the right thing. Make us look forward to the weekends again.

Tagged Twice!

…By the terrific Wanda Rizzuto and the awesome Daners Isadora. So, you may ask, what took me so long?… I’m the last idiot on the internet who doesn’t know how to make a hyperlink, that’s what. But I digress. Most of you already know I’m borderline hopeless in cyberspace, and those of you who don’t will certainly figure it out fast enough, since I posted the damn links in old-fashioned idiotese. But that’s awfully negative. Think of me as Old School, ‘Cause That’s Just How I Roll.

The game is this: Go back through my archives (whoa! dude! I actually have archives!) and post links to the following favorite posts:

1. About family: this will explain a lot about me.

The Great Christmas Tree Theft of 1989

http://tigereye.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/the-great-christmas-tree-theft-of-1989-a-holiday-melodrama/

 2. About friends. Well, close enough:

Spike: An Introduction

http://tigereye.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/spike-an-introduction/

3. About myself. Well, as you might imagine, this was a tough one. Here’s the side of me I chose to highlight:

Five Great Places to Pick a Fight

http://tigereye.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/five-great-places-to-pick-a-fight/

4. Something I love. I almost chose politics, but y’all will see enough of that in the next few months, so I picked another favorite pastime:

The Last College Football Post My Friends Will Be Asked to Read Until August

http://tigereye.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/the-last-college-football-post-my-friends-will-be-asked-to-read-until-august/

5. Anything. This is probably my favorite post that I’ve done here:

Other Door

http://tigereye.wordpress.com/2008/01/16/other-door/

And I’m tagging the following cool people, ’cause I wouldn’t mind reading some more by and about them:

Anners Scribonia

Ameboid Blurry Smile

Corina

Bibliomom

Quill Gordon

See y’all here again, I hope… If you don’t mind keeping it Old School…

Charlotte’s Web

If you think this is going to be a heartwarming tale about a good book from my childhood, I cannot possibly tell you how wrong you are.

I’m extremely phobic about spiders. The earliest concept of hell I had as a child wasn’t a mental image of a fiery cavern — it was a damp, earthen-floored basement, dripping with cobwebs. There’s something unearthly and infernal about spiders: all those eerily crooked legs, that scuttling gait when they run or climb, the naked horror of the big hairy ones who jump, like they can’t possibly get close enough to you in order to scare the bejeezus out of you. Don’t even get me started on the poisonous ones. I saw my first black widow at about age ten and had more nightmares about it than anything else I’d seen until then, except the hideous baby from “It’s Alive” and a couple of campy monsters from Saturday afternoon reruns of “Shock Theater.”

If a spider is big enough to be visible to the naked eye, that means it’s grown big enough that it needs to be killed. If it’s larger than a nickel, that means it’s big enough that someone else needs to kill it, because I can’t bring myself to get close to the thing. My ideal spider-killing tool is a flamethrower, but none of my landlords has ever agreed with me about this.

When I lived in my first apartment, I had a small deck on my porch, and a writing spider took up residence there.

Here’s the exception: I don’t loathe and fear writing spiders the way I do the rest of their diabolical species, although I don’t plan to invite them in for cocktails, figuratively speaking. Writing spiders have had Charlotte and Miss Spider as their goodwill ambassadors, which means I won’t kill them. Some friends accuse me of having this particular rule so I won’t look ruthless and ill-tempered enough to kill Charlotte. To those friends, I say, I’m not inviting YOU over for drinks any time soon, either.

But anyway, writing spiders. I can restrict my phobia to a certain extent. I just save that unused horror for the next time Animal Planet features some fool pointing to a bird-eating spider, or John tells me about a recently discovered undersea arachnid that’s roughly the size of a ROOM –

‘Scuse me a minute.

OK, sorry about that, I just had to go take a couple of Valium to get past that image. I’m all right now. Really. The shaking goes away in a few minutes.

So a brightly painted yellow-orange-and-black writing spider moved onto my deck. I was unexpectedly cool with this. It was March or April, and I wasn’t going to be using the deck for at least another month or two anyway, by which time Charlotte would’ve either bought the farm or moved on to one. And I had to admit the web was a work of art, enormous and symmetrical. She could’ve caught a beagle in it. I admired it from a healthy distance: at the time I was still a size 2 and didn’t want to end up in some spider’s freezer, waiting for the next time the spider family wanted Irish Stew.

Charlotte put her web up every evening and took it down early the next morning. For a few days it went up and came down in roughly the same spot, the far corner of the deck. If she’d asked me, I would’ve said that was the best place for it. Instead she began moving the web in increments: it crept along the length of the deck, closer and closer to my front door and my uncomfortable proximity. It was OK, I told myself. Writing spiders were harmless. Harmless! Charlotte could only harm me if I was a grasshopper. Besides, the children’s department supervisor at work had just read the “Miss Spider” books at storytime last week, and even I had been charmed. I couldn’t bring myself to fear Miss Spider, right? None of the four-year-olds had seemed to.

The web moved closer yet to the door, finally approaching the steps at the corner of the deck, still too close for my taste but apparently moving south, down the handrail. This was fine. I didn’t need to use the handrail anyway, I told myself — a short fall wouldn’t even bruise me, and besides, a couple more days and she’d be gone.

The morning after I had this desperate thought, I was scheduled in early for work. I had to leave the house just before sunrise to make it on time, and I went about my usual morning routine and opened the door to leave.

There was Charlotte’s web, spread across the doorway, exactly the way a horror-movie director would place it. And smack in the middle, at face level, sat Charlotte, probably blinking at me with (shudder) all eight eyes.

I screamed so loud my throat hurt.

I slammed the door and backed the hell away, still shaking, and a few minutes later opened the door just a crack. Yep. Still there. She was slightly bigger than a Cadbury Candy Easter Egg. If she was, like her namesake, pregnant, she looked ready to deliver the world’s entire population of writing spiders for the next year.

I shut the door again and thought about my options. There had to be somebody I could call.

My dad was at work.

My boyfriend was at work.

The police would lecture me for calling 911 over a spider, unless  — and I seriously considered this — I stabbed my own fingertip with a safety pin and claimed I’d been bitten. (I had terrific health insurance at that job.)

So, watching the clock, I did what any reasonable arachnophobe would do: I called in sick to work.

I didn’t open the door again until three in the afternoon, when I knew Charlotte would’ve taken down her latest display. That evening I called my boyfriend and he brought over a can of New and Improved Raid! Now With Malathion, and we shellacked my entire apartment front with it. We then spent the rest of the night coughing up pieces of our own lungs amid the resulting cloud.

The next morning Charlotte was gone. I felt guilty for about 0.05 second, but on my way to the car I felt less so: she’d packed up and moved across the way, to live on the front porch of a neighbor I didn’t like.

I never sold another Miss Spider book without a brief attack of the shivers.

Why?!

This is an emergency/substitute post. Your regularly scheduled post should return tomorrow.

Why are men so goddamned stupid? WHY?

The Brits Are Here and They’re Kicking Our Asses

And I’m enjoying every minute of it. It’s like the sixties, with eyeliner and profanity.

I thought at first it was going to be all sunshine and happy love songs, and hard as it may be to believe, I can get into that sometimes. First I heard Corinne Bailey Rae, little skinny girl with a lovely voice, and I thought she sounded enough like Norah Jones for me to buy her CD. It’s pretty good, by the way.

Then it was Amy Winehouse, who I love because she’s so into her fucked-up weird self. She celebrates her crazy in a way I wish I had the nerve to try. What if I’d woken up one day in my early 20s, looked in the mirror at a horrible hair day, and decided to embrace my ugly side with 40 full-color tattoos and a pierced face? I might not be gorgeous, motherfucker, but you’ll remember me. And then she’s got that amazing voice, which, strangely, goes with the rest of the screwy package. It makes you think about how the most talented people you knew in college were all train wrecks.

And now, in a fit of unsuspected novelty, VH1 presented me the other day with Kate Nash, singing this weird wonderful  edgy song about a relationship coming apart, “Foundations.” Who the hell worth knowing hasn’t felt this way? I mentioned it to a friend the evening after we’d both had a bad day (although hers was worse) and she bought the CD. Two days later she returned the favor and sent me a terrific song, with the same spare, bare-bones arrangement around the vocals as “Foundations,” except this song began, “Why you bein’ a dickhead for… Stop bein’ a dickhead….”

Holy shit. It was like my brain had somehow clawed free of my skull and then gone and got itself a recording contract.

I bought that CD too.

Where are all the pissed-off American women? Even the ones I love are awfully fucking mellow lately. I adore Norah Jones, but “My Dear Country” is about as angry as she gets, and it’s more bitter than hostile. Alanis Morrisette grew up and went away, and I really can’t argue with that. There was Shirley Manson of Garbage — she always seemed too tough to be crossed, but now that I think about it she might be British, in which case I should’ve Googled her before I brought her up. And while Queen Latifah still rules, she’s mellowed more than I would’ve ever expected.

“Thirty-five people couldn’t count on two hands the amount of times you’ve made me stop and think why you bein’ a dickhead for…”

What’s the matter with us, America? Why couldn’t someone over here write that? This woman’s going to be looked at in 20 years like Joni Mitchell. She’s a prophet. It’s not like we’ve got nothing to be pissed off about — we watch the news, right? That’s not just me, is it?

Seriously. The voice of reason just released a great angry album with a bunch of songs that are like brilliant little time-release photos of a couple falling apart. Or maybe the voice of reason is a screwed-up crackhead who might not be good enough to attend the Grammys but was awesome enough to win one. And sometimes it’s a romantic, jazz-obsessed teenager.

I can be all three of these and more at times. But I can’t sing. Who’s gonna step up to the plate?