If you haven’t noticed, I don’t write about anything anymore that has to do with my life. I write whatever comes to my head. I suspect that most of it is bad, and that the only reason I’m doing it is because I am no longer able to write about stuff which even vaguely matters, and that this is my way of coping.
I do not know why the caged bird sings. There is no hope. The only thing you can do is fall out the window and hope you fall on a soft shrub, and maybe that you don’t break your femur.
The caged bird sings because there is no music, and he wants to create some. He sings songs by Prince like “Pussy Control” and songs by Ben Folds Five whose names he doesn’t know. He sings them loud and clear, often in the morning when his masters are still sleeping. When they yell at him he changes his tune to something more upbeat, like “Charm Attack” by Leonna Ness. He is a sucker for female lead singers.
On Fridays he sings classical songs, usually Chopin and sometimes Beethoven. On Saturday he sings 80’s hair rock , namely Guns ‘n Roses and Van Halen. Despite the fact that he always sings “Patience” by Guns ‘n Roses, it is not his favorite song. He only sings it because it has a whistling solo. His favorite song is “My Michelle.”
On Sunday, the bird is silent for the first part of the day. He is letting the Lord rest. The Lord is the only person he lets rest. At exactly 12:01pm (there’s a clock across the hallway from his cage) he lets out a blood-curdling scream. He screams as loud as he can for five minutes, but no one in the house ever notices because they are all still at church. Sometimes he cries and laments his fate to be locked in a cage for the rest of his life. He sings the first 15 seconds of “Coming Down the Mountain” by Janes Addiction followed by the middle 45 seconds of “Rudy Can’t Fail.” He mimics the sound of Joey Ramone; he hates The Ramones.
When all is said and done, the caged bird sings for himself. He sings to annoy his owners, and he sings because he likes the sound of the chorus in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” He will never sing David Bowie, because he would consider that sacrilegious. Not because David Bowie had weird hair or because he was gay, but because he wouldn’t be able to do him justice. Once he broke into “Life on Mars” before he realized what he was doing but then quickly stopped, ashamed of himself. That day momma did not smack the cage with her broom.
In two years, the caged bird will die. He will have sung 5,777 songs. His family will bury him in the plot of earth just in front of the house, and after school one of the children will put stepping stone on his grave to prevent the armadillos from digging him up. In just two more years, he will be all but forgotten with the addition of a new family pet, a ring-tailed lemur that stowed away on a ship from Madagascar to Singapore by hiding beneath a trash can.
This entry was written by , posted on January 19, 2010 at 11:53 pm, filed under Writingz and tagged i know why the caged bird sings, maya angelou, party, your mother. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Rippin’ it
Dear Faithful Readers,
By last count there were roughly 42 of you. Why do I use the word “roughly” with the seemingly precise integer “42?” Well, it’s complicated, and you’re not a statistician. So don’t ask questions. The other day apparently there were around “60″ of you. 60! I don’t even know 60 people, so that made me feel pretty good. Actually, the thing that made me feel awesome was when I went to a bar the other night and a friend of a friend recognized me just because of the “blog.” I had never met this girl in my life. She asked me “How Hawaii was.” So as you can see, I’m already famous.
Fame has its downsides, though. I have to wear those hats with the really curvy bills pulled down tight over my eyes all the time so people don’t recognize me. That or really huge sunglasses. The other day at Chipotle some chick was harassing me for an autograph and she scratched me with her newly manicured nails. I screamed “How dare you” and scratched her back. Nobody messes with me when I’m at Chipotle.
Another fairly annoying thing about being famous is the paparazzi. These days everyone has a point and shoot camera, so everyone is a potential paparazzi (or paparazzette). So far nothing too bad has happened but I’m really worried that one of these days I’m going to be getting out of my car and someone’s going to take a really awful crotch shot and put it all over the internet. Right now I don’t have a car so I guess that’s not very likely to happen. But maybe some one will do it when I’m riding the bus. I take the 71 all the time.
In health news I have stopped drinking again ever since my and Darren’s trip to Ensenada. I’ve replaced the drinking, however, with gross amounts of junk food and frozen pizzas. Tonight I polished off a frozen Tony’s pepperoni pizza to myself, which is bad and clocks and at around 1000 calories but isn’t as bad as it used to be because their pizzas have gotten smaller. One of the reasons I haven’t been drinking is because I’ve had a cold, which I’ve been combating by ingesting around 20000 mg of vitamin c a day.
As far as employment goes, I’m still interning at El Extranjero. I’m confused because a lot of the time people there aren’t that warm to me. I mean, some of them are, but most of the people haven’t even introduced themselves. I think most of them look at me and think, “Oh, there’s that new intern. I’ve heard about him. He’s going to be huge,” and they’re kind of intimidated and it’s just easier to walk past my desk without really making eye contact. Or something.
In travel news the next Where’s Wetzler? trip will be this weekend, though to where I do not yet know. I might do it in the same format as the last one, i.e. post photos but never really reveal the location. Keep you guys guessing. Make you study those maps. Do you study maps? Study those maps. I was in the 8th Grade Geography Bee. I got out on the first question because I confused longitude with latitude. Study those maps.
Fondly,
Wetzler
P.S. Natalie Berry
This entry was written by , posted on March 2, 2009 at 12:51 am, filed under Capitol Hill, Uncategorized, master cleanse, the boot and tagged agoodreed, friends, seattle, seinfeld, uw, vancityallie, yobeat, your mother. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.