Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 74: pop, pillows, puddles


Happy end of the week, friends! Here are three things that left me happy or grateful this week. 

Three Things, episode 74: 

                                          

1. Pop! 

I could pretend that my week was more profound than it was. But here’s the truth: what made me the happiest was replaying a clip on YouTube of the closing credits on the broadcast of the 2011 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony. On stage performing De Doo Ron Ron were Darlene Love, Bette Midler, Elton John, Neil Diamond, Leon Russell—and Alice Cooper. It’s a special bit of joy. Watch it. Dance in your kitchen. Sing out loud. This can wait.

       

Cooper sporting his black grease paint while singing the “caught my eye” line. Bandleader Paul Shaffer getting reading with an index finger in the air for the key change. The delight on the face of the rhythm guitarist while Midler is belting it out. The way the percussionist  takes the mallets to the big bass drum for two boom-boom heartbeats before everyone sings, Yeah, my heart stood still! Love’s yeah, yeah, yeahs that made the woman in the audience raise her arms. And that made the dude in the audience tied up in his tuxedo summon as much Alice Cooper as he could. Elton John on piano on one side, Leon Russell on piano on the other side, my God, if you believe in forever….or if you just believe in those 89 seconds under the spell of that music, listen to it again, and then listen to what it first sounded like when the Crystals in 1963 dropped it into the world from somewhere above.

          

2. Pillows 

I sleep with four pillows. I would like to move up to five, but that would leave Auntie Shelagh with one, and that seems to be not very egalitarian, so, I will stay with four for the foreseeable future. 


It’s regularly the case that one of the pillows, over the course of the night, slides between the head of the bed and the wall. This cools the temperature of the pillow by, what, a degree? a half-degree? I don’t know. I know only the feeling of retrieving the errant pillow at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning and then positioning it on top of the feathery pile so that my head now rests on what feels like a bed of dew.  It is delicious. I am back on my way to sleep quicker than I can call to mind the best nap of my life. We were in Seattle. We had pedalled a big chunk of the Burke-Gilman Trail and I lay down to drift off in our Vrbo, but not before Shelagh opened the bedroom window for some fresh air. What blew into that house in Phinney Ridge at that moment was what the Romantic poets called a zephyr. A soft, peaceful, cool escort on my feathery descent to the harbour of sleep. 


I have been trying to find that inspiration ever since. The best I can do is refrigeration—the wall-cooled pillow technique that draws out head heat generated by too much reviewing and previewing of the days. I would ask Shelagh if she agrees, but it seems I am already asl-zzzzzz. 


3. Puddles 

The spruce trees were right there. Had I chosen to, I could have looked directly at them. The sky above was right above, and I could have easily tilted my head back and looked right at it. The clouds, like thought balloons, were floating in that sky above those trees and could have been taken in by a direct glance. For whatever reason, I gazed at that natural, elemental scene above Hawrelak, née Mayfair, Park, indirectly—by staring into the morning puddles deposited by the rain the night before.
If you were the driver of the white car that swung around me while I was stopped staring over my handlebars into the puddles on the park’s ring road last week, let me try to explain. I mean, it’s a bit of a mystery, right? Why am I attracted to the likenesses and not the things themselves? It’s a surreal question, actually. After all, where can I least expect to see a skyscape than while  looking at the earth? And, yet, there it was…on the ground, the sky…but not exactly…but kinda…except…not really…The puddle that reflected the watery sky and the clouds and the trees was a momentary escape hatch from the standoff of earth and sky. I didn’t quite know where I was. It was nice to feel confused. 

I felt awake.



Three Things from Edmonton, Episode 74:  https://podcasts.apple.com/.../three.../id1550538856...  [4:59] features a little bit of Alice Cooper, et al, Neutrin05, and me asleep. The podcast theme music is original, from the original Brendan McGrath. The end bells are from Edmonton’s underworld mythological god of metal, Slavo Cech. 


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