Exploits of a City Dweller

This morning when I got back home, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what the 12 things were that what’s-her-name’s true love gave her on the 12th day of Christmas. I had to tediously comb through my CD rack (that I have to dust by the way) to look for that safety hazard of a song. Coincidentally, it was track twelve – how strangely cosmic. Gee, I wonder if they did that on purpose.

So finally I popped it in the stereo and I skipped the entire hullabaloo straight to the last day that awful man showers his lover with an unsolicited assortment of animals and entertainers. I found out it was 12 drummers drumming. The joy I felt at finding this utterly useless piece of information. Now I can sleep.

And now to my point…

Who on God’s green Earth wrote that song anyway? As a kid, you accept it as one of those hard-to-memorize Christmas carols. When you grow up and get more sense breathed into you, you’ll find that it’s completely ludicrous. The horror that woman must have felt at getting hordes of strange oddities shoved at her doorstep and what’s worse is that they multiply exponentially for 12 days in a row. Tell me, who in her right mind would want to get 12 partridges complete with pear trees, 22 turtledoves, 30 French hens, 36 calling birds, 40 golden rings, 42 geese a-laying, 42 swans a-swimming, 40 maids a-milking, 36 ladies dancing, 30 lords a-leaping, 22 pipers piping, and 12 drummers drumming? Not only will your apartment look like a festive Noah’s Ark, you will also end up having a long queue of angry neighbors banging on your door with pitchforks. I admit to having no clue as to what sort of birds partridges and calling birds are, but they sound ominously inclined to leaving little white puddles of excrement all over your living room rug. And what, pray tell, would the 40 maids be milking? Wait…Don’t answer that.

Anyway, I’m guessing she had enough sense to leave this life-ruining cretin before he got started on her birthday. If not, I imagine the world would have been stuck singing an intricate 12 verse birthday song enumerating exotic marine wildlife…on the 1st day of my birthday week, my true love gave to me…a jar of zooplankton!

Then the nightmare will never end…

I have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His short novels make for great reading. The man, unlike many other novelists, does not suffer from verbal diarrhea and possesses humor of a very distinct kind. While a college youngling, green and fresh off the plantation (and I mean that literally…for 15 years, the only neighbors I knew were rice fields and the occasional goat. But let’s not trail from the point.), I picked up one of his more famous novels A Hundred Years of Solitude in an attempt to fit into the “intellectual” horde I found myself associated with. Not to say that I’ve never read anything before that. I read a lot of books growing up. What else can a teenager do when there is no phone, no cable TV and anything remotely interesting is a 45-minute bus ride away? You hole up in your room and read.

And my opinion of that book is this: All the great ones have their flaws. Garcia Marquez probably got so caught up in the storyline, he forgot to take a step back and see that he has whipped up Calculus (for the benefit of those who don’t know this about me, let me state this once and for all, I loathe Math!). For that I will never find out how it ends or what it was really about, not in this life or any of the other lives I will have in the vast karmic wheel of soul-recycling (that is assuming reincarnation is true and even so, who’s to say I won’t be an ant or a bird in my next life).