Moving On

I made this one up tonight while I was hanging out with the girls. They're five, and tolerate my guitar playing fairly well as a backdrop to other, more important, things, like treasure hunts and conversations between rubber duckies. A few nights ago, an upstairs neighbor I'd never met showed up at the front door with a bag of costume jewelry. "I thought your girls would like playing with these," she said. Necklaces. Bracelets. Lots of watches. A few lockets. Even a miniature mantel clock. It looked sort of like booty to me, the sort a pirate might steal from K-Mart. I stopped at St. Vincent de Paul's on the way home and got a few jewelry boxes. When filled, they looked just like treasure chests. The girls marveled at their fortune while I noodled away.

Just before bed, we did Cat in the Hat. One doesn't just read a story to the girls anymore. One engages in dialogical exegesis of the text. Tonight, Twin A observed that "the fish isn't having any fun." This stopped me short. My own interpretation relies more on Freud, with the fish being all about super-ego. Thing One and Thing Two are pure id. The Cat in the Hat, of course, is an expression of healthy, unrepressed ego. I thought I knew all about The Cat in the Hat, but this — this notion of "the fish isn't having any fun" — this was new, and opened up unforeseen interpretive possibilities.

The Cat in the Hat asks how far you can go without getting in too much trouble. I'd always identified with the fish more than the cat or the kids. Maybe this is a Rohrschach to test where one falls on the internalized repression continuum. The fish knows what cats are about. Don't let the bow tie and funny hat fool ya kids. The freak show feline is a killer!

The fish is always right. The cat should not be there when their mother is out. One does not fly kites in the house. Mother would not like it to find us this way. But everything works out in the end, and fish gets all worked up over nothing. He teaches us that being right isn't everything. He isn't having any fun.

The girls had their milk and chocolate chip cookies and were off to bed, leaving me to ponder amidst the scattered treasure. I've been playing a lot lately. I had Twin B feel my fingertips today. They're like rocks with a little perma-grooves engraved into the ends. She said, "cool!"

I opened Garageband once they were down and spent an hour getting this one mostly right. It's recorded without effects. I call it moving on.