Monday Morning Commute: Bears, Wolves, and Ghosts
It’s Labor Day, so hopefully none of you are reading this after having put in a full day’s work. Today is the last HURRAH!, the final chance to high-five Summer before he starts putting his suitcases into the trunk of his car. Don’t worry, he’ll be back next year to regale us with hot-dogs and sunburns and countless hours of molasses-paced baseball. Everything’s going to be all right.
Besides, I can already see Autumn’s car down the road. He’s cruising towards us in a pickup truck full of pumpkins and foliage and warm apple pies. So as long as we stay strong during Summer’s departure, we’ll be fine.
Okay, let’s cut to the chase – this is the Monday Morning Commute, the spot where I show you all of the goodies that’re going to get me through the workweek in one piece. After you check out my wares, hit up the comments and show off your own ennui-destroyers.
Time to dance, beetle-breath.
–-
Recitin’/9-5ers Anthem (Aesop Rock)
9-5ers Anthem is one of my all-time favorite Aesop Rock tracks. With this week seeing my return to regularly-scheduled workdays, I have no doubt that this track is going to be in the back of my mind. At all times.
Fortunately, I’ve also got the wonderful outlet that is OL to make sure that my creative muscles don’t atrophy. Which I think is important, because I’m convinced that many folks would be far less miserable if they occasionally took the time to sit down and create.
Sketch a cartoon. Write a poem. Strum a damn guitar. Just do something creative.
But the problem’s that most people stop expressing themselves after taking high school art class. Dragging themselves to jobs they hate to pay the bills for shit they want because the neighbors got it first, these cogs never realize the significance of grappling with their imaginations. Shaking hands with their own first person perspectives. Trying to figure out what they’ve got going on beneath the surface. Instead, they sit on their couches, slurping from cans of premium lite-swill, watching televised images of coke addicts and third-world disasters.
Creative atrophy leads to spiritual atrophy.
In Aesop Rock’s words:
Now we the American working population
Hate the fact that eight hours a day
Is wasted on chasing the dream of someone that isn’t us
And we may not hate our jobs
But we hate jobs in general
That don’t have to do with fighting our own causes
We the American working population
Hate the nine-to-five day-in day-out
When we’d rather be supporting ourselves
By being paid to perfect the pasttimes
That we have harbored based solely on the fact
That it makes us smile if it sounds dope
–-
Gigglin’ at/Animals Being Dicks
I was recently directed to the ultra-addictive Animals Being Dicks. This website is genius in its simplicity: an enormous library of animated gifs showing creatures acting like assholes. I spent the better part of a half hour clicking through this site, laughing as I saw birds knocking over turtles, cats knocking over televisions, and older-brother monkeys knocking younger-brother monkeys into bodies of water.
Yes, I’m still basically a child.
–-
Readin’/A Moveable Feast
I’ve started reading A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s posthumously-published recollections of his time in 1920s Paris. I’d been meaning to check out these memoirs for awhile now, as A Farewell to Arms is one of my favorite novels and Death in the Afternoon helped save my life. Moreover, I became even more intrigued by this book after seeing Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which I think might be the best all-around movie I’ve seen this year.
So I’ve decided to man up (the author would approve of that phrase) read through Ernest’s account of the Lost Generation. I’m only about twenty pages in and I’m already in love with Hemingway’s remembrances of cafes and studios and youthful aspirations, all converging in a single city. This type of writing, the chronicling of what it means to live up to romanticized visions of life, renews my sense of appreciation for life and its hidden possibilities in a way otherwise impossible.
–-
So that’s my week.
What’s your week look like?