Paper View...

It's late, I'm getting phlegmish and I've been banging my fucking head against the dewy basement wall for the last two hours trying to come up with a 3 second musical loop using sitar, tablas, oboe, flute and strings. Unfortunately, it's sounding less like Ravi Shankar and more like Rotting Chancre.

Anywhich, I'll make this quick. Over the weekend, I walked into Mr. Z's room and was suddenly blown away by how much fucking paper and paper-related detritus was strewn all over the goddaman place. Fuck cows and logging companies and disposable napkins -- the single greatest cause of deforestation on the planet is Mr. Z's personal paper consumption.

So this happens like once a year -- I get all worked up about the clutter in his room and I say, "That does it! We've gotta throw MOST of this stuff out -- it's a fire hazard in here, boy! Sit down!" And then we sit down and leaf through the piles, splitting things into "keep" and "discard" piles until I get tired and lose interest. Usually, he wants to keep everything and I have to say things like, "Look... do you REALLY need this torn Post-It with a drawing of what looks like a frog or a poop that you did when you were four?!" And he'll say "YES! I LOVE THAT DRAWING! AND IT'S NOT A FROG OR A POOP... IT'S CHARMANDER!" And then it goes into the keep pile.

This time, however, he was all for getting rid of shit. He couldn't throw it away fast enough. At first I couldn't believe my fucking luck. Then, I started looking at the stuff he was tossing and I was like, "Dude! You can't throw this out! This drawing is AWESOME!" And so I started fishing papers out of the garbage bag and starting my own pile. There was some classic shit in there. Like this, for example:



It's a concept for a "Little Slug" album called "Brr! Freezing Popsicles and Silly Songs" that he drew up when he was, oh, about five or so. In case you can't make out his handwriting the songs are:

1. Fledgler's Log
2. Baby Birdey's Squirrel Nut
3. Stuff Your Starfish Silly
4. Who Wants to Get on the Tire? I do!
5. Frosted French Fries
6. Orange Snail Eater
7. Curly Baby Fun
8. Exercises
9. Black Feather Sassafras
10. Cardinal, Crow & Magpie
11. He's Smoothbill or Groovebill
12. Great Blue Karen

That has to be the greatest set of song titles ever written. It's like some lost Captain Beefheart album. "Black Feather Sassafras"?! I should sell that one to Tom Waits. And there were like eight more Little Slug albums he had come up with, too. I kept them all. And I am SO going to get him to actually write these songs and record them.

But for now, I'm going to go upstairs, pinch a "fledgler's log" and hit the sack.