Obsessive-Compulsive? Me?

Since reading, somewhere, the other day that the tune and chorus of Charlie on the MTA* were based on The Wreck of the Old 97 I of course had to find that song, which I located at The Blue Ridge Institute. (I don't know how, stumbled in through some back door.)

I've spend the last few days going back and listening again to The Wreck of the Old 97, feeling that learning it might be nice, and then today wandered off amongst some of their other offerings. Reading the backstory for The Vance Song (lyrics here, audio clip at the top) I didn't think I would like it, partly because it says the murderer composed it and sang it before he was executed. But the guy they recorded singing it - wow. He sounds like he's 180 years old and came from Ireland when he was 15 and he was just amazingly evocative. It sounds like it was recorded in someone's kitchen after they'd been drinking. It made me want to write my own death song. I may have to put off dying for a while 'til I can get the recording right.

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*I don't think I made a note about it at the time, but I had to listen to every different version of Charlie on the MTA that I could find after Copperbadge made mention in his steampunk AU story The Dead Isle of the main character singing "Charlie on the MTA" to amuse himself when he's in prison. I hope he hasn't decided to change that, but I don't think he will, as it's a damned fun song. Okay, maybe I really want to learn all of Charlie rather than Old 97.

I'm amused by a bunch of things about "Charlie":

-It's often billed as "Irish music" by people posting it on YouTube. It seems to get covered by Irish bands quite often, but it's pretty firmly American music, I would say.

-In the lyrics is a mention of Scollay Square station (often incorrectly transcribed as "Scully Square Station") - which ceased to exist in 1962. Of course the song was originally composed in 1949, so it did exist at that time, but, as Eor pointed out, it does seem very New England that a place which no longer exists and is so forgotten that people misspell it is still immortalized in a song that's still popular and riffed on. In the Dropkick Murphy's Skinhead on the MBTA the Skinhead's wife hands him a grenade through the window at "Scully Square Station". (I can't quite forgive them for changing 'unlearned' - which is supposed to rhyme with 'return' - to 'unknown.' Why? Yes, that's my OCD showing through.)

-Watch the Heebie-Jeebies version! :)

-Ages ago Eor and I had both read a story which we associated with "Charlie on the MTA." We both thought we'd read it in Asimov's within the last 30 years or so, but it turns out it was A Subway Named Mobius, by A. J. Deutch, which came out in 1950 (just after "A Streetcar Named Desire," naturally.) So, a year after the original "MTA" song was written, but before it was really popularized by the Kingston Trio as "Charlie on the MTA" in 1959. It's a pretty cool story, but there's no character named Charlie in it. There ought to be. Professor Turnbull, in fact, the guy they still can't find at the end, his first name is given as Merritt - it should have been Charles. (Or, could someone please write me a spoof where it's "Merritt Turnbull on the MTA"?)

-Yes, the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority's travel card IS called the Charlie Card because of this song, it's THAT much a part of Massachusetts culture.

Memo to myself...

Make sure that when you are bedding down guests for the night you tell them what time you are getting up (and set your alarm and stick to it, even if it's a day off) but also let them know which are their towels and washcloths for the next morning. The people who you least expect to ever get up and take a shower will be the ones who decide to do just that. I should have learned this lesson when Hawk did it to me a few years ago, so I was unsurprised but still kicked myself when Mom did it this morning - they used my hand towel, because 'that's the size of towel that is given out in the public baths in Korea,' they both said. Hawk was more obnoxious about it, because he's a little brother - "I took your face towel and dried my ass with it!"

I've had some questions regarding my post about the real estate agent.

I'm sorry I've made a lot of people feel out of the loop regarding our plans for moving. We're not necessarily abandoning this condo right away, we need to find a place to go that fits us well, and we don't want to jump too precipitously. This has been a really great place to live in a lot of ways - nearly everything you want within walking distance - but there are constraints with having neighbors right on top of you. One can't make changes to the outside of the building or major changes in the yard without gathering the neighbor's opinions, and you don't want to turn the music up too loud. It would be a better place for someone who's more outgoing and sociable than we are. We wanted to compromise so as to have the convenience of in-town living, but it seems we can't stand, for an extended time, to compromise quite so much as we have done.

You can see the floor on my side of the bed! :)

We're going to have a real estate agent in, tomorrow evening, so the pile I've been creating for the past year had to disappear. I didn't actually throw out a whole lot of stuff, I just mainly moved dirty clothes to the laundry, put books on a shelf and stuffed and stacked everything else more creatively. So now there's like floor where there was a small set of drawers and a row of journals and notebooks, completely covered with a pile of papers. Stuff that got stuffed. A lot of it has to go, but for this evening this is all I can manage. I think now I should take a Tylenol PM, for the anti-histamine, and get to bed.

If you get a chance (and won't be offended by playing with religion) read Jeeves and the Mysterious Ways by laeticiav. :)

Other than that, my day... Well, let me see. Waking up too early after being up too late, and running off to Portland to get the van inspected. Then a stop at the hardware store and on to breakfast at Becky's - yay! Looked around the LL Bean main store and outlet in search of long johns for Eor, then some work in the garden (weeded, turned some dirt, got some pea netting up - had to weave some of it together because it was too short, planted pea pods, bok choy and more radishes), tacos, and then I took another quick trip back to the store looking for a yellow button-down shirt.

I was back in a little more than a half hour with chocolate milkshakes from Johnny Rocket's and the impression that yellow button down shirts have been banned from Freeport. I went into Tommy Hilfiger, LL Bean and Calvin Klein with very little luck. (yes, I do move fast when shopping - cruise through, see that what I want is not there, move on.) Oh, there was one yellow-and-white striped shirt at LL Bean, of that material that is very ripply-bumply (is it called poplin, perhaps?), and there was a bilious, eye-searing yellow shirt at Calvin Klein. Which is weird because, seriously, there is every other goddam thing you can imagine in pleasant, sunny shades of yellow. T-shirts, sweaters, polos, fleeces, raincoats, shorts, weird halter-top-looking blouses. I would also have been happy with ocher, but I thought that was an even longer shot. I thought yellow would be likely!

Chocolate milkshakes made the walk worthwhile, though. :)

Now off to mend the raveled sleeve of care, or something like that.

exhausting, but good.

Today we got up and made ourselves a couple small tacos and were outside by about 8:30AM. We dug up and wrapped the roots of a bunch of our blackberry plants, jammed them into our tiny car, and carted them on up to our friends' (groundctrl & littleredhead) new house that they're building. They had picked out a spot and groundctrl had the fence posts almost all cut by the time we got there, and we all ran at it with a fearsome speed. Eor has, I think, decided to call this 'dog-teaming,' as we all tried to out-pull each other and nearly worked ourselves into a stupor of exhaustion. But we got it done and it looks GREAT! I wish we'd taken pictures. In fact, I think what I will do, if I can, is I will take a picture of what we were imagining and see if I can get Littleredhead to take a picture of what Groundctrl designed and we assembled, today, so you can see how many notches above our vision he took it. :)

We worked straight through until 2:30pm with a couple of mouthfuls of trailmix and the like, and then realized we all felt like falling over and went out to eat; had an amazing meal that couldn't be beat, looked at our plates and thought "I could eat that much again." Well, apparently Littleredhead was full, she's the only one of us who seems to have proper portion control. But, had desert instead, and then bought more candy on the way home, because my and Eor's bodies insist that burning any extra calories is not allowed. ;)

And then I cooked cornbread, which I guess was 'dinner.' Off to bed, must work in the AM. :P

I love working side by side with people. I do think there's nothing better for friendships, if you can keep from getting snappish with each other when you're exhausted. :)