Every so often, you hear a song and it just blows you away. Though you heard the song only one time, it sticks in your brain. You walk around humming to yourself. You hear other songs, but they don’t measure up. You think about that song, think about its melody, and determine to purchase the album that contains that song. Sometimes, this action proves to be a brilliant bit of foresight on your part: maybe you bought Vivid by Living Colour. Other times, your gamble does not pay off.

Perhaps when I arrived at the store to purchase Sia’s Some People Have Real Problems, I should have been cued in by the absolute idiocy of the cover. But her song “The Girl You Lost to Cocaine,” with its whiny, Nelly Furtado-like vocals and killer hook was deeply, deeply embedded in my brain. I was fully prepared for a few of the songs to be filler, but I ignored the obvious warning signs presented by the cover and it’s MS-Paint sprawl.

Seriously, I bought an album that looks like this:

God, what was I thinking?

Well, here’s what I was thinking: “The Girl You Lost to Cocaine” (mp3)

One of the joys of carpal tunnel syndrome is that you get to use voice recognition software, which leads to some strange misunderstandings. Almost invariably, you end up making some sort of slurring your speech, because not everyone can talk like a newscaster (which the software recommends for excellent dictation). This isn’t so much a problem when you’re writing an e-mail, because you can prove the e-mail before you send it. But when you’re talking to a friend on Google talk, and you want to keep up the pace of conversation, you’ll almost always say something embarrassing in print that was perfectly innocuous when you spoke aloud.

The proof of one’s manliness is his willingness to make these mistakes in his blog entries, and leave them uncorrected.

Here is a poem that have been wanting to share with you for a few days:

Logical Games for the Unbeliever

All night I kept solving for G.
Now, through this dark morning,
the equation escapes
at the set speed of light.

There are so many things I don’t understand. The future
comes and it’s no longer excited
to be here.

There are so many things I can’t know. My old friends,
are they happy?

That small square of light

I went and sat inside it
and my heart lifted,
I swear it.

–Olena Kalytiak Davis

I’ve been quiet this week for several reasons, among them:

• general frustration
• a work schedule that has seemed unrelenting, but probably upon reflection wasn’t
• staring at poems, wondering what the hell I should be doing next
• when I read a poem I really want to post for you, by the time I get downstairs I’m already distracted by Scrabulous, ESPN.com, or a vague sense of paranoia

Emma, this is for you.

Some more news from the Emma Bolden camp tonight reminds me that she’s a total rockstar. (Keep an eye on her blog, details will no doubt appear there soon enough.)

If you don’t already have her book, why don’t you swing by Toadlilly Press and order yourself a copy? You can thank me later.

I’m so unfaithful to you, book.  I lay around with you all night, nowhere to go, nothing else which needed doing.  I took you in the bathtub and then dragged you back to bed, barely able to towel myself off before I opened you again.  I could barely keep myself in the moment of each page, so eager to discover everything about you.  I practically had my mouth around your syntax, saying it with you, until finally I reached the last page, and lingered only a moment before putting you down.  You’re still on the pillow but I’m up, walking around: a drink of water, a stretch, a walk around the house, feeding the cats.  I’ll think about you the rest of the night, sleep with the memory of you, but tomorrow, I will open up the next book and begin reading.  We spend a week together, maybe two, and then I move on to the next thing, not in spite of you, dear book, never in spite of you: because reading you brought such pleasure, and later served only to remind me that there are so many books I’ve yet to read.

Well, damn. About ten minutes after I Twittered that no one else should start a new Scrabulous game with me because I have nine going, Scrabulous is no longer available on Facebook. I broke the Intarwebs.

Update: It came back. False alarm.

I’ve spent a couple hours this morning trying to dig out the mess that is my office, which goes along with the couple hours I spent last night doing the same.  I’m now able to get to the closet and have some stuff organized there, but the books are still a mess and I don’t have adequate shelving space.  I’m seriously tempted to zip to Home Depot and buy some cinderblocks and wood.  Ladybug seems to have accepted finally that I’m all out of space.

We went on a book binge yesterday to a used book store in Durham that we had not been to.  A hair under $70 later, I had a ton of new books, most of which cost me less than three bucks– one by Debra Allbery, five by James Applewhite, two by Gerald Barrax, one by Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Maudelle would have killed me if I had passed on it), one by Cornelius Eady, two by Louise Gluck, two by Lisel Mueller, one by Ellen Bryant Voight, and about six more that escape me right now.  The weird thing about this bookstore was that, though they had a small poetry section (which yielded most of the above), they organize books by publisher, and file most of their poetry away that way.  So, I spent a good amount of time looking through the publishers that I felt were likely to yield some poetry (Louisana State, Pittsburgh, New Directions), but really just didn’t bother with the majors because I don’t know who publishes who and when I found the large presses, I didn’t feel like subjecting Ladybug to hours of me hunting through rows and rows of fiction for that one book of poems from FSG.  (Plus, the publishers were arranged in no particular order, so I never even found Knopf, Norton, and Harper-Collins.  Smaller presses like Greywolf?  Fuhgeddaboudit.) And who knows?  If I’d committed to that hunt, I might have bankrupted us.  At the very least, I wouldn’t have had any place to put the books.

I’ve moved from Movable Type to WordPress and combined years of blog entries into one compendious monster. Enter the old entries at your peril.  Next up: I have to categorize about 341 entries created after I killed the White Noise blog and stopped using categories.  Don’t you wish your girlfriend would blog like me?

It doesn’t seem to matter what else you do for her birthday; as long as you take her to karaoke and sing James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” in the voice of James Blunt, she’s going to be happy.