Long Way to a Short Thing

I'm sure you all remember the Simpsons episode when some fans are asking questions of the people who work on their favorite cartoon, "Itchy and Scratchy." One of the fans observes, "In episode 2F09 when Itchy plays Scratchy’s skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones." All right, keep that in mind! So, I recently rewatched TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN, and thought, in the middle of my viewing experience, that it would be a good idea to order a self-published (?) book by an obsessed (?) fan of the show, because it would be fun and interesting to read some theories about the plot and so on. Well, the book came, long after I had finished watching the series again, and I sort of flipped through it, and it was giving me a headache, through no fault of the author. It was just cloudy yesterday, and the light was poor. But also, I couldn't remember why I had ordered it... or, to be more accurate, I couldn't recapture the feeling of wanting to engage with it. Furthermore, to my jaded eyes, a lot of it seemed to be, maybe (and this is based on an unfair skimming under bad conditions), of the "he strikes the same rib twice in succession" variety (the questioner goes on, "What are we to believe, that this is some sort of magic xylophone?"). I see that I have mentioned xylophones on the "blog" only twice before! That seems low. I've been doing this for, God, 17 years, please help me, though, of course, I stopped "blogging" in 2016. Well, all I really wanted to say, and it should come as no surprise to anyone who has a passing familiarity with Twin Peaks, is that this book has an owl in it.

My Resonators Don't Buzz

Yesterday in the New York Times I read about the gyil, "a xylophone with gourd resonators that buzz with the silk of spiders’ egg sacs, called paapieye, that is stretched across the gourds’ openings." Reader, I have one! I just never knew what it was. I used to play it in my old band. No, my OLD old band. One or two songs we'd drag out the gyil. Not that we knew it was a gyil. Do you care? No. Do I? Yes, barely. Anyway, I could turn around and look at the gyil if I wanted. It's right behind me! One gourd has been long missing. And one stick. There used to be two sticks to play it with. And there was never any silk of spiders' egg sacs, or maybe it was knocked off in transit. So my resonators don't buzz. Never did. Story of my life. Anyway, I have a gyil with no spider sac. The buzzing is half the point! Now I've listened to some gyil with the silk intact and it makes all the difference. We could've been big!

Xylophone

I realize that the previous "post" should have also had these "labels" at the bottom of it: "action" and "the cosmos." And probably some more I am forgetting. BUT I ALREADY USED UP LITERALLY TWICE THE ALLOWED AMOUNT OF LABELS and I have no place for any more labels. No place but here. Also, I would like to mention that I read a New York Times obituary yesterday in which one sentence began, "With his trademark monocle, frumpy suits and penchant for playing the xylophone..." I am going to work very hard to make sure a sentence in my obituary starts that way too.