The Weekly Meat

Ear Words

One summer during college, I DJ'd a weekly (early) AM radio show. My roommate, Brett, had a job that summer that required him to get up each morning at 6:50. The night before each radio show, I'd sneak into Brett's room, set his clock radio to my station, and turn up the volume. The next morning, at 6:50 on the nose, I'd be playing the poppiest, most insipid, incessant song I could find. The Ramones, They Might Be Giants, maybe the Hemingway 7" by an odd little band called Blue Clocks Green — which may still be the catchiest thing I've ever heard (and through the magic of "the internets" you can hear it too). In any case, I considered the day's show a success if my earworm song was indeed embedded in Brett's head that night.

I imagine the phenomenon of a song that is stuck in one's head has been around as long as songs themselves. Now, thanks to the Germans, who also gave us obscure international hockey player Petr Draisaitl, we call this an "earworm" — from their word ohrwurm — which, translated literally, means "lyrics to Rappers Delight."

My wife, AKL, is an easy mark for earworms. She will freely admit that her internal life soundtrack is one of the most stunted one could ever hear. It sounds like a compilation K-Tel and John Hughes might have released in the mid-'80s. I'm not quite so troubled by these traditional earworms, but they roll around my brain enough that when AKL says, "Guess what song I have in my head," I generally cover my ears, jabber loudly, and run to the bathroom.

No, my true sleep-killer is not the classic earworm song per se, but rather earworm language. I get words and phrases in my head, phonetic constructions, odd syntax, and, worse still, names of obscure and long-forgotten hockey players. My sleep has been disturbed many a night by the odd sound or syllabic stress of bygone hockey names like Steve Konowalchuk, Jim Peplinski, Simon Nolet, Wilf Paiement, and Reijo Ruotsalainen.

Foreign spellings and pronunciations linger in my craw like stubborn phlegm, with their seemingly misplaced or extra letters. Former Soviet and Russian players: Kharlamov, Zelepukin, Mogilny, Afinogenov, Afanasenkov. And then there is the daddy of them all: German national team member Petr Draisaitl. I have no recollection whatsoever of any details about this guy other than his name. He was nothing near an outstanding player. But his name haunts me still, those bevel-edged consonants occasionally clanging together in my otherwise empty head at 3 a.m. like some complex math problem.

Some of my earworms are much simpler. Friends and I noted a few years back that Brits often pronounce "tuna" as "chuna." That one kept me awake a while, just repeating the sound of it in my mind. Place names, too, can be problematic: Monongahela, Nesowadnehunk, Coxsackie. Fuggedaboutit.

And it's not just language. I can get caught up on conceptual earworms too — the latest being the seemingly crucial thought that somehow the entire universe hinges on a simple combination of Murphy's Law and Occam's Razor. That is to say something along the lines of "the thing most likely to go wrong will go wrong."

Sometimes large chunks of text get stuck in my brain: the middle section of the Jewish mourner's Kaddish; a Henry V monologue I learned once for acting; much of the repetition in Tim O'Brien's great The Things They Carried. Sometimes, I can read something only once or twice and bits will stay with me forever. (Admittedly, the bits that don't much matter, but still.)

The construction and language of poet Michael S. Harper's For Bud (Powell) is that way:

For Bud

Could it be, Bud
that in slow galvanized
fingers beauty seeped
into bop like Bird
weed and Diz clowned—
Sugar waltzing
back into dynamite,
sweetest left hook you
ever dug, baby;
could it violate violence
Bud, like Leadbelly's
chaingang chuckle,
the candied yam
twelve string clutch
of all blues:
there's no rain
anywhere, soft
enough for you.

Man, I fall hard for that thing every time, like I do for Mary Stuart Masterson in that awful guilty-pleasure Some Kind of Wonderful, or for Juliette Binoche in, well, anything. Some things are just goddamn Shakespeare to my ears, or eyes, as it were.

I don't know if anyone else out there has my affliction, aside from maybe my brother, who shares some of the same obsessive-compulsive hockey knowledge. If you do, please send me the cure. Is there some form of substitution I could be doing, a la "Maim That Tune"?

I eagerly await your comments and answers. Until then, I'll remain thankful each day this haole doesn't live in Hawai'i (god love you for that apostrophe). I might not sleep again, with all those polysyllabic words in which every other letter is a vowel. Even looking at the following words as I type them, hits me like a brace of Blue Hawaiians: MELE KALIKIMAKA!

 

Kitties and Dogs 2: Of Women and Socks

With the addition of two baby girls in the past two years, I've been coming to terms with the suddenly elevated levels of estrogen in the house. We have a 3-month-old, and her 22-month-old sister, RK — who is currently exhibiting her newfound "big girl" maturity by breastfeeding her dolls. I suppose I can turn to our boy cats for a little male bonding, but well, they're cats.

And then there is RK's exponentially expanding vocabulary. For starters, we're having a risqué pronunciation issue. Apparently, the "s" sound is a difficult one for the young palate to make. Most toddlers substitute a "t" sound, as RK does for the word "see," which becomes "tee." But, tee, here's the rub: it should follow that those cotton or wool things one wears under one's shoes would be "tocks." Not so for young RK — who, instead, begins that word with a hard "c."

[S]ock. As in adult male fowl, to set a trigger for firing, etc. It's also, mind you, the way she pronounces the following similar words: clock, quack, cluck, truck.

The thing of it is, when you have a vocabulary of maybe two hundred words, and your existence revolves around eating, sleeping, pooping, and getting dressed, you tend to lean heavily on a word like sock. It, "hat," "mitten," and "shoe" — which she somehow pronounces infinitely better than sock — are the only clothing words in her permanent lexicon. So as she happily sifts through the clean laundry trying to match up socks in our house of four bi-peds, she'll say things like, "Daddy [s]ock. Mommy [s]ock. Baby [s]ock."

I'm not sure how the ubiquitous parenting for dummies sort of books tell you to handle these "little kids say the darndest things" moments, but we live in Boston, and her pronunciation gives entirely new meaning to a certain ubiquitous local world champion baseball team. (She, of course pronounces "red" just fine.) In other instances, whether in public or at home, I like to occasionally humor young RK by pronouncing words the same way she does. So, instead of saying "more," we say "mao," and "dieboo" instead of "diaper." Red [S]ox? Not so much.

And this [s]ock business only serves to underscore the fact that among the words one is curious to learn at that age is — well — what to call the thing between one's legs.

With all due respect to Eve Ensler, vagina's just not a word I use a lot. OK, ever. Rather — with heartfelt thanks to an ex-girlfriend and her sister — I prefer the term they used growing up: wahine. It's Hawaiian for woman, which is a nice, strong image, it rolls smoothly off the tongue, and well, it's not vagina. In any case, it's what I call it. Even to my wife. Who rolls her eyes in a way remarkably similar to my own when she refers to my hockey socks as leg warmers.

I realize vagina’s a proper medical term and all, but so is “bowel movement” and doctors don't even use that anymore. (It’s as if there was some sort of medical Vatican II a few years ago wherein it was decided that “poop” would heretofore be the officially-sanctioned term of record.)

Mind you, when I get out of the shower and RK points inquiringly to my naked midsection, I say, "That's right, daddy has a penis, because daddy's a boy. But you and mommy and your sister are girls, so you have a wahine." Double standard? Yes. Do I care? No.

Sorry, RK- you and your mom and baby sister can have your little Our Bodies Ourselves rallies to your hearts' delight as you grow older. Me, well, I do have the cats on my side. C'mon boys, join me: have a couple beers in the old sweat lodge, get a little drum circle together, scratch yourselves. Rock out with your sock out!

The Truth about Kitties and Dogs

The problem with cats sometimes is that, well, they’re not dogs. A few weeks back, I called our cats so they’d come downstairs in the way a dog might. Nothing happened. I called again. Nothing. I looked at my wife, AKL, who said, “You have to call them in a higher voice — like I do — and you have to say, “Here, kitty kitty kitties….” She does so. And it works.

My problem with this is twofold: I refuse to use the “here, kitty” voice; and, well, I refuse to say the word “kitty.”

Over our six years of marriage, I’ve noticed that, though AKL and I ostensibly communicate well and are both native English speakers, we have different lexicons. There are words that she, as a woman, uses that I simply cannot. I’m not talking about sex-organ–specific slang or bodily function sorts of words that make some uneasy, I’m talking about everyday English.

In addition to kitties, there exist furry little bushy-tailed animals that hop around. I would call those creatures rabbits. I’ve always called them rabbits. AKL calls them bunnies. (Note: She also sometimes playfully calls our “kitties” bunnies. But I digress.) I would say I’m shorter than Shaquille O’Neal; Abby would say I’m littler. I have a stomach; she has a tummy.

AKL wears tops, I wear shirts. She wears jammies to bed, I wear boxers. No offense to the more fashionable guys out there, but men wear clothes, not outfits. And those things that professional sports teams wear when playing a game — they are not outfits either, they’re uniforms.

I’ve played ice hockey with cracked ribs. I’ve gone solo camping miles from civilization. I’ve done a gut rehab on our kitchen. It’s not that I’m not secure enough in my manhood to use these female-centric words, it’s just that — well — okay, maybe in part it is that I’m not secure enough in my manhood.

For bunnies to exist in my world would be to overturn too much I learned about living in the world as a man. The list of movies that can make me cry may start and end with Brian’s Song. Okay, maybe I misted up a bit when the Red Sox won it all in '04 — but not in a bunnies sort of way.

Still, I’m not suggesting that I’m a stereotypical guy. I grew up with a sister and female cousins, and I’m very sensitive — I own clogs for god’s sake. A friend’s wife even likes to suggest that he and I fall into a small sect of men who make great husbands because we’re “just gay enough.” Meaning, we cook better than our wives, dress ourselves well, and can use big words during a football game despite the fact that we’re straight. But still, that Y chromosome prevents Girl Words from even entering my brain, let alone escaping my mouth.

I should mention here, too, that AKL is by no means a girly-girl. She doesn’t wear makeup, hates perfumy smells, understands the rules of all major sports, and can bait her own fishing hooks.

But she’ll refer to my hockey socks as leg warmers. And when pressed, she might admit her favorite thing is cuddling.

So when your husband or wife, or sister, or mother, or whomever, claims that sometimes it’s like the two or you are speaking different languages, well, maybe there’s something to it.

I have friends up in Montreal whose colloquial Quebecois French is a different sort from the type I learned back in high school. So we communicate in a halting patois that is neither English nor French. Alcohol generally helps our understanding, but certain concepts are invariably beyond simple translation.

Similarly, the gendered lexicon surely limits us at times. It can be frustrating, but ultimately maybe it’s for the best. Let AKL have her secret world of kittycats and bunnies. Some things are innate — where I hear song lyrics, she hears something more like the sound made by Charlie Brown’s teacher — and it’s our differences, rather than our common ground, that give us things to laugh about.

If we can’t change our spots, I suppose the cats can’t either. I might not be able to teach them to come running when I call “C’mon, boys” — but they sure do jump to the sound of their food cans being opened.

To Begin

I’m at the ass-end of my thirties, and I’ve always approached blogs with a bit of trepidation. I read them, sure — some are brilliant — and part of me has always wanted to be a weekly columnist. So why not self-publish just such a column? Another part of me, though, sees blogging as an egocentric bourgeois endeavor. "Look at me!" And it most probably is. But to stop there may be missing the point. The internet, and one of its killer apps — blogging software — is just a conduit. Much of today’s best writing is now being published exclusively online.

Still, I hope my initial cynicism guides me well. The word “essay” itself is derived from the French essayer — to try or attempt. And that I will: to rise above the tossed-off email-style commentary on pop culture, and self-aggrandizing. Maybe my vision is something of a magazine in blog’s clothing. A less self-conscious McSweeney’s.

The point is to keep the cobwebs from my fingertips and post weekly essays and various viscera on life, language, sports, art, culture, leisure, pleasure, pain, and politics (What else is there, right?). Sure, I should have started five or ten years ago — when I had actual time on my hands — but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to start now.

It’s been a long time (since grad school, maybe) since excitement over an idea roused me enough at 3 a.m. to get out of bed, and write it down, as the idea for this blog did the other night. It was the name that finally got me up. It came without much struggle, and with the sort of clarity that I generally get only in the middle of the night. The name’s an allusion to E.B. White’s great collection of his Harper’s essays, One Man’s Meat, and I’m glad I wrote it down — not simply to log the thought, but to commit to it. As the great and sometimes obtuse Philadelphia Flyers' coach Fred Shero liked to say about commitment: “When you have bacon and eggs for breakfast, the chicken makes a contribution — but the pig makes a commitment.”

As they say when the gates open down in Opelousas: "Ils sont partis!"