Week 387: Blame It On The Tintintinabulator; Five New Memories, Plus a Season Finale

I blame it on the Tintintinabulator, that musical Spirit who goes from ear to ear and secretly whispers catchy songs into semi-catatonic minds. That is my theory for why tunes get stuck in our heads. Currently, Kate Bush is singing Wuthering Heights in my mind. “Cathy” has been at the window for about a week. She’s done it before and will again. It usually takes ten days for her to go away, satisfied that she has once again qualified me for a berth in Crazytown.

It’s not a long trap ride through the wily windy moors to Crazytown for any of us. It’s in all our eyes; just more so in some than others. Like death and Paris, we’ll always have Crazytown.

Despite one’s mental status, life goes on and the chores keep coming. Thus I am determined to finish this post despite “Wuthering-wuthering-wuthering” sounding in my head every thirty seconds like the dread approach of winged Cthulhu. Lucky for me I happen to have one last Saturday Special for this year (we are at our annual limit for such) lying around to conclude this wrap. And there are the week’s stories to fill the middle. So all I need to do is endure Cathy just a bit longer because I see Crazytown looming over the next rise.

I now present a short list of Songs I Cannot Get Out of My Head. If you have any to offer just forward them to Crazytown.

• Wuthering Heights-Kate Bush
• What’s Up?-4 Non Blondes (hey-yay-yay)
• Theme to The Flintstones (outro too)
• In a Big Country-Big Country (the bagpipe via guitar stays with me for a long time)
• Achy Breaky Heart–Miley’s Pa. The only song on my list that I dislike. In fact I hold a deep and profound hate for it. I’d love Tarantino to make a film in which this song gets what it has coming to it the way he gave it to the Nazis, slave owners and Manson Family.
• Yours…

Five New Memories

Perhaps the constant repetition in my head has something to do with the odd way the weeks are playing out circumstance-wise. There’s something groundhog day-esque about finding myself introducing a group of first time site contributors and Tom Sheehan on Saturdays. Still, this week there is a different wrinkle, for along with Tom and three newcomers, we have the second appearance of a friend of the site.

Topics involved an everlasting wild ride through the desert; a country doctor who’d be a mystery to Bones McCoy; soul switching; remembrance, and aimlessness finding purpose.

Rory Hughes roared onto the site Monday with It Was Like The You Saw the Devil In Something and Just Kept Going. This is a fine self aware damnation that gains speed as it goes, perhaps endlessly in a loop. The two characters half-realizing what is up to the point of almost naming it enhances the tale. Forgive me if I’m being vague there, but those who’ve read it might know what I mean–and I wouldn’t want to spoil anything for those who have yet to take the ride.

The welcome return of Edward N McConnell highlighted Tuesday. Sawbones is a unique blend of realism and the mystical and suggests a form of Karma worth rooting for. Ed had long been a supporter of the site and always upbeat despite the ups and downs faced by all writers.

New friend Quinn spiked the middle of the week Wednesday with a neat little piece that raises a question that perhaps only time might answer. Baby’s Breath causes me to wonder just which one of the participants created the event described. There’s no underestimating children of any age, but Cats are masters of skullduggery and duplicity.

The Master known as Tom Sheehan streaked across the sky like a quick orbiting moon. He comes round plenty–and to underscore that stay tuned for the season finale of 2022 Saturday Specials at the end of this wrap. Charleston Calling Back is difficult to comment on because it too requires repetition. Let’s just say that Tom has been as good a writer as any for a long long long time and appreciate that he still continues to share his talent with us.

William Stoddart closed the regular week’s business with The Road Finally Home. William is the third of this week’s debut writers and, in my mind anyway, this piece would have to star a young Jack Nicholson if it were a film (here’s hoping that has happened in a parallel universe, for wishing for parallel universes is about as fair as this one gets). It is amazing the amount of, well, stuff, that goes on in this short piece, and yet nothing is given the short shrift. It is full and beautifully realized.

I must go now. Cathy has returned to the window and I’m going to see if dousing her with holy water will cause her to hiss off into the moors. But before I do, I present a Saturday Special season finale of sorts by Tom Sheehan

Leila

And So, The Way It Was Supposed to Happen, It Did, Love Advancing the Soul’s Illumination of Inner Light by Tom Sheehan

And so the way it was supposed to happen, it did, the mass of it coming at once, at first an illusion so

beautiful it was previously unimagined, and then, after his wanton sleep was beset and circulated with

toss and turn and turmoil, and with a side glance at once mistrusted but leaving a hard dent in his

memory, she moved from the covey of her own shadow into the scan of his horizon, and remains in that

one spot, that totally owned place by herself, a grace emanating from that aura unseen as music but the

tempo and the unbidden language coming along with it, the rhythm of a woman who moves with ease

into the depth of a man where she assimilates, absorbs, animates by a motion so subtle to this day it still

overpowers him .

She moved like the appreciation of a mountain morning hovering over a lake, a mist slow in ascension to

translate into an unseen level allowing iridescence of innumerable growths to appear in a painting his

eyes said existed solely for his vision, at the moment no other person seeing what he was seeing; and in

its climbing into a nothing that did exist for his wonder and awe, became the other side of the lake, she

in one image he had put away for all time as that one image to salvage him from despair and loss so

unequivocal it promised no future to his natural hunger and need; knowing from the inception she was a

dream come alive for him, this woman, a mere mist at first, coming alive, a smile wide as horizons,

coming alive, a voice saying she was real, coming alive, its tone so meticulous and full of clarity it struck

him with lightning delivery, the first word coming alive his name, the very first sound saying she was

thinking of him and beset with the energies and want that had littered his days and nights steady as

cast-off memories shunted aside but never letting go, the other truths hanging on, past dear life.

His name came softly in the night, in the truth of darkness, on the breath of a woman moving the way

only a woman moves, a languorous length of her, a gloried broadness, a hip salutation as much

signature as identification, into his mind before all else, into the spirit sitting there alone and waiting for

the word, the gesture, the hand sending its touch on a linen full of sound but so silken and smooth it

was as if his name came carried there first, the manner of the passage as much invitation as any

invitation might be broadcast from soul to soul, the call heard and the reply sent outward, the elegant

length of her reduced, brought closer, a loop in its coming, a grasp, a homing brought to bear his all, an

ascension of will silent at first but then pounding in his heart, and then to his mind where it evolved as

the transfer of love more monumental yet existing in that languorous depth beneath him in a grip only

her kind owned.

He said her name, and it rose pious, devout, though of a second nature, an element about in the night

like an unseen feather on unseen air but letting off a whisper of sound, a whisper of such promise and

continuity it came of soul salvage, of mere dreaming, of harnessed energy, of the ultimate connection of

essence and turmoil mixing the grander ingredients where imagination alone is the king, the guidepost,

the whip soft as bee flight, as positive, her grasp essential.

Then, in brevity of concern, of conscience, he heard her voice as from the far end of a tunnel, or the top

of a mountain so distant it was out of sight, the soft syllables advancing on him the way balm dissolves

worry and fright, the way it descends on the ache in a spirit.

Tom Sheehan