iPod: what is on it

I keep meaning to whip out that iPod (I mean, that Zune, cough cough) and write down the first ten songs that come up on shuffle. Just list them, not skipping any, no excuses. But, I keep saying to myself, what if something really mortifying comes up? Like, uh, Barbra Streisand or the Hooters, as entirely hypothetical examples? What if all my most indie rawkish selections that show how totally dialed in I am even though I am old do not appear at all? What about the fact that my iPod is inexplicably in love with Smoosh?

Tough.

Here is the list.

Bird Stealing Bread | Iron and Wine

Iron and Wine are folktacular and soothing. I am not sure why but it bugged me that they were splattered all over the soundtrack of In Good Company.

It's All Over Now | Rolling Stones

Early Rolling Stones sounds like someone dropping an aluminum trashcan down a stairwell. They are basically, America's greatest and most awful rock band.

Night Moves | Bob Seger

Sigh. It didn't take long to get outed as a former big-haired Sacramento Valley chick, did it?

Concrete and Barbed Wire | Lucinda Williams

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is a great record.

Larry's | The Wedding Present

Generally a really enjoyable band but this song is kind of a bummer.

Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime | Beck

I actually hate Beck. He looks like that undersized, fair haired, lank little dude that went to your high school who all the girls thought was Such A Sweetie, but he couldn't get any action. I like the movie that this song is from however, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which has a great ending. However, Mark Ruffalo, normally ridiculously attractive, struck a sour note (which he continued to do in a lot of future roles... sellout.) Wait, what were we talking about again?

Idiot Prayer | Nick cave and the Bad Seeds
The Boatman's Call is probably the best record about being in love that I can think of. Which sounds weak. Seriously. It's probably one of my favorite five records, ever. And I am not really even a Nick Cave fan.

Take | Low
Low is a super glumcore depression soundtrack band. I haven't listened to them in ages.

Babylon | David Gray
Look, this one is cheesy. I admit it. I have a distinct but random memory of once seeing this video playing on a row of portable TV's in Target.

She Walks on Me | Hole
Hole... ugh... I'm having a 90's flashback... get me an overpopulated rental house full of clove smoking dipshit roommates, on the double.

Baby projects

As I previously mentioned, babies engage in projects. I have documented one here.

E.R.

You say you're not going to be one of those parents, the loser rookie pediatrician-on-speed-dial type hassling the on-call doctor at 2 am about sneezing, or rushing their kid to the OR with a rash, since when you sign up for the whole parental thing, it's one the mantras they drill into you, repeat after me: It's probably nothing.

But then you have this baby sitting there engaged in some sort of typical baby project (dumping the contents of your wallet out on the carpet, un-doing neatly folded piles of laundry, extracting dog-eared, ex-lit-major paperbacks from your bookshelves one by one) when suddenly she begins to scream the strangest scream, a sort of jagged, wheezing, barking scream, and curls up into a ball.

Now, something is really wrong. Ruptured spleen wrong? Favorite gold earring that I lost in the carpet at undetermined time this week drilling a hole in small intestine wrong? Between screams she groans, like a war movie casualty. Her eyes are wild. Her screams disintegrate into an odd, exhausted trilling sound, a sound we've never heard come out of her before, and with that I'm on the phone to one clinic, and handing thepediatrician on speed dial to the husband, and we're holding this gnashing, pale child in our arms, giving each other startled looks, is it me? Or did something really bad just happen to us?

They filibuster. "We usually say that the child should scream for an hour before someone takes a look." "The doctor on call will get back to you, what's your call back number?" The baby is pale and gasping, and making a noise like Old Yeller after he'd been shot. Yes, it's time to overreact, I'm saying to myself, running up the stairs with the baby in my arms, where are her socks? Where's her health insurance card, the one probably dumped out on the carpet somewhere, under a layer of unfolded clothes? We're doing that thing they tell you not to do, it's decided then and there. We're taking her to the ER.

Now we live pretty close to the hospital but it always seems that people are driving so slow on your way there, I remember it seemed that way the day that she was born. I'd waited a wee bit too long at home, stoic, determined not to be one of those idiot moms who came rushing in at the first twinge of labor, only to be sent home in disgrace to wait it out.

The baby is in her car seat, and she is fading. I couldn't even bear to force her into a pair of pants, the car seat straps seemed to cause her intolerable pain. She is moaning and slumped, the color drained out of her face. Her eyelids are tentative, they begin to droop over her eyes, and for the first time a real sense of fear crow bars its way into my naturally skeptical heart, I'm slapping her cheek and telling her to hold on, I'm putting my ear up to her chest, is she breathing? How can you tell, inside a noisy car?

No one likes to see a baby in the ER. The people calmly sitting in the waiting room look up and wince as I stagger in, a half dressed baby dangling oddly in my arms. Revived by fear, she is screaming again, and I announce the obvious to the triage attendant: "something is wrong with my child."

So begins the restraining of the baby; the weighing, the temperature, the blood draw, the catheter. "She definitely has a temperature," the triage nurse says. Ah, so I'm not insane. They're always so casual, you're standing there with your wheezing, hysterical baby while they calmly discuss shift rotations and who didn't leave the baby-sized IV needles in the third drawer to the left.

The baby clings to me like a rhesus monkey while they tape glowing heart monitors to her toe, and stick instruments in her ear canal. She has found some reserve of energy somewhere from the terror and the intrusions and the strangeness, and she heartily screams, a little more of a normal kind of scream, sweaty and red-cheeked. Her color is back. They can't find the vein, darn these babies and their tiny veins.

And when the tide of blood-drawers and catheter-inserters washes out and we are left alone in the florescent white room of this new hospital wing (so much has changed when we were here years ago with that nasty cat bite) suddenly snatches of our old baby return, like feeble sun rays, she's calming down a little. The barking and the wheezing, they're gone.

It seems like a very long time, some calculable fraction of our lives before the young-ish doctor returns and tells us, all the tests, they came back clean. "I don't know," he says. He looks contrite. The baby, she reaches out to touch her glowing, heart monitor toe, and smiles.

"I have a one year old," the doctor says. "I've been in the ER seven years, and I used to just think, eh, but you know, now that I have a kid, I would have done the same thing." And so with that, we checked off that parental milestone, first inconclusive visit to the ER, and we all drove home, and put the baby to bed.

Introducing: Uberhoot, and also, the relaunching of tiny dog

Tiny dog has been struggling of late, due to technical details explained in random posts that I often deleted after the fact, because all they contained were expletives directed at Blogger. Things are afoot here at tiny dog, namely the following:

1) Tiny dog moved web hosts, and all of its archives are temporarily suspended in hyperspace. They will gradually return in the nonexistent nanosecond of discretionary time I have each week.

2) Tiny dog has spawned a sequel, Uberhoot, based on a most hideous defunct print 'zine circa ten years ago that was actually exhaustively discussed in the aforementioned missing tiny dog archives. Uberhoot is a zine that focuses on random prattle by a collaborative group of contributors. In its heyday, it was in fact completely nonsensical and ridiculous, so we hope to raise the bar just a fraction from that.

That is all.

Where the hell have you been?

If you can see this, tiny dog is back from its lengthy hiatus in DNS domain rename land, in which tiny dog dumped her domain host of yore, and transfered her content to blogspot, which basically was a dumb idea, and thus she migrated to yet a third host, while meanwhile across town realizing that she owns yet another domain, which will require some kind of weird migratory flight from its current host in order to properly reflect content of its own.

Every time I do something new to the site, I get this song in my head.

But back to tiny dog, with a great sucking sound, 6.5 years of content is no longer online. Oh, it's on my computer somewhere in a folder that contains a file structure resembling the mixed vomit of 1,000 servers, and as to whether it will ever see the light of day again, the mysery remains.

No, the archives don't work.

Welcome to my blog.

Reboot

I am trying to re-create this site, which is a Frankensteinian mash-up of a half-dozen half-implemented web technologies that in some cases boast a vintage dating back to when the twin towers cast a long shadow in Lower Manhattan, all managed in a nested folder structure resembling an old crazy cat lady's junk drawer, and sprinkled liberally throughout with a jury-rigged hand-coded link structure and the wreckage of a decade of buttons and banner designs. Thousands of pages and images and rambles and scans, oh my. It probably looks like my brain from the inside.

And did I mention that I am trying to do this with no technical or design resources, in the picosecond of free time I have every day, borrowed from a sleep schedule limited by a mandatory 6 am wake up call?

Of course it doesn't matter, but the fact is, this site bugs me. It's sloppy, it's overabundant, it's like late spring, with the tipped-over peony blossoms splattered on the sidewalk like broken heads, and tattered poppy petals blowing around and sticking to everything like wet plastic bags, and aggressive armies of weeds surrounding anything you once tried to plant with anything like deliberation, but couldn't keep up with.

I can't take it anymore. Plus, it's weird and incoherent and abstract. Who the hell is this tiny dog persona I have been yapping behind for years? Can anyone explain it?

It's time for bed.

Reblog

Unblogging is all the rage, that is, the act of taking your blog offline in a snit after taking personal offense at someone's comment, or something, but instead I think I am going to reblog, which is to take down your current blog, because it sucks, and put up something else.

Not sure what the something else is yet. But anyway, that is my plan.

The Wrens

I saw this show.

And it was awesome.

I think I see a sign

Before we go any further I feel it needs to be said that the Nup came over the other day and, randomly, broke into the worst song ever written by humankind: Cool Change by the Little River Band, a song containing the line: "The albatross and the whale, they are my brothers."

Dear god.

Moving on. If my site had a search thing, I could try and figure out whether I have ever discussed Stuckey's, not a place you are likely to recall if you are even three minutes younger than myself. Surely I have spoken of the chant my brother made up in the late 70's as we rolled across dusty godforsaken stretches of lifeless Utah interstate in an Econoline van, bound for Arkansas:

I think I see a sign
And it's gonna say Stuckey's
And it's gonna be fine
We're gonna get a smokin' monkey

Stuckey's is a haunting shack of bygone days that once beckoned to summer road tripping backseat brats when the Little River Band ruled the airwaves. It contained vast bins of jiggling, dirt-stained bendy guys with snapped wires sticking out of their rubber thighs, and dried bird poop paper weights with glued-on plastic google eyes, and varnished spanking paddles with some weird, suggestive grandpa joke written across them in cursive script. Your parents might stop there because it was the only bathroom until Jackson Hole, still another 237 miles up the road, but damn the toilets, if you were under 12, you'd sit there fighting over the Walkman tape player loaded up with a threadbare TDK60 copy of Journey's Infinity to kill the time while dreaming of the motherlode: a smokin' monkey.