Meetings and A Stone

In the past 48 hours, four important meetings at work have been canceled. In a way, I'm very lucky. Less time wasted in windowless rooms, more time to do other things (enjoy the impossibly beautiful weather, plan a strategy for making Seymour (a cat) shed less, enjoy the amazing second third of the book I'm reading - Charles Bock's Beautiful Children, etc.) But then I realized that I kind of like the meetings at my job. (Long time readers will remember my long-winded complaints about meetings at my previous employer.) In the land of cardinal and gold, meetings have agendas, (most) people who speak have something to say, and good ideas are shared. Yeah, I'm getting old. We all are.

I've written a lot about music lately. I think I'm starting to annoy people. Some of you say "Stop ranting about the brilliance of your 90s singer-songwriters, Ali!" But really, I've showed restraint. Do you know that on a recent flight from Minneapolis to Los Angeles I wrote 20 small-notebook pages about Liz Phair and Mark Eitzel and why, dissimilar as they are, they mean so much to me? Do you know that I'm sitting on the piece, not posting it on my blog until my reader(s) have at least a month-long break from the music of the past?

So I'll talk instead of the music of the much more recent past. In my iTunes rotation today, Okkervil River's 2005 album Black Sheep Boy showed up, right on time. I may be one of the few people who likes their latest album - The Stage Names - better. (This opinion is based on my time-tested method of rating albums - more good songs.) But on Black Sheep Boy, there's a song called A Stone. It's been written about before. And, as usual, I want to write about the lyrics. These lyrics:

You know I never claimed that I was a stone
And you love a stone
You love white veins, you love hard grey
The heaviest weight, the clumsiest shape
The earthiest smell, the hollowest tone
You love a stone
You love a stone
Because it's dark, and it's old,
And if it could start being alive
You'd stop living alone

And those lines pretty much sum up every painful relationship that anyone I know (me, friends, family, strangers) has ever been in... been stuck in.

Go back to the above link for an excellent article on a great now-dead music website, in which the brilliance of everything followed the above verse.

That's all. I have phone calls to return, emails to await.