vino fire, arcade fret

"He made fret noises with what?"
"A bottle of vino!"
"A bottle of wine?"
"Yes! Well..,the neck," I correct, sounding repetitive, repeatedly sounding corrected.
"What a waste of perfectly good liquor."
"What?!!"
"What?" she asks, repeatedly sounding corrective, correcting the repetitive sound of..
"What wasted note of sound have you ever found to correct?" I repeat a corrected sound to no one.
"Ashley, do you have to be obscure all the fucking time?" she asks, repeating noises that fret with a pocketwatch pace to the only one who listens.

---

"You saw the Arcade Fire?" she asks
'Yeah," I say, into an Austin Texas blanketed air.
"How did you move your way up front?"
"A third-person omniscient narrator told me about the propane fire in the paper.,.,.,.,do you know what happens next?"
"No." the narrator answers in an all-knowing (nothing) tone.
"Don't patronize me," I Thesaurus fret verb perturb & defibrillate the condescension from my heartless appearance of kindness.
"Do you have to be so ob--"
"--no, I don't need to alarm the deliberate magnification of abstruse texts that only you and your recondite cronies could understand..,,"
"Fuck you! Neither I, nor my 'cronies' could identify your enigmatic linguistics, even if we had the highest paid nerds in the country to determine your verbal cloaks, so don't--"
"Ok, ok, I just wanted to know if you got to see the Arcade Fire."
"Oh..,,.,,.,.,.,well,., .. , , yes.!. !"
"And that's your answer, punctuation and all?"
"I expressed myself without a ques?ion mar? did'? I"

---

"Did you know Gertrude Stein well, while she was alive?"
"No."
"And what did she tell you?"
"I never met her, so how--"
"Were you born in New England, Sir?"
"I'm not a man, so I really can't--"
"Did you tell Gertrude Stein that her language barriers would never get her published?"
"Are you on crack, man? I just want to get home to my wife and ki--"
"Tell me, sir, how you and Stein got mixed up in that scandalous plot to overthrow the government."

---

"A propane fire blasted through Zilker Park this afternoon, leaving hundreds of 'Austin City Limit' fans waiting in ridiculously long lines, some in which their ADD attention spans could not allow a normal waiting time: fast cabs and a few ambulances were called."

"ALL OF YOU WHO WANT TO SEE THE ARCADE FIRE MOVE TO THE FRONT; ALL OTHERS MOVE TO THE BACK!!!!" I cup my earnest palms.

"Um, Yeah, like all of us are here to see the band," she fibrillates her way out of my sympathetic, 'um-yeah' heart.
"Um, Sir? Sir. sir? sir. sir. sir,." I plead, off the recorded record.

---

"Ashley?"
"~~~~~ {}_+{-==p;-=][~ ::'.;[///"
"Ashley, it's time to go to Texas, and--"
"WHAAAAAT??"
"Honey, remember, we're going to Austin to see the ______Fire?"
"Oh, um, yes," I say embarrassed as a an embarrassing misspelling of embarrass.

---

"Peter Bjork and John."
"Peter who?"
"PEE TER BEE YORK and--" ah, fuck it, I brain wave into a white stripe song.
"And? Who?"
"And Whom," I correct a repetitive sound.
"All-fucking-right," she repeatedly sounds the alarm.
"We missed--'. "
"Missed, what?' she coaxes an em-- into an empircal saul bellow book.
"We missed one of the most important bands in history--Peter Bjork and John--"
"I wouldn't say--"
"--I would, and, I'd say that we got to the festival in time, but the propane fire kept us in line for about a half an hour, and then the--"
"Arcade Fire?"
"No, well, yes, we pushed our way to the front for the Arcade Fire, but their brilliance--"
"Like a fire, right?"
"Um,.,., yes,.,but, i, but--"
"I apologize, I seemed to arrived...."
"Now you're plagiarizing Fionn Regan..."
"True."
"True," I truant my noun's choice in verb.

---

"Oh, DeVotchKa, I know that band."
"Yeah, well, it was this sexy tuba player, and her stringed compatriots."
"Don't you mean--"
"--No," I tell my sexy dream companion.
".....it's not your man that your dreaming of,.,.,,you're too tired to be in love,,.,.,.,.,,.,"
"Do you always confuse commas with periods?"
"As much as I confuse periodic comas with periods of comatose love."
"Amore."
"Amor."

---

"Ashley...ASHLEY!!"
"...what,?"
"Wake up, honey, the Arcade Fire is starting in an hour."
"What's the crap band playing before they go on? Nevermind, I don't care, I'll watch anything to get closer."
"Artic Monkeys."
"Never heard of them."
"Thought you might not, Mr. Burns...I--"
"Wait, Smithers? Am I dreaming ag--"

---

"Class, the example given to us in this actpack comes from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Do you know his other famous work, Through the Looking Glass?"

The snickering class does not know. I am awake three states away, looking through a glass-full of vino, listening to the fret noise of a whine-less violin, bottle-necked with an extra dry malbec, asking,

"Why waste wine or music with one or the other?"
"Ashley--"
"Shhh, just enjoy the rhetorical nature of the question.....

end quote

---

god bless the polacks for their stringed instruments, the french for their wine, the dutch for their propensity for natural energy, the scotch-irish for their ballads & whiskey, and the canadians for the bastard music molded from all of the above...