Ani, if you're out there, thank you.

10 reasons why I love Ani DiFranco:

1. Her voice is creamy. Seriously. Like vanilla pudding. It's a beautiful juxtaposition – somewhere between angelic and fierce. If Ani were singing shit about my pug, I'd turn up the volume and sing along. She's that captivating.

2. Her songwriting is AMAZING. I picture her scratching out lyrics between coffee refills in diner booths. Or on the back porch of her home in Buffalo, under an awning, in the rain, making sense of bad relationships, her 20s, her 30s, politics and pollution.

3. She's from Buffalo. My hometown. And without too much preaching, she became the poster child for a steel belt city with a reputation steeped in bad football jokes, blizzards and economic woes. A few years ago she purchased a historic church on the corner of West Tupper and Delaware Avenue, rehabbed it, reopened it as a music venue and called it Babeville.

4. She is 11 years older than me, but it never felt that way. In the mid-1990s, when I first started listening to Ani, newspapers and magazines labeled her militant, angsty, angry, gay, bisexual, feminist, rocker grrrl, younameit. As a teenager, I couldn't think of a better chick to idolize. She was complex; a Rubik's cube of sexual identity, with song lyrics like poems, marked by peaks and valleys in an emotional landscape not unlike the one I pounded. Britney Spears and I are the same age. (Arrggh! It's true!) Yet it was Ani I latched onto like a long-distance pen pal. (Ani and Jewel to be exact.) From my bedroom in the middle of nowhere, with its pink walls and quilted bunk bed blankets, I spent my nights alternating between Ani and Jewel, a cross-pollination of a fan. Romantic and wispy. Pent-up and pissy.

5. She can fingerpick a hoedown beat like nobody's business. Ani could pluck a love song using her guitar strings to clean out the grit from under her fingernails. She's that fast and that good.

6. She's a journalist's wet dream. She's funny, disarming and ridiculously quotable. ("Some people wear their heart up on their sleeve. I wear mine underneath my right pant leg, strapped to my boot.") Even her terseness is eloquent. ("My songs are just little letters to me.")

7. She's a stubborn success story. Ani has repeatedly turned down baller contracts with major record companies. She formed Righteous Records in 1989 with Dale Anderson, a writer from The Buffalo News, and renamed the company Righteous Babe Records in 1994 after she and Anderson parted ways. The company now produces a growing list of emerging artists – Andrew Bird, Bitch and Animal, Arto Lindsay, Sara Lee and Hammell on Trial to name a few.

8. Her song, Angry Anymore, was my anthem for years. Listen to it. It's cathartic.

9. Fuck you at the start of a refrain never sounded so pretty or so appropriate. Untouchable Face is a lyrical feat of genius.

10. She is finally happy, and I'm happy for her.

--

PS. Joe took me to the Tampa Theatre last night to see Ani. The tickets were a Christmas present. (Thank you, Joe!) I cried tears of happiness during the show. It was dark, so no one saw.


***

Lance spreads some love.

My boyfriend keeps hitting the snooze on his radio alarm clock.

It's how he wakes up every morning before work – to 20-second blasts of 1980s pop songs.

"Do you come from a land down under? Where women glow and men plunder? Can't you hear? Can't you hear the thunder? You better run. You better take cover."

Me? I'm usually in my office by then, drinking Timmy Hos coffee out of an Artvoice mug.

Who would've thought when I swiped this Artvoice mug eight years ago from the dimly-lit, alt-weekly newspaper I interned at in Buffalo, that I'd be sitting in my office, in my house, in St. Petersburg, Fla., sipping Timmy Hos in a blue nightgown and red slippers?

"Buying bread from a man in Brussels.
He was six-foot-four and full of muscles.
I said, 'Do you speak-a my language?'
He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich."

Although Valentines Day has come and gone, I'm going to put this post up now before it totally gets away from me.

Since I still feel like the new kid on the blog block, one of my New Year's resolutions was to introduce Lance to some friends, which I did by following new peeps on Twitter. I hadn't set out to befriend only mommies on mommy blogs, but apparently Lance likes moms.

"Lying in a den in Bombay.
With a slack jaw, and not much to say.
I said to the man, 'Are you trying to tempt me
Because I come from the land of plenty?'
And he said ..."

Not being a mommy, I didn't think I'd be drawn to mommy blogs (oh, and to one pseudo-daddy blog), but upon further reading, I found myself oddly captivated by these men and women and their child-rearing highs and lows, the likes of which I won't get into. That's their job.

Suffice it say, reading mommy blogs has kept me equally awestruck and birth-controlled.

Jill over at Modern Mommy Blog, is a 29-year-old social worker whose New Year's resolutions include ingesting fish oil every day and avoiding alcoholic beverages. I think it's refreshing that she broke both of these promises by Super Bowl Sunday, because in my opinion, cutting alcohol out of your life while introducing your body to fish oil sounds grim.

Jill has a one-year-old daughter, and is rooting for Kate Winslet in the Oscars. She entered herself in a Valentines Day contest sponsored by Linda, a scrapbooking, stay-at-home mother-of-three in Mississippi.

On Valentines Day, Jill, the Modern Mommy, spread a little "bloggy love" my way by posting about Lance on her blog, which was so solid of her.

So ...

In the spirit of paying it forward, I recommend Modern Mommy to those of you who have children/are about to have children/might one day have children/are parents to pugs (or other such animals)/can appreciate a network of supportive family-friendly folks even if you are crass, self-indulgent and light-years away from having children/enjoy a pretty blog layout with meaningful posts/appreciate good advice and loyal webships (web friendships.)

Oh, and Joe finally woke up around 9:30 a.m., throwing groggy daggers my way in Pat Benatar's battlefield.

"We are young, heartache to heartache we stand.
No promises, no demands ..."

--
PS. My father gave my mother 1,600 lb. of corn for Valentines Day. After receiving such an awesome gift, she helped him lug the corn bags into the basement to dump into their corn burner hopper.

O Buffalo.

What is it about Buffalo? It's a ghostly city lined with crumbling steel mills, surrounded by brick buildings with their windows punched out. The outskirts of the city, a town called Lackawanna, looks like the bottoms of a pair of muddy worn out jeans. The inside of the city on cold winter days from the top of the Skyway bridge is a kind of Gotham City snow globe. When you move away from Buffalo and tell people where you're from they shiver and say, "Sure glad you got outta there, aint ya?"

That's the thing about Buffalo. Most of the people I talk to who grew up there and no longer live there rarely speak ill of the place. (We save that for the people who remain.)

Tim Russert is a good example, rest his pundit soul. Ani DiFranco is another good example. Even Johnny Rzeznik from the blasted Goo Goo Dolls gets misty-eyed when he talks about Buffalo ...

Rather than listen to me go on and on about why I love Buffalo, its pierogies and chicken wings, its dark old soul and puffy winter coat'ed people, I'm going to, in honor of Russert, post bits of what other people have said about the place. Here goes:

+

"It's a really beautiful old place. It felt really good to be back where I grew up. It's sort of that whole getting-back-to-your-roots thing only that sounds cliche, but there's definitely a different kind of dramatic tension there than in L.A. ... It just reminded me that this is who you are. This is where you're from. It's never anything to be ashamed of, and it actually gave me strength to have a sense of my own history. It's so easy to come out to L.A. as an outsider and plant your head so far up your own ass you can disappear."

- Johnny Rzeznik on returning to Buffalo after the success of his 1998 album, Dizzy Up the Girl. The band recorded its next album in a 100-year-old Masonic ballroom in the city.

+

"Like a typical Buffalonian I came back. There's a high recidivism rate in this town. You can check out any time you like but you can never leave, so I'm back living two blocks from the hospital I was born in. It's the community I desired all along, all those lonely folk singer-in-a -car days. It's finally being realized."

- Singer Ani DiFranco in an NPR interview on her decision to purchase a 137-year-old church in Buffalo and turn it into a concert hall.

+

"A few weeks before Dad's 75th birthday, I called him and announced, "I'm finally in a position to buy you a new car." For his whole life, Big Russ bought only used cars, and when I was a boy, I used to say, "Dad, someday I'm going to buy you a brand-new Cadillac."

I sent him Cadillac, Mercedes and Lexus catalogs. "Look them over," I told him. "You can have any car you want, with any options. It's a birthday present. When I come for Thanksgiving, we'll pick it up."

On Thanksgiving, visiting Dad in Buffalo, I said, "Okay, which one?"

"Let's go for a ride," he said. We got into his Chevy Caprice and drove to Jack Adkins Ford. A tall, thin man with a Buffalo Bills jacket came out to greet us.

"This is Charlie," Dad said. We shook hands. "He gave me a good number on my trade-in. Charlie, show him the car."

"We followed Charlie into the showroom. There, all shined up, was a black Crown Victoria. I couldn't believe it. "Dad, it's a cop car!"

"Isn't she beautiful?" he said. He opened the trunk. "You can get three suitcases in there, and two cases of beer."

As we were heading home, I said, "Dad you could have had whatever you wanted - a Cadillac, a Mercedes, a Lexus - but you chose a Crown Vic. Do you really think it's better?"

"No of course not," he replied. "But if I came home with a fancy Cadillac, do you know what people would say? 'His kid made it, and now he's too big for us.' This is who I am."

- Tim Russert, from "Big Russ & Me."

+

"There's a part of the country could drop off tomorrow in an earthquake. Yeah it's out there on the cutting edge, the people move, the sidewalks shake. And there's another part of the country with a land that gently creaks and thuds, where the heavy snows make faucets leak in bathrooms with free-standing tubs. They're in houses that are haunted, with the kids who lie awake and think about all the generations past who used to use the dripping sink.

And sometimes one place wants to slip into the other just to see, what it's like to trade its demons for the restless ghost of Mrs. Ogilvey. She used to pick the mint from her front yard to dress the Sunday pork. Sometimes Southern California wants to be Western New York.

It wants to have a family business in sheet metal or power tools. It wants to have a diner where the coffee tastes like diesel fuel. And it wants to find the glory of a town they say has hit the skids, and it wants to have a snow day that will turn its parents into kids. And it's embarrassed, but it's lusting after a SUNY student with mousy brown hair who is taking out the compost, making coffee in long underwear.

- Folk singer Dar Williams, from "Southern California Wants to Be Western New York."

Existential scavenger hunting

Distractions are everywhere.

I woke up this morning first at 7:30 and then at 8:30. At 8:30 I shuffled to the kitchen. Made coffee. Made toast. Sat on the couch and opened this page. Two and half hours later I've accomplished nothing. Nothing. I blame MySpace, Facebook and random news stories about Broncos players diagnosed with diabetes, Britney's preggo sister, a story about an Asian man whose skin turned to tree bark and another story about an Asian man whose face developed gargantuan tumors spilling out from under his chin like tsunamis of yellow flesh. Freakish stuff. This is what I chose to do with my precious three hours before Joe wakes up.

(He's still sleeping by the way.)

Maybe if I go out on the porch in the sunshine.

Anyway. When I was in Gaitlinburg, Tenn. last summer I set up camp beside a 20-something couple from Baton Rouge. Their names were Rachel and Shawn. Newly engaged. I remember several key things about Rachel and Shawn. Namely that their tent leaked in a rainstorm that night and Rachel, totally pissed about this, stormed Shawn's truck like an army sergeant first thing in the morning, hauling armfuls of wet clothes into the cab, cursing in a southern tongue that their "god damned Wal-Mart tent was a piece of goddamned shit." I also remember that Shawn surveyed my car one night between bites of Smores and said, "That's a Honda HX yer drivin there." And I nodded and said yes. And he said, "Funny. I never seen an HX before." And that was that.

I think about it often. Probably every day since that night in Tennessee. Whenever I'm driving and I pass another Civic, I check out the rear model name - LX. EX. CX. DX. Never HX. I drove from Sarasota, Fla. to Coos Bay, Oregon and not once did I spot an HX on the road, in a parking lot, at a traffic light. I was floored by this, so floored that I made a habit of announcing the make and model of every Civic I passed from there on.

"LX. Not an HX."
"EX. Not an HX."

It is a lame road trip game, but one of many Rain Man-ian ticks I developed while driving and camping alone, spanning our country's most lunar surfaces - specifically northern Utah - doing maniacal things like rolling my tongue into a Tootsie Roll on the roof of my mouth, making noises I thought only my dog could hear and of course looking for Honda Civic HXs and never once finding one.

... Until yesterday on Siesta Key Beach, under the North Bridge facing the Ringling Causeway at 4 p.m. I obliviously parked next to one. A red HX. My car's hamster-like twin, dustier and littered with fishing tackle. Its owner, a Mexican kid in a Hanes undershirt, knee-deep in salt water, was futzing with a bucket of oily jacks flopping to and fro. And since I was in the middle of photographing someone for the paper, I stupidly forgot to snap a photo of the car.

Though I'll probably never see the thing again I drove home yesterday with a renewed sense of worldly order like now I can scratch the missing HX off my existential scavenger hunt. It's one of many scratch-offs on an assignment I gave myself years ago. The existential scavenger hunt assignment.

It started four years ago with a dog in the passenger seat of a truck. I was sitting in traffic at McKinley Parkway and Southwestern Boulevard in Hamburg, New York, staring at the truck parked next to me. Riding shotgun was a dog mangy from age, with a beaky face and once-crazy eyes. I remember sitting at the intersection we all called Seven Corners and looking over at Mangy Dog and thinking, shit Mangy Dog, I'll never see you again. This moment I'm sharing with you now at the Seven Corners in Hamburg, New York in one minute will be over and I'll never see you again.

At that time I had only a month to go before leaving New York for Florida. I was in that mode we all slip into before leaving a place for whoknowshowlong. It's a state of mind I describe as Steely Sadness. Before leaving a place you grow balls of steel. "I can do this. I'm cool. I'm free spirited dust in the wind. I'm the stuff you write home about. Eck. Ugh. Sigh." Which is such a farce, because really what happens is this:

You spot a mangy dog riding shotgun one day at an intersection famous for its deadly crashes and you start crying in spastic waves because you know this is It. You're looking into the once-crazy eyes of a beady-beaked dog and you're saying goodbye, out loud and in between snot-sucking sobs, you think: 'I'm 23 years old and this is the most pitiful moment I'm ever going to have. (Which we all know is not true.) And if I weren't at the wheel of this rattletrap jitney, at the deadliest intersection in Western New York, I'd be brought to my knees.' But you're wailing now like a breeched newborn slapped on the ass. And the dog is cocking its head and not blinking. And in his once-crazy eyes you see a shimmer of recognition (because glassy eyes make ghostly mirrors) and you know that in .3 seconds the light will go green, you'll grit your teeth and say buh-bye.

Thus you are born into what I call steely sadness.

Light turns green. Dog looks away. You press your foot to the pedal and accelerate. With the window down you hear the sound of your car's engine - not smooth, not steady, but high-pitched and throaty - and you shrug, because nonetheless you are moving.

I've not had another mangy dog moment. And like finding the HX yesterday (or as Joe calls it, "lampooning my white whale") I have no idea what it will mean if it happens again. I like to reckon it's one more kill in an existential scavenger hunt, though I fear it's just one more asinine thing I do to distract myself.

Ps. The picture above was taken in Jerome, Idaho. If anyone ever calls Idaho 'West-bum or East-bum' anything please dismiss it. Idaho is beautiful and solitary. Idaho sunsets cast the best pink-ish light I've ever seen blanket a field at dusk.

Jon Voight squeezed here.

This pig keychain was a gift from Joe's sister, Rosey. It lights up and oinks. But its oink sounds less, "Oink" and more "Quarr." 

Quarr.

One, I love pigs.

Two, I love pugs* and they're not much different than pigs. 

Three, I want a Pigasus tattoo to mimic the way Steinbeck used to "sign" his books followed by the latin expression: "Ad astra per alia porci." (To the stars on the wings of a pig.)

I left my keys at Publix Sunday night. I'm not positive of this, but I'm pretty sure I left them in the chip aisle. (Joe and I labeled bags of Doritos with "Peabody Award Winning" labels printed off Stephen Colbert's web site on Sunday night and I can't think of any other aisle I lingered in for 10 minutes to sticker groceries.) 

So I left them at Publix and when I called the store yesterday to ask if a set of keys had been turned in the woman who answered the phone asked: "Is there anything identifiable about the keys?"

I said: "The pig?"

She said: "We got em."

One time while I was at a Rudy Giuliani  fundraiser in Sarasota (to photograph, not support the candidate) I met Jon Voight. I never actually saw Giuliani. But Voight, he shook my hand and in doing so accidentally squeezed the pig. It oinked.  Rather it quarred. He pulled back and said, "What was that?" I smirked and said, "It's my pig." And off Voight went.

Do not dismiss your goof-tastic keychains. One day you might run into Ed from "Deliverance" and wholly crap, bless your heat if you have a pig keychain and Voight thinks to himself, "Is she being cute with this thing?" And, like me, it takes months for the serendipitous-ness of the moment to sink in ... and when it does you're all-be-damned and wondering what it all means. 

Anyway, Joe's awake now. Our dog has to piss. "Merv Griffin's Crosswords" is on and I'm about ready to go samurai on the TV. Nonetheless I have work to do. (From home today.)

Hell-o Dylan and a pot of Tim Hortons! I hope you have a good Tuesday.

*See Our dog, sidebar.

A-Maizing what we'll do for coffee and heat

So here we are. Joe asleep. Me awake. We're on dog-sitting duty at my friend Roger's house in Sarasota this weekend. And as anyone whose ever babysat, dog sat or house sat knows, staying at someone else's house can be troubling because you are beholden to their gadgetry (ie: TV with rabbit ears, microwave you have to pummel to make work, toilet handle that sticks so jiggle it after you flush, etc ...)

This is normally not a problem with Roger because as my sister PK would say, "Roger's a minimalist," which is why I'm stupefied by the fact that he's ditched the old coffee pot I gave him and replaced it with a French press. (What the Christ is a French press?)

(Side note: The coffeemaker by the way was Joe's. It had it's quirks too. Like gurgling Folgers over the side like a coffee fondue. But I mean, snap the lid down tight on the top of that thing and you'd be fine. I often balanced a phone book on it to seal the lid.)

Well whatever. Roger wasn't buying this rigmarole, so he went and bought a French press. The guy with no cable TV, who for the first time in years has a microwave because it came with the rental, a guy who washes paper coffee cups from places like Starbucks (though he'd never go to Starbucks) but you get the picture. That sort of guy. A minimalist. Or as he likes to call himself, "a luddite." This guy buys a French press.

(People's priorities amaze me. Why some of us chose to error on the side of convenience while others go a few extra rounds in the ring when it comes to any number of things is a fascinating study in human habits.)

Roger loves coffee. Loves coffee more than any show on TV. Or movie. Or fancy car. Or slick video game. He's beyond his years in this regard. So I Googled French press and apparently the thing captures more of the coffee's flavor and essential oils, so of course he'd get one.

I'll ask him about this when he returns and I'm sure when I do, he'll say it's worth the extra elbow grease if the coffee tastes like Juan Valdez himself delivered it via mule. And like most things in his life he doesn't need a drip coffeemaker or CNN because he gets the NY Times, or he doesn't need Tivo because Hemingway on the nightstand, with a receipt for a French press marking the chapter, is by far a better way to pause a story than to Tivo it ... which leads me to this next tale in human priorities:

My father soaked a pretty penny a couple years ago into replacing my family's old oil-burning furnace with a corn-fueled heater. If you ask him why he did this, he might respond that his reasons were 10 percent environmental, 50 percent money-saving and - this one he might not admit - 40 percent mechanical curiosity.

The corn heater, called A-Maize-ing Heat, was as big a Time-Suck my mother had ever seen. Before this it was the two-seater Cessna named Isabella that we called The Other Woman. Now it was Mistress Corn Heater.

According to my mother in the first six months of the corn heater's homecoming my dad spent every evening after work in the basement tinkering on her, re-calibrating her, feeding her purer corn, building her new parts, ordering her new parts, communicating with her maker in Iowa ... all the while singing her praises to anyone in town he ever overheard bitching about heating costs and G.D. oil companies.

"Get a corn heater," he would say.

A corn what? They'd ask.

"It's fantastic I tell you. She runs on corn alone. Wave of the future."

Nonetheless, to make what is a long story short, no one in North Collins got a corn heater that year as far as I know, and after one year of near Sisyphus-ian re-tooling, my dad's corn heater burned out. Not one to throw in the towel after one knockout, my dad refused to go back to the oil furnace despite the corn heater's failings.

If they got cold. There was always a space heater.

"It's a faulty heater," he told the guys at the Iowa A-Maize-ing Heat plant.

Yeah. Right. They said. Ship her back then - but you cover the shipping costs. They suggested it was his constant tinkering that caused her to quit.

"No," my dad said. "I'll drive it back."

And so he did. He and my Papa, in my Papa's truck. Drove the A-Maize-ing Heat corn burner from New York to Iowa where they toured the A-Maize-ing Heat manufacturing plant, studied the machines and quizzed the guys who designed them. And finally after a a few hours of diagnosis, they were told that in fact my father was right. She was faulty. Perhaps even the tinkering extended her lifespan. Like putting stents in arteries that were blocked.

So, off they went. Back to New York in my Papa's truck. The new corn heater riding bitch in the bed. She runs like a charm now. Or at least I haven't heard any dispatches from the basement trenches lately. But then again it's 80 degrees in Western New York right now. The nicest April my dad can remember.

As for my priorities - my corn burner. What I threw some Andrew Jacksons down on recently? I won't say. Not right now. The Thing I Bought requires no maintenance. No boulder-pushing-up-a-hill bittersweetness. No trip to Iowa, no nose-to-the-grindstone glory. None of it. I couldn't even bother with Roger's French press this morning. I heated up a cup of water in the microwave and dropped a tea bag in.

It's almost 11 a.m. Joe is still asleep. Maybe I'll go make a Starbucks run. Joe is not really a tea kind of guy.

PS. The picture above is of my dad, who viewed Lance yesterday and wasn't that impressed by him. I'm sucking up by posting a picture of his Lance, The Corn Burner.