I don’t like Sheryl Crow. I can’t say I hate her because I haven’t met her and I only say that about people I’ve met, but I would say that I have a strong disliking for her and her music. To a certain extent she’s been crowned the preeminent woman of rock even though she’s terrible. There are so many other great female rockers out there (like Melissa Etheridge, Karen O, Meg White… I can’t think of any others right now) that put Crow’s pitiful songs and embarrassingly simple lyrics to shame (“You get down, real low down/You listen to Coltrane, derail your own train/Well who hasn’t been there before?/I come round, around the hard way/Bring you comics in bed, scrape the mold off the bread/And serve you French toast again/Well, ok, I still get stoned/I’m not the kind of girl you’d take home…” That’s embarrassing). I find the only rocking that her songs do is rocking me to sleep, but not a warm, cozy sleep where I’ll dream about ice cream and smoking hot actresses; it’s more like I’m being anesthetized by Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker is standing next to him with a scalpel in one hand and a corn on the cob in the other and I’m trying to resist but Miss Piggy is holding me down and I can’t move and my eyelids are getting heavy and there’s nothing I can do, I’m just reaching out, searching for anything, maybe an EpiPen of serotonin to jam into my temple to shock me back into reality.
What does my dislike for Sheryl Crow have to do with anything? It doesn’t. I just heard a song on the radio today and I thought it prudent to make sure no one assumed I was a Sheryl Crow fan.
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Day three at the new house and still no neighbors. I noticed something today though: the neighborhood is very quiet. More than just quiet; it’s dead silent. You know, the type of silent that is painfully broken by the screaming of a table saw ripping through a 4x8 sheet of plywood.
Demo went very well again. No injuries to speak of and I tore the wall out between the dining room and living room. Now it’s wide open and looking like the dog’s bollocks.
The worst part of the day was removing the old tile counter tops. The tiles were antique, white, hexagonal little guys, about ¾” across. It must have taken a month to lay them. That’s nice and all, but they were set in 3” of mortar. No shit. The entire 10’ long counter top had to weigh a thousand pounds. I can’t imagine why they would have used 3”when 2.75 fewer inches would have sufficed. The only way to get it out was to chisel at it with a sledgehammer and a big steel spike. Holy shit I’m tired. I felt like John Henry, driving railroad spikes, except I didn’t die when it was over and I would gladly have lost to the steam engine if it would have saved me the 4 hours of work. As it was, I got it done, though I doubt they’ll be writing any folk songs about me.
John Henry, O, John Henry!
Blood am runnin’ red!
Falls right down with his hammer to the ground,
Says, “I’ve beat him to the bottom but I’m dead
Lawd – Lawd –
I beat him to the bottom but I’m dead."
Photo: View from the living room through the dining room to the kitchen. No more walls.
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