The Halloween Parade -- "The past keeps knock, knock, knocking on my door"

Trick or treating is now officially over. We had a lot of kids this year, maybe 15 groups of 3-6 kids each plus 5 or so doubles & singles. Good! There's not that much left-over chocolate. I should take it to "work" or give it away. I'll do a little of both, but I'll eat a goodly amount of it too. So there.


Lyrics by Lou Reed

There's a down town fairy singing out, "Proud Mary"
As she cruises Christopher Street
And some Southern Queen is acting loud and mean
Where the docks and the Badlands meet
 

This Halloween is something to be sure
Especially to be here without you
 

There's a Greta Garbo and an Alfred Hitchcock
And some black Jamaican stud
There's five Cinderellas and some leather drags
I almost fell into my mug
 

There's a Crawford, Davis and a tacky Cary Grant
And some homeboys lookin' for trouble down here from the Bronx
 

But there ain't no Hairy and no Virgin Mary
You won't hear those voices again
And Johnny Rio and Rotten Rita
You'll never see those faces again
 

This Halloween is something to be sure
Especially to be here without you
 

There's the Born Again Losers and the Lavender Boozers
And some crack team from Washington Heights
The boys from Avenue B and the girls from Avenue D
A Tinkerbell in tights
 

This celebration somehow gets me down
Especially when I see you're not around
 

There's no Peter Pedantic saying things romantic
In Latin, Greek or Spic
There's no Three bananas or Brandy Alexander
Dishing all their tricks
 

It's a different feeling that I have today
Especially when I know you've gone away
 

There's a girl from Soho with a T-shirt saying, "I blow"
She's with the 'Jive five 2 plus 3'
And the girls for pay dates are giving cut rates
Or else doing it for free
 

The past keeps knock, knock, knocking on my door
And I don't want to hear it anymore
 

No consolations please for feelin' funky
I got to get my head above my knees
But it makes me mad and then it makes me sad
And then I start to freeze
 

In the back of my mind, I was afraid it might be true
In the back of my mind, I was afraid that they meant you
 

The Halloween Parade
At the Halloween Parade.
See you next year, at the Halloween Parade

Read more: Metrolyrics Print Halloween Parade

A Century of Books. The List.

 

I'm very excited about a new list I'm working on -- as of 20 minutes ago. I follow a number of book blogs, including this one, which led me to see the blogger's list entitled A Century of Books. She got the idea from this blog. I'm going to see how many years, from 1900 to 1999, I can fill in with the name of a book that I read that was published in that year. (I can word that differently, and I probably will later.) Considering that I've read quite a few George Orwell and Willa Cather and Edith Wharton novels I hope to fill in a lot of dates from the 20s and 30s. I feel sure I'll have a book to list for every year after about 1970, which is when I was out of school and could read whatever I wanted.

 

I've got a list of books read since 1984, the year my second child was born. Can't wait to get home tonight from my Dinner Group so I can fill in the blanks. (The Dinner Group is what I now call The Book Group that I joined last January and isn't really a book group at all. It's a dinner group and it feels better if I just call it that. I didn't want to be in a dinner group, I wanted to be in a book group, but I've bitched about that before and won't repeat myself too much here.) Below is what I served when it was my turn, in August, to host the Book Group, I mean the Dinner Group. Tonight we're pretending that we're getting together to discuss Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, which I'm almost finished and liked a lot. A whole lot, which is unusual because it's a short story collection and I thought I didn't like short story collections.

 

 

 

Post dinner report: Once again, I'm ready to quit this group. I really hate myself the morning after each dinner. I talk too much, I interrupt people, I'm overly nervous. I simply don't like myself and don't want to feel that way. I've tried to quit before but failed. Sigh.

More Lou. With Metallica, and Emmylou Harris & Sheryl Crow doing Lou.

 

Sad day. Lou Reed (1942-2013). "The pedestal that so many reserve for Bob Dylan? It belongs to Reed."

 

I hardly saw them all but I saw a lot, including Lou in about 1999, no 1998, at the 9:30 Club in DC. He made some awfully good music. And he had a good marriage. Two pretty great things. 71 wasn't a bad run for someone who, shall we say, didn't always show the best judgment. He'll be missed.

Chris Richards, Washington Post, 10/28/13
"Reed was our most uncompromising rock star. The pedestal that so many reserve for Bob Dylan? It belongs to Reed. Reed, the grouchy genius. Reed, the street poet with the lousy singing voice. Reed, the inscrutable self-mythologizer. Reed, the guy who always made rock-and-roll feel mysterious and alive."

Red cardinal climber, one of my favorite unruly plants.

 

 

A number of years ago I bought one cardinal climber vine (Ipomoea sloteri) at a farmers' market. Since then I've grown them every year using the seeds I collected at the end of the previous season. The hummingbirds love these flowers, and although they are pretty and reliable and long-lasting (I still have a few blooms), they aren't spectacular. You have to be very near in order to see the little blooms. But next year (I'm always saying that... "but next year") I hope to plant tons of them and see if they'll make more of a splash. Don't know yet if the deer will allow that since I've only grown them on my deck and behind fencing.

 

 

 

 

Food confession: this looks good. I'd need a dozen friends, maybe two?, to help me eat it but that could be fun. I wonder if there's a bun on the bottom? I see lettuce peeking out.

 

From: https://www.facebook.com/Baconisyummly

A praying mantis.

 

 

 

Yikes, I'm 28 books behind schedule.

 

In January I entered Goodreads' book challenge and chose 100 books as my goal for 2013. Time's running out. I'm 28 books behind schedule, according to Goodreads. I guess they have a way of predicting my personal speed of reading -- one of those algorithms it seems like we're always reading about these days. (I think the word "algorithm" was one I heard or read way back in 7th or 8th grade and then never heard again until social media came along.) I've read 50 books so far in 2013, with, what, 2 1/2 months to go? Goodreads therefore must predict that at my speed I'll finish 22 more by 12/31. Therefore I'm 28 behind schedule. At least that's the way my mind figures it. So I guess to meet my challenge I have to more than double my reading rate for the next 10 weeks. Not bloody likely. Although I did just start reading Old Filth an hour ago and it's so engaging that I'm racing my way through it. Who am I in competition with? Myself? The Grim Reaper? Yes, him! He'll win.

Overdue post. A rainy August day at Bethany Beach, Delaware.

Breasts in advertising.

Sorghum field, I think. On the road north to Mt. Airy, MD.

Some kind of moth caterpillar? Found on a dying heuchera leaf on my deck.

Beloved 4 o'clocks.

 

These flowers make me so happy. They bloom from July to October, produce hundreds of blooms and thousands of seeds (for next year), and smell heavenly. They start blooming late in the day, bloom happily all night, then begin to fold up at 11 AM or so. The deer generally don't eat them until late in the season when everything else is gone.

 

I prefer red 4's, but am too stubborn to go out and buy seeds for reds. The plants shown in this post are the descendants of 4's I planted a few years ago -- white blooms with a hint of pale, pale yellow. I like the process of gathering and saving seeds for the next year. I have many baggies of various seeds scattered about.

 

I've been a very bad gardener this year, just awful. I may post pictures to prove my point. Or maybe not. I've also been a very bad blogger this year. (But I've read a LOT of good books!)