Alpha Rats Nest

I'm so sick that I feel like Kafka. Maybe relatedly, the Mountain Goats song that I'm the most into right now is "Alpha Rats Nest." I think it's the manic quality. Like the way I would giggle to myself when I hear We do our best vampire routines if it didn't hurt my throat too much to giggle. But the effort of not giggling makes me start coughing and the song rattles on, heedless, heedless, jittered up like kids with glowsticks on E. It sounds exactly like I feel, especially when the little hitch comes before it starts over again, trapped on Repeat>1.

If I see sunlight hit you
I am sure that we'll both decompose

OH

sing, sing, sing

sing for the damage we've done

and the worse things that we'll do

Game Shows Touch Our Lives

I saw The Mountain Goats recently. They played a lot of Tallahassee and a lot of Sunset Tree. I am not the Tallahassee expert on this blog, but I thought I would write about "Game Shows Touch Our Lives" anyway, because they played it and I like it and it's one of those Mountain Goats songs that sounds like it could be romantic if you didn't know the Mountain Goats. Or even if you just didn't listen to the song closely enough to catch the little betrayals that signal that, whether or not I'm in the mood/the mood for you, something isn't quite right.

But apparently Mountain Goats fans all love these lines, just like I love these lines:

People say friends don't destroy one another
What do they know about friends?

Because the whole room sang them like it was the last chance they would get to sing along with a song until "No Children."

Idylls of the King

I can't get over these lines:

Your face like a vision straight out of Holly Hobby
Late light drizzling through your hair
Your eyes twin volcanoes
Bad ideas dancing around in there

Because all I can think of is a possessed, maybe even life-sized Raggedy Ann doll as (would have been) seen in The Omen. I mean, it's either that or the Patchwork Girl of Oz. Which is a lot less frightening, because Scraps, as we all know, was great. This interpretation also (awesomely, to my way of thinking) turns the "I" of this song into the Scarecrow, who is my favorite Oz character.

I know, I know -- this is Tallahassee, not a whimsical romp through the magical Land of Oz. All the same, suddenly it all fits: huge crows, the shrieking of innumerable gibbons, possibly also the vultures, and, best of all, our shared paths unraveling behind us like ribbons. It also means that the Scarecrow is having weird, probably portentous dreams about armies/armies of ghosts, which is not un-Oz-like, and can only mean one thing: invasion.