the number one song in heaven

                July 25, 2021

            the number one song in heaven

            i'm thankful that i'm sitting in the shade in the backyard and f is at the foot of my lounge chair in between my legs and miso is to my left. i'm thankful that though i misted them both with the hose earlier, they're dry now. i'm thankful that though we still cannot get them to play together (the ultimate dream), they can be close to each other without conflict. i'm thankful that though i accidentally let miso out of the yard and she could have run off, d caught her quickly. i'm thankful that i thought i hurt my foot the other day jumping aggressively around the the yard in thin slippers, it was just a little bruise with no lasting effects.

i'm thankful that, like last week, this week's astro poets horoscope for my sign ("Week of 7/25 in Scorpio: There will be smiles and heartfelt goodbyes. There will be hellos too—to a new way of being. Find yourself in the midst of it all. You can take your time with it. But you probably won’t want to.") is a good one seems to resonate with an exciting/kinda scary thing that feels like it might be finally happening at work, which of course may just be confirmation bias (i'm thankful to have learn of the term "barnum effect" when googling that i had the right definition of "confirmation bias") and who knows but i'll take confidence/optimism/hope wherever available even it's fake! (give me some placebo effect while you're at it).
i'm thankful we broke our "fruit as dessert" (which has already evolved from "fruit as dessert every day" to "fruit as dessert every day but one day" to "fruit as dessert on weekdays" and actually "fruit as dessert on weekdays except my parents are visiting this week so probably we'll eat some dessert during the week with them then too") diet with cinnabon yesterday. i'm thankful that d likes the outside of a cinnamon roll better than the inside and i am the opposite, which means we are well suited to sharing a cinnamon roll (and i'm thankful also for cinnabon's "center of the roll", which is delicious and ridiculous in equal measure).

i'm thankful that last night i started reading annalee newitz's four lost cities, which is providing some interesting history i didn't know about. i'm thankful for the hbo max documentary on woodstock 99, which further reaffirmed the fact that i have no desire to go to a music festival. i'm thankful for the sparks brothers, the documentary about sparks, even though i think it is a pretty average movie from a filmic perspective (which was kind of a letdown, given what a stylist edgar wright can sometimes be) but on the other hand introduced me to a fascinating band who i only ever knew as "they were on gilmore girls that one time and i looked them up on wikipedia") and delivered a helpful and entertaining capsule review view of their long career. 

i'm thankful for my favorite song of theirs so far, "the number one song in heaven", which has so many good noises (the weird stacked harmonies in the opening, the cotton candy soft flanged whooshes that show up periodically in the left channel, the chunky sequenced synths at the core, vocoder saying things i can't understand, grainy filtered pads floating in a sea of reverb, the way that halfway through there's a weird drum fill and then a faster and harder version of the sequencer kicks in, the thing, which seems like the core thing to sparks from the whitman's sampler of the ouevre in the movie, which are vocals that start high and climb higher and higher and you think they can't go higher but they do, the way the song crescendos and breaks and crescendos again and again, that it feels like such an epic, joyful journey that even though it's a seven minute song i just want to listen to it again after (and am doing so now).

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