Heart: Home

HITCHCOCK BLONDE
For the second time running, a computer oversight, postal error or clumsy work experience student meant that an invite to the after-party for the MTC’s new show wasn’t forthcoming. I can only blame simple human error or technological glitch for this, since to consider otherwise is to gaze into an abyss of self-doubt and recrimination – did I do something wrong? Print something unspeakable? Spill post-show plonk down the back of someone’s rental tux? Why am I not counted amongst the MTC's favoured golden children anymore?

Either way, I can’t review the post-show thing because I wasn’t there. It wasn’t as bad as the last show, where I went looking for a bank and accidentally found the after-party to which I hadn’t been invited, making visible my shame like a mother loudly chiding her child’s poor bladder control in the pasta aisle of Safeway.

I can’t write about it. I wasn’t there. So I will write about what else happened. I was or was not at all or some of these events.

ACTUAL CONVERSATION HELD RECENTLY WHILE LOOKING FOR A CAR SPACE:
M: Have you seen I love Huckabees? You’d like it.
Z: I heart Huckabees.
M: I love Huckabees.
Z: It’s pronounced I heart.
J: It is. I haven’t even seen it and I know that.
M: I heart Huckabees?
Z: Yeah.
J: You say heart.
LITERALLY 30 SECONDS LATER
M: Who’s this on the radio?
[pause]
J: Heart.
M: Right.
J: It is. Actually, this is pretty weird. Band from the 70s. Heart. This song is called Magic Man.
M: It’s great.
J: It is. It’s about a girl telling her mama about the boy she’s fallen for. And he sounds like a bit of a bad boy, too. “He’s got the magic hands”.
Z: Heart?
J: Yeah.

MAGIC MAN (EXCERPT)
Winter nights we sang in tune
Played inside the months of moon
"Never think of never...let this spell last forever"
Well, summer lover passed to fall
tried to realize it all
Mama says she's worried..growing up in a hurry

"Come on home, girl" Mama cried on the phone
"Too soon to lose my baby yet, my girl should be at home"

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS
So says (Retired Airline Captain/Former USMC Fighter Pilot) Bob Raab, of California. I’m unaware whether Bob (born Robert) is a fan, or even knows of Heart’s song, or agrees that Heart’s “girl” really ought to be back “home” at this point in the song. But Bob might know a thing or two about homes. Captain Bob tells an interviewer:

“I have lived in southern California in my current house for 31 years. However, it does not feel like home. I feel more at home when I visit my daughter and her family. I also get that "I'm home" feeling of contentment any time I drive onto a military base, especially a Marine base. I guess that old saying is true, "Home is where the heart is."”

ANOTHER RAAB
Lawrence Raab is not a Retired Airline Captain, or a military man. He is a poet (which might make him a ‘magic man’, in the Heart sense, possibly even with ‘magic hands’). He did write a poem called “The Terrible Dream About Airlines”. Also, my favourite, “Attack of the Crab Monsters”.
But more importantly, here, “Why It Often Rains in the Movies”:

Because so much consequential thinking
happens in the rain. A steady mist
to recall departures, a bitter downpour
for betrayal. As if the first thing
a man wants to do when he learns his wife
is sleeping with his best friend, and has been
for years, the very first thing
is not to make a drink, and drink it,
and make another, but to walk outside
into bad weather. It's true
that the way we look doesn't always
reveal our feelings. Which is a problem
for the movies. And why somebody has to smash
a mirror, for example, to show he's angry
and full of self-hate, whereas actual people
rarely do this. And rarely sit on benches
in the pouring rain to weep. Is he wondering
why he didn't see it long ago? Is he wondering
if in fact he did, and lied to himself?
And perhaps she also saw the many ways
he'd allowed himself to be deceived. In this city
it will rain all night. So the three of them
return to their houses, and the wife
and her lover go upstairs to bed
while the husband takes a small black pistol
from a drawer, turns it over in his hands,
then puts it back. Thus demonstrating
his inability to respond to passion
with passion. But we don't want him
to shoot his wife, or his friend, or himself.
And we've begun to suspect
that none of this is going to work out,
that we'll leave the theater feeling
vaguely cheated, just as the movie,
turning away from the husband's sorrow,
leaves him to be a man who must continue,
day after day, to walk outside into the rain,
outside and back again, since now there can be
nowhere in this world for him to rest.

IT RAINED IN NEW ORLEANS

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS, pt. 2

Anyone who’s ever been threatened with eviction may know the pang.

“Dear [AHFLV]:
I write to inform that due to your rent being in arrears, we have been instructed by the landlord to issue you with a 14 Day Notice to vacate for rent arrears. We stress that this notice is a precautionary measure and should the rent be paid to date or close too within the coming weeks, any further action will be postponed or withdrawn.”

To lose your home like this must be nothing compared to watching a natural disaster rip it from you.

GOD

Some who’ve survived are praising God for pitching in and helping out, while others are suggesting that they should maybe rethink the whole God concept, considering what just happened. Either way, that whole line of thought kind of diverts attention from the probability that human-sponsored climate change is a major contributing factor.

Doesn’t give anyone their homes back, either.

ANOTHER RAAB Pt. 2
Ask about absence
Water has spent a long time learning
how to fill with itself
the space of a missing thing
-- Lawrence Raab


Hitchcock Blonde is a relatively unimportant addition to the MTC’s calendar.