A view of the world through a child’s unclouded eyes. Crying fetal-ly. Looking too closely in the mirror. That’s the sense I get. That probably tells more about me than it does about Cat Power. So, while I’m on that track, let me stray further…
When I was younger, I thought I might grow up to be magical. I hoped I would. I wanted to smell like flowers without help from perfume, lotion, or shampoo. I imagined that maybe someday my eyes would actually sparkle. That my skin might shimmer at sunrise and glow in the night. That my hair would radiate light. I could be the girl of the love poems and the love songs that aren’t real, except that I would be, you know, real.
To be honest, I never really hoped for those things to be true of me. I knew it wasn’t possible, but I did like to think of it back then. What’m I saying…I still do.
Maybe I should think of having traits more honorable, more useful, but no. Even if neither this nor that has or has not to do with what I started out with, not now. I’ll save that more worthy stuff for another time.
So you see, this is what listening to Cat Power does to me. Or maybe that’s just my excuse.
The Greatest
As a child, I was confused about mercury, the element. I had not connected it with quicksilver, but instead believed mercury to be the red stuff in the great majority of thermometers I saw. How I got that idea, I do not know. Regardless, I tended to be more careful with the red stuff because I’d heard that it’d lead to behavior like that of Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hatter character. Misinformed about the identity of mercury as I was, I never thought that the silvery stuff in two or three older thermometers in my house was anything to worry over. After checking my own temperature one day I believed myself sick, I was shaking the thermometer so that the silver stuff would return to the bottom. Accidentally, I hit the end of it on the edge of my bathroom sink, breaking the glass thermometer and spilling what I now know to be mercury. Not knowing any better at the time, I found the substance fascinating. I played with it, touching it and pushing little dots of it toward each other. Through those young eyes, the way the mercury looked, felt, rolled, and held itself together was fun. Eventually, I just washed, wiped, and threw away the thermometer and mercurial remnants. At some later point in time (but not too much later), I accidentally broke another thermometer with mercury in it! I can’t remember the details of the second instance, but I probably played with the stuff again. Later on, I realized that the silvery stuff was, in fact, mercury. It now seems that I’ve violated health codes and exposed myself to a toxic element! (Though cigarettes and other far less regulated things can easily do more given the right (/wrong?) circumstances.) Those two short exposures probably weren’t much, but I could’ve absorbed mercury via inhalation or through my skin. Eh. I’m not worried about it. I don’t have any of the problems associated with it… Oh wait, yeah I do!