With all my ranting lately about character encoding and programming you’d think all the joy had drained out of my life. Well, here’s a bit of joy and humor that fits squarely in my present consumption of all things programmatical:

Answers for a Canadian 6th-Grader is 82 year-old Bob Bemer’s response to a young boy’s questions about the technologies he’s responsible for: namely character encoding in computers. His style is cute and wholesome and he’s my kind of computer geek. He’s got a no-nonsense, hardcore approach to tech and a keen understanding of the soft tissue (humans) that beat on them. I love reading his "Computer History Vignettes". It’s amazing to me that everything we know of relating to digital computers has been created in one man’s lifetime.

Wow, it fuckin worked. I just solved another character encoding problem. Now I can type in my blog. .decode(‘utf-8’) is to thank for me bringing you another installment of “rave about the Mountain Goats”. You’ve heard it all before but it hit me again tonight and in solemn deference to the laws of energy, I must pass it on to you. This one includes a sound bite. Choosing among the first (rock, peacock) or the second, (rock, crow) was my only dilemma.

I thought “Fall of the Star High School Running Back” was all there was to the new album. But it has been growing into a young, healthy monster here in my living room. As I demonstrated by making a fool of my self in mp3, I think “Pink and Blue” kills.

“Balance” drags, and I mean by the hair, with shorts on over the hot asphalt, an unfortunate couple’s demise before us. The balance in this case stands for what’s left to withdrawal from the lovebank. “Two tall glasses of sweet ice tea, underneath that sweet young tree and the love we once nurtured you and me, disintegrating violently.” But I’m not here to write about that.

Gaining ground and closing with force is “Fault Lines”. I’m not sure if it’s the same couple, different day but the results are not much better: ”I got sugar in the fuel lines, both of us do. Yeah the fights and the lines that we both love to tell, failed to send our love to its reward down in hell. I’ve got pudding for backbone, but so do YOU!”

“The Mess Inside” is slaying me at this moment, and at many moments I’ve felt the same as the couple that is on a habitual “relationship saving vacation”: weekend in Provo, week in the Bahamas, New Orleans in spring, New York City in September. “Took the train out of Manhattan, to the Grand Army stop. Found that bench we’d sat together on a thousand years ago, when I’d felt such love for you I thought my heart was gonna POP. I wanted to you, to love me like you used to do.”

Are you crying yet? My right eye is a little wet.

But the whole reason I’m not finishing off that big block of If...Else statements in pcStorage.py is that “Distant Stations” are playing. This song is like the Bill Murray of songs. The one and only. You know, when you’re watching some Bill Murray and suddenly you think, “God, I’m so happy I’m here to witness this. He’s not a comedian. He is my mother and my father and all my brothers and sisters and he is every wink from a cute girl I’ve ever gotten. All here, goofin for my benefit.”

You taught me how to listen to these distant stations.

I thought “Distant Stations” had a cool guitar hook. I thought it was a fine MG’s ditty, heavy on the wheel grind, but it wasn’t until I started to listen to it critically, to try to hear the chords, thinking that I’d try to play it, that I heard the lyrics and saw the scene laid out before me and witnessed the brilliance of the phrasing and structure. Immediately you notice the Raymond Carver-like pointillistic detail. Sure. Sounds like a bitter lover (again?) stalking his teacher and nemesis.

But then, on the 15th listen or so, I hear what he is saying. Sometimes I don’t hear what John is trying to do when he paints an atmospheric detail that is supposed to signify what is going on in his characters. I never got “symbols” when I was in English class. John uses a lot of symbols. He uses them so much -- the sun: rising, falling, hanging raining, drinking: together, alone, again, trips: ending, starting, remembered, -- they’re hammered-on icons at this point. Many times I don’t understand what working in a bakery has to do with how a man feels when he gets home and sees his wife’s keys on the kitchen table. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think of “Distant Stations”.

You see, “I found and old rock in the dry dirt outside the door of my motel room. It was triangle with soft rounded edges and a slit down the middle of one corner. It was darker than English moss. Green like the soft frills of a peacock’s plume I waited for you. But I never told you where I was. It was you who taught me how to write this kind of equation. I waited on the steps for you and I hid in the bushes whenever a car pulled into the parking lot. You taught me how to listen to these Distant Stations.” This guy waits for someone who doesn’t know how to find him. Ok, he doesn’t want to be found. But maybe he wants to be found more than anything. Or maybe he is unsure if he’s lost or even knows where he is. These could all be correct guesses because he seems to be at home in this koan-like nonsense. After all, the person who he’s waiting for has taught him “how to write these kind of equations”. He throws a rock at a crow that was playing in the roses by the motel office and misses him by a good yard or two. You all know what that means. Don’t you? Listen. He’s teaching me to write his wicked-ass equations.