Decluttering, Hell in the Grocery Store, & Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition
Welcome back to another week of December! It hardly feels like it since it was oddly warm this weekend, but we took advantage of it by opening our windows and replacing the stale indoor air with fresh and exciting outdoor air. Juno loooooved this and spent a good 30 minutes in front of the window, enjoying all the smells the smellgorithim could provide before winter creeps in again.
While winter has not been a great time for outdoor activities, it's been a perfect time for Jenn and I to work on decluttering.
Specifically, we've been working on cleaning out one of our closets which is FILLED with an assortment of things – mostly junk. It's been that way ever since we moved in, filled it with a bunch of crap, and closed it and pretended like it didn't exist.
As you can imagine, it's an absolute mess in there, but we're slowly working through it!
We also went to HomeGoods and I got an adorable little record player Bluetooth speaker which fits perfectly at my desk. The little vinyl even spins when it’s playing music!
Other than that, the week has just been spent doing the usual working and doing what you gotta do to live.
The Fiction Corner
I've been reading a lot of Chuck Palahniuk lately. It started with finding a copy of Lullaby and Diary while we were visiting Eau Claire. If the name sounds familiar, it's because he wrote Fight Club. He has a very frank way of writing, and it’s something I was hoping to replicate in my own writing. Didn’t write as much as I would have liked to this week, but I still have something short for you, taking experience from my time at a grocery store. I’m not sure what exactly to call it, so we’ll just call it:
Hell in the Grocery Store
It’s a new night in hell at the Grocery Store.
Someone nearly spits in a clerk's face because their favorite yogurt's out of stock.
Poocasso is rubbing their shit all over the walls of a bathroom stall, imagining how the poor fuck who has to clean this up is going to look after the job’s done.
And an old creep ogles the female workers who are too young to vote. His beard is unkempt, his glasses are all smudged up, and his clothes vaguely smell like piss and sweat.
Despite all this, he has the balls to approach one of them when they’re all alone and show them a picture of his pride and joy.
Fortunately, this is not a euphemism for his dick, but rather a picture of furniture wax and dish cleaner.
After he has thoroughly made her uncomfortable by making her laugh at his jokes and listen to him for way too long, he walks away, having gave nothing and taking everything.
Later, the manager chastises this girl for not upselling any of their products to the creep. He rattles off statistics of how doing so could make the company sooooo much money, throwing in a “the customer is always right” for good measure.
This is the third time the creep has approached her and the tenth time her manager has given her bullshit advice that does nothing but put her in harm’s way.
It’s only been a month here and she is already done here.
She takes off the stupid fucking tie they make employees wear here like they’re servants, screaming at the manager.
It’s another night at the grocery store, but this time it’s going to have to end without her.
This week's music pick:
Modest Mussorgsky - Pictures at an Exhibition
For this week, I have some classical music for you with a sweet but sad story. After Modest Mussorgsky's friend Viktor Hartmann, a painter and architect, passed away suddenly at the young age of 39, an exhibition was put together to memorialize him. Mussorgsky lent two pictures he was given by Hartmann to the exhibition and, after viewing it in-person, was inspired to write Pictures at an Exhibition, a ten-movement piano suite, in only three weeks.
Each of the ten movements depicts a work of Hartmann's that Mussorgsky saw at the exhibition, of which many are lost.
It's a beautiful work of music and, if you have the time, I'd recommend sitting in a quiet space and listening to the whole 35 minutes in one go while looking at the wiki page where the paintings not lost to time are available to view. Jenn and I sat down this past weekend to do just that, and it was a memorable experience.
I'm linking to a piano rendition of Pictures that Mussorgsky – the original instrumentation for the piece – but it also includes the orchestral adaptation that Maurice Ravel later wrote in the 20th century. It probably doesn't matter which one you pick, but I personally prefer the piano one.
Either way, while many of the paintings are lost, Hartmann – and Mussorgsky – will forever be remembered thanks to his work.
Oh and there's also some interesting covers of this piece. First is one done by Isao Tomita, a Japanese electronic music artist who create an adaption that is goofy at times but unique from beginning to end.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer — a Prog rock supergroup 🤘🏻 — also has their own rendition as well. There are probably more out there, but these are the first that come to mind!