My inner-thoughts and ways in which I'm a creeper.

Yesterday at work we were talking about the serial killer house, which naturally segued into talking about the Tom Waits songs "Don't Go Into that Barn" and "Murder in the Red Barn".

We sat for a time talking about the lyrics. And then I had terrible flashbacks to high school English with  Mr. Woods. Every Friday we would listen to songs and then talk about what we thought the lyrics meant. I remember we analyzed Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," Metallica's "Enter Sandman," and Matchbox 20's "3 AM." Some really profound music, for sure.

It doesn't take a sophomore English teacher to decipher Tom Waits lyrics. It takes drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.

Sometimes when I'm listening to Tom Waits, I think he sounds like a 40-year smoker on LSD. He sings about some weird shit. I can totally see him as the kid in fifth grade that smelled like pee and sat in the back row, drawing pictures of death on graph paper. But then that smelly kid grows up to write songs about all the weird dreams he used to have.

One of my favorite Tom Waits songs is "16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six". I like all his songs about crows, like "Shiny Things." Crows. I want to get a crow and keep it on a leash.

One day I was pulling into the Starbucks drive-up and there was a crow in the way. I knew he would move, being squished by a car would seriously hinder the crow's ability to eat puke, and crows love puke. IK was in his car seat in the back and saw the crow but didn't see it hop out of the way.

"You ran over that crow!" he shouted.
No I didn't. He moved, see. I pointed to where the crow was back eating piles of junk off the asphalt.
"Oh." IK was quiet for awhile. "What do you think is inside of crows?"
Candy, I told him.

A little 3 year-old Tom Waits in the making.


I've developed a mild fascination with crows and I think my spirit animal is the crow. I don't know this in some sort of official capacity. I mean, if you want a spirit animal, shouldn't you just pick it yourself?

Crow. I'm going with crow.

I was mildly curious about how one figures out which animal is their spirit animal and turned to the Native American mystic know as Google to figure that out.

Step 1. Google "How do I figure out what my spirit animal is?"
Step 2. Pick the first search result that doesn't appear to have been written by toddler.

According to wikihow.com, a website that I believe is maintained by Viagra ad copywriters, there are nine easy steps to finding your spirit animal.

Nine steps! That sounds like a lot of work. I like my process a lot better. Step 1. Pick whatever you want to be your spirit animal.

Actually, I do know how you pick your spirit animal. You get really high and sit in a darkened, incense and candle infused living room, meditating and periodically banging on a deer skin drum while a cynical and sarcastic teenager looks on in disbelief. I know this because I was a cynical and sarcastic teenager and I grew up in Montana where people do a lot of weird shit.

Tom Waits had this to say about crows, in a NY Times article from last fall.

Crows…they say if you can find a wounded crow and nurse it back to health it will never leave you. I’m always looking for limping crows. I’ve even considered wounding a crow then, like a doctor – they break your leg and then fix it, just to have your business. I saw a crow building a nest, I was watching him very carefully, I was kind of stalking him and he was aware of it. And you know what they do when they become aware of someone stalking them when they build a nest, which is a very vulnerable place to be? They build a decoy nest. It’s just for you. So that you think, well, that’s where he took the gum wrapper. That’s where he took the sticks. That’s where he took the tinfoil. But the nest is somewhere altogether different that you’ll never know about. That’s a form of intelligence that’s very curious.

And I also think someone would be real scared of you if they saw you walking down the street with a crow on a leash.

What was I saying about people from Montana doing weird shit?