I don’t have much time this week; I’m nipple-deep in spring cleaning. I won’t sleep until this apartment shines like the top of the Chrysler Building.

As with everything I do – from cleaning, to cooking, to not doing math homework, to faking my way through a treatment of complicated parapneumonic effusion and pleural empyema by video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery – I do it with music.

Here then, are some of my favorite things to hear when I’m wielding a Swiffer or yanking my Toilet Duck:

While I was polishing my silver bullet collection, I couldn't help but notice that my fellow Amoeblogger, Billyjam, posted an interview with me, which you can read by pressing the word "perambulator" in this sentence. It's really too kind. My only complaint is that he neglected to include the scratch 'n' sniff portions.

Now then, back to cleaning. When I'm done, you're all invited to my house for pickles and chainsaws. It's not really an "activity" per se, just two things I have way too many of.

You fool. You bloody fool.

You’re too smug, too naïve! You think you have all the time in the world to deal with Christmas music. Or worse, maybe you haven’t even thought about acquiring any Christmas music at all!

It’s because I love you and want the best for you that I say I’m disappointed in you.

Don’t wait until the last second to figure out what you’re going to play for your Christmas party, Christmas Eve dinner, or Christmas morning, gift-giving orgy. (Incidentally, I found out what you’re getting this year, and frankly, most of it’s disappointing, but there’s at least one thing I think you’ll really like.)

Amoeba Music puts up their Christmas music section promptly after Thanksgiving. I understand if you’re too doped-up on tryptophan to shop it immediately (those vegetarians who opted for a Tofurky instead have an excuse – they’ll be suffering from indigestion until mid-February) but time is of the essence.

Learn from my mistake two years ago and buy USED Christmas albums early, before the hipsters pick-over the selection and leave only this:


Here’s a few gems I recommend:

Swingle Singers “Noëls Sans Passeport”


Also released, in the States, under the title “Christmastime”, this album is jazzy and lighthearted, but the vocal harmonies are ornate and require deft singing. You may think you’ve never heard of these guys, but by now you’ve almost certainly heard their music; they are often featured on film and TV. And once your holiday guests have had a few cups of egg nog, they will inevitably try to sing along, sounding like stray cats in heat – and isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

It was on this day in 1962 that Marilyn Monroe took her own life. Or, if conspiracy theories are to be believed, it marks the day that the Kennedy Family hired Reticulians to invade the actress’ home, kill her, make it look like a suicide, and then use snippets of her DNA to… I dunno… revive Adolf Hitler’s dehydrating brain. (I’m not as well-read when it comes to American history as I should be.)

It’s also the day that the Manson Family first killed, fulfilling the only thing possible that Charles Manson could do that would actually be worse than his music.


It’s also the anniversary of the day that Paul Tibbets flew his airplane, named after his mom, Enola Gay, over to Hiroshima, where he performed an act that would later be re-enacted by every Thai food delivery service that gets inside my apartment building.


I could go on. In short, it’s a particularly dark day in history. So I’m sitting with my beloved in his favorite café, Stir Crazy (at La Brea & Melrose), asking myself to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative; I’m calling upon myself to remember things – music, movies, flavors of Method cleaning products – that remind me that it is a beautiful world after all, and that Norma Jean didn't have the right idea, forty-five years ago.