Tall Dwarfs - Starry Eyed & Wooly Brained [mp3]
One of my roommates at the Dupont apartment, Kat, she agreed to dogsit for one of her friends. I didn’t know about it beforehand, just came home from work and “Hey, dog.” The dog was a pit bull. I don’t remember her name really, something human probably. I feel like it was a memorable and appropriate name. Anyway, the dog was unfortunate. As per pit bull breeding standards, her nose was scrunched into her face, flattened broadly across her sagging cheeks. I think also she had asthma or some similar such dog condition. Whenever she would get excited, she would start breathing terribly, a high pitched hissing screaming through her nostrils. She was easy to excite.
One evening, I came home and the dog was alone, sitting underneath the naked lower half of our man mannequin. Immediately she started to freak out, rapidly wagging her stub of a tail as she seized into a fit of terror. Really she was just happy to see me. I had the feeling that I would be alone most of the night, that all four of my roommates were going to be occupied and that all of my friends were busy otherwise. I felt depressed to be by myself with this dog dying, making sounds of death at least. I called three girls that I had been slowly wooing in succession. There names were Kate, Katie and Kaitlyn. I wasn’t wooing Kat, but I considered it briefly after meeting the third of this Ka- trifecta. I called each of the three girls and asked if they would like to eat ice cream and walk up and down Hennepin Avenue. None of the three wanted to do that but Kate said she would come over after playing ultimate frisbee.
The apartment was kind of messy probably because four college girls lived there. Kate was coming over in two hours and I wanted to impress her with cleanliness and order. The dog was making things difficult though, making it hard to think about how to clean a dish or pickup some trash from the floor. She was following me everywhere, breathing all over the fucking place. I would try to perform some basic task, like folding a blanket, and her breathing at the excitement folding a blanket would cause me to keep folding it over lengthwise, over and over again until it was impossible to folder it width wise. I folded the blanket into a long rectangle before resolving to solve this problem.
I closed her into Kat’s room at one point, but that caused her a great deal of excitement and I became worried for her life, the noise coming from underneath the door so terrible and loud. Maybe she was anxious too, to be confined while excitement lingered. Eventually, driven mad by the ghastly sounds of her breathing, I simply turned up the volume on my computer playing Tall Dwarfs. In the sonic bubble of Tall Dwarfs, I managed to tidy the apartment and completely re-arrange the living room so as to appear more aesthetically pleasing on first glance. At one point, Starry Eyed & Wooly Brained was playing and I thought, “I would like for this to be the song that is playing when Kate arrives.” I thought probably she would be impressed with my taste in obscure, New Zealand music when I explained who the Tall Dwarfs were after she asked about the song. When the doorbell rang, I first went into my bedroom where the computer was and re-started Starry Eyed & Wooly Brained.
She said something about the apartment being nice and made some nice comments about the cute dog. I tried to excuse her breathing problems but she didn’t seem to notice. Maybe she has a pitbull. She didn’t notice the Tall Dwarfs song.
Tall Dwarfs are a rhythm and blues band from New Zealand. The featured song is from the album 3 EPs. Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.
