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defrogContinuing the Halloween countdown, I thought we’d better stick in something a bit genuinely creepy. So here’s Tom Waits with the greatest piece ever about suburban paranoia: “What’s He Building In There?”
Waits has a lot of explanations as to what he had in mind when he wrote this, but the best one is from his VH1 Storytellers special: “When I was a kid I had a neighbor that we all wondered about. But everybody has a neighbor they wonder about. Then you grow up and yr the neighbor.”
That’d be me.
Or it would be if I still lived in the states. But for all I know people in Disco Bay see me walk by and say, “Yes, him, he’s the one I was telling you about, the one who reads those strange books about extraterrestrial porn or something on the ferry listening to heavy metal music real loud on his iPod, and he never quite looks you in the eye. He goes out ‘swimming’ in the middle of the night wearing glow-in-the-dark vampire t-shirts, and my wife swears that when she goes to fetch the laundry off the line there’s always a bra missing. I saw him in the coffee shop after closing time pounding madly away on that laptop of his and leering at the teenage girls over by the Internet kiosks. He had a dog once. No one knows for sure whatever happened to it.”
And so on.
The boy next door,
This is dF
Waits has a lot of explanations as to what he had in mind when he wrote this, but the best one is from his VH1 Storytellers special: “When I was a kid I had a neighbor that we all wondered about. But everybody has a neighbor they wonder about. Then you grow up and yr the neighbor.”
That’d be me.
Or it would be if I still lived in the states. But for all I know people in Disco Bay see me walk by and say, “Yes, him, he’s the one I was telling you about, the one who reads those strange books about extraterrestrial porn or something on the ferry listening to heavy metal music real loud on his iPod, and he never quite looks you in the eye. He goes out ‘swimming’ in the middle of the night wearing glow-in-the-dark vampire t-shirts, and my wife swears that when she goes to fetch the laundry off the line there’s always a bra missing. I saw him in the coffee shop after closing time pounding madly away on that laptop of his and leering at the teenage girls over by the Internet kiosks. He had a dog once. No one knows for sure whatever happened to it.”
And so on.
The boy next door,
This is dF
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on 2008-10-27 10:44 am (UTC)I was just listening to that the other night and thinking the same thing. (I have an adaptation of the song "Get Behind the Mule" from MULE VARIATIONS coming out, so that album has been on heavy rotation.)
I live alone. I work from home, and I am always busy with 'projects' involving computers, guitars, artboard and IKEA furniture.
I have no children of my own, you see.
-- JF
PS Maybe I should post some of the pages of the story. Nic Hunter did the art and it is fucking gorgeous...