The Color of Fun

What’s the color of fun, and does it come in a package? Is the name on it your name, and is your name spelled incorrectly, Brook Rodden?

(That’s not my name, my name is not Brook Rodden! Brooks Roddan is my name!)

But yes, the color came in a package but not the fun. The fun was sealed up inside the package and when I opened the package 102 coffee beans fell out and tumbled to the floor. It was like I was picking up pieces of Otis Redding’s soul.

I’m not understanding Taylor Swift. So many people seem to be understanding Taylor Swift. I do understand Dinah Washington and Carmen McRae and there is a younger singer named Lucy Dacus I understand who’s written and sung a new song titled, ‘I Don’t Want to be Funny Anymore’ that I do understand and sing along to. But I don’t seem to sing along with Taylor Swift.

My voice isn’t what it used to be, it’s a whole other voice. I seem to be getting old inside my voice so that when I talk or sing my voice is the color of sourdough bread. So many other people who listen to me when I’m talking or singing either believe I have a gift or have irredeemably lost everything I’ve been given.

There was a time I listened to the poet William Carlos Williams. Remember his injunction? No ideas but in things. William Carlos had a reedy little voice, at least as a voice on the old Library of Congress recordings of his poems, and I never really understood what WCW meant by the phrase, No ideas but in things.

I’ve dropped the ball, I’ve had to let it go, I no longer count on either ideas or on things or the way my name is spelled or misspelled. Nothing really matters to me in ideas or in things—how they may be packaged or presented or whether they’re in hiding—but the sound of a singer’s voice is often loud and clear.

Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, Ca. July 8, 2023.