The Carpenters

"I remember a Carpenters song that came out when I was twelve. I didn't quite understand the song then, young as I was, but I knew that it had to do with birth and beautiful things that lay beyond me. And the song's joyous rhythm and bouyant melody, so full of optimism, ushered me into the shithouse of adolescence."

I've drawn my comb back and forth a few times over the above blurb that I've written for a Carpenters reissue, and I can't quite determine where it loses its way.

The Horrors of Whistling

Whistling is a sorry affair, an affront to humanity, for it is invariably tuneless and never done well. One hears it only in circumstances when escape is impossible---on buses, airplanes, the factory floor. When I was a teenager working in a summer factory job for eight hours a day, the fellow chained to the machine next to mine would whistle for hours and this, like a scar on the face of a beautiful woman, ruined his otherwise comely personality. When conversation fell away to silence, he would take to whistling. To avoid further torture, I would engage him in conversation for as long as I could. I learned that he wiped his ass crack from a standing position, he once lusted after his own sister, and he used to pee in his father's orange juice. That's what whistling brings people to.