SHOWDOWN AT THE J.K. CORRAL

Just got back from the release party for the final Harry Potter book. Hopped up on adrenaline and gelato. Feet killing me. Never wearing high-heeled boots again, not even in the service of literature. Must sleep. . . . . . . .

And yet it calls to me, it's siren song filling my ears, Stay up and read me. Don't go to sleep. Don't wash the dishes. Don't clean out the trunk of your car, like you've been saying you'll do all month, or put away the laundry. Don't socialize with other people. Stay up and read me.

Damn you, Harry Potter.

If only I could stop my ears with wax, like Odysseus's crew. But no, I must fight this foolish desire to pull an all-nighter, and lash myself to the mast of sleep. Only through sheer willpower will I be able to wait to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows until I find time to actually enjoy it.

COUNTDOWN TO POTTER-GEDDON

Warner Brothers fired the first salvo in this month's war to win our hearts and minds over to Potterdom. The movie adaptation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix opened last Wednesday, and at 12:01 a.m. this Saturday, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last in J.K. Rowling's series, will reach the waiting hands of its devotees. And then the entire population of the nation's schoolchildren will seclude themselves in their rooms for the rest of the weekend.

Alas, I will have to wait until Monday to discover Mr. Potter's fate. Although I'll be dressing up as Madam Rosmerta, the proprietress of The Three Broomsticks (a popular pub in the Potterverse), while I help staff Spellbound's Harry Potter release party, I have to work at my "real" job on Saturday and Sunday. If I don't finish the book by Tuesday night, my Harry Potter-obsessed co-worker will spoil it for me on Wednesday.

If nothing else comes of the madness that will ensue Friday night, at least I now know the true measure of Jeremy's devotion to me. After much bribery and cajoling, he agreed to be the disembodied voice of the Sorting Hat, which we will lower onto the heads of the children in attendance via fishing wire. Jeremy will then pronounce "Hmm. . . a headstrong goody two-shoes. You look like a Gryffindor!" or "My, what maladjusted social deviant you are! Slytherin!" or "I don't really know what to do with you, so we'll just put you in . . . Hufflepuff!" Or at least, that's what he'll say if I don't hurry up and type out a list of approved Sorting Hat phrases. We tried to get him to dress up as Professor Snape, but he wouldn't hear it. He loves me, but he doesn't love me that much.

Leslie, the owner of the book store, also tried to co-opt Pyewackett into serving as a prop. "He would make a great Professor McGonagall!" she said.* Her enthusiasm waned when I explained that I didn't think many parents would appreciate Professor McGonagall attacking their children. It would go something like this:

Even though only the human members of our household will be participating in the festivities, it looks like this weekend will be a wild, exciting experience, and one we're unlikely to want to repeat.

*For those unfamiliar with the Potterverse, Professor McGonagall has the ability to shape-shift into a cat.

GOAT ON THE LOOSE!

One of our neighbor's myriad goats got loose today. We found him tied to a road sign in front of our house. The mystery: Who tied him up, and when?

I was folding laundry in the front bedroom today, when I heard bleating coming from the wrong side of the house. I threw on some shorts and ran outside to find one of the larger billy goats tethered to the street sign in front of our house. My next-door neighbor had already called animal control, so the woman across the street and I contented ourselves with taking pictures. Aside from frightening a baby in a stroller, spraying the street with feces, and destroying some shrubbery, the goat didn't do much harm. He eventually pulled himself free and trotted back around the other side of the house to rejoin his harem of nanny goats.

Even though his daring escape brightened up my otherwise depressing afternoon of chores, I'm sorry the goat got loose. Most of the people who came across our escapee were charmed or amused, but as I've posted before, my next door neighbors seem to have a vendetta against the goats' owner, and want his animals gone. This is the perfect excuse to have the city take the goats away. Then what will I watch over my morning coffee? Incidents like this are what make living where I do so interesting. If we lost the goats, as inconvenient as they are at times, we'd lose part of what makes our corner of town the vibrant little burg it is.

POOR PYE!

Pyewackett, our handsome if oversized cat-beast, has endured all manner of indignities over the past week with a stoicism unmatched by any of the human inhabitants of our house when we fall ill. His recurring eye infection is back, which means Jeremy and I have to pin him down twice and day and drop a goopey creme into his eye. To his credit, he has yet to attack us afterward. He also recently had vaccinations for rabies and some other new, horrible, cat-related virus that causes leprous sores and imminent death in felines. Needless to say, he's been sleeping a lot.

Today, Pyewackett finally began showing signs of being himself, i.e. waking me with a 6 a.m. pounce and trying to filch Jeremy's dinner. Incidentally, I also decided to dye my hair. Red being my color of choice, I looked like an extra in a Hammer B-horror movie by the time I was done. I turned away from the mirror, disposable gloves covered in what looked like especially viscous grenadine, and streaks running over my shoulders and down my arms, and found Pyewackett reposing on the bed. One look at me, and an expression of terror crossed his face. He bolted from the room and hid until I had washed the dye out of my hair. Fortunately, Pyewackett has either an endless capacity to forgive, or a fortuitously selective memory.

GIVING UP THE GHOST (OF BILLY CORGAN)

When I was in ninth grade, the Billy Graham Crusade came to Charlotte, N.C. and set up camp at the newly-built Carolina Panthers stadium. Charlotte was close enough to my home town to constitute a field trip for my church's youth group, so they packed us into a van and carted us off to Youth Night. This was the heyday of Christian alternative rock, and also a year or two after Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness came out, so after a brief show by two relatively big-name alt-Christian bands, Billy Graham took the stage and inadvertently introduced me to the Smashing Pumpkins.

I had led a relatively sheltered life up until this point, so I didn't recognize the reference when Billy Graham started quoting Bullet with Butterfly Wings: "Billy Corgan sings, 'Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage,' but I am here to that young man, you do not have to have all this rage; you do not have to feel like a rat in a cage!"

The audience exploded with applause, and up in the nosebleed section, I clapped as hard as anyone else. But later, when I started wearing a lot of black and hanging out with my boyfriend's theater and art class crowd, I got a chance to hear the song and decided Billy Graham was wrong: Jesus probably wasn't going to make Billy Corgan feel any lest angsty and full of disaffected, youthful rage.

In high school, I loved just about every Smashing Pumpkins song ever recorded, partly because pre-Marilyn Manson, it was still edgy to like them. Now I get more excited when David Sedaris does a reading a Malaprop's. Is it possible I'm even more of a dork than I was in high school? But since every other person in town is freaking out about the Smashing Pumpkins playing in Asheville, I suppose I should mention it, too. Baaa. I'm a sheep. Oh well.

The band is playing a nine-night straight gig at a local club, The Orange Peel, which holds a little under 950 people. Why on earth a group of genuine rock gods would deign to visit our little town and book a club with less than 1,000 person capacity is beyond me. The Orange Peel is a cool venue, but I'd never have guessed Billy Corgan and his ilk would play there, especially since mid-level bands like The Decemberists seem to have decided it's too small for them. Our local newspaper has been running articles and op-eds left and right about how cool the Pumpkins are and ohmygodBillyCorgantalkedtomeoutsidethis restaurantsitwassofreakinawesome!

Since all nine shows sold out within 20 minutes and scalpers are now asking somewhere in the range of $900 to a grand for tickets, Jeremy and I obviously aren't going. What surprises me is the kinds of people who are going. Far too many baby boomers are fawning over the Smashing Pumpkins for me to hang on to my previous conception of reality, where Billy Corgan was a sexy alt-rock bad boy. If my own little brother hadn't informed me that our mother, a preacher's wife, actually liked Rob Zombie while he was visiting us the other week, I wouldn't have been able to keep it together when my 50-something-year old boss started gushing about the Smashing Pumpkins show.

Has my parent's generation become completely desensitized to the content of modern rock music or has the standard for what's edgy shifted so completely that the Smashing Pumpkins are now wholesome entertainment? I think I'll go put on some Cat Stevens and watch Jeopardy, just to even things out.