All right, I’m here.
You know, one thing I ponder is how all the readers of this blog know exactly when I update this, when 99% of my readers don’t come here through the WordPress app, which of course alerts people when I’ve posted here.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I just find it curious.
So here I am. Life goes on. Although you have no idea how often I wish that it wouldn’t. Yet indeed it does.
I’ll be working again on the play today. The full scope of all those rewrites are finally taking shape for me. They aren’t necessarily “rewrites”, they are more “additions” — things that need to be peppered throughout the play so that I can add certain character arcs near the end, ones that only make sense if I plant the seeds of them from the very beginning. Leave intact what’s already written, but add things to it, so that the ending can be more pronounced, extreme, chaotic, beautiful.
I had some serious stumbling blocks with it yesterday (more to do with certain people involved with the play who I feel are undermining me, and when that kind of emotional stuff happens, it can be debilitating for me, creatively). I texted Peitor about it, just a simple line about how I was feeling. And he got right on the phone and called me from NYC, where he’s with family, attending a wedding, and he gave me the most breathtaking and straightforward and life-affirming pep talk that you can possibly imagine. It was just so beautiful and it meant so much to me. It really helped me get back on track with the play.
Still, I awoke this morning early; was out of bed doing the cat-feeding routine, the breakfast thing, all by 4:45am. Went back upstairs to meditate. Then I sat on the end of my bed still in my PJs, with my little Inner Being journal thing in my hand. In the dark. And instead of journaling and getting my day underway, I sat there in the dark and cried. I didn’t sob or anything, just cried — about all the people & things that are overwhelming me right now, the things I don’t understand and can’t understand, that I can do nothing about. All I can do is write; it’s actually all I have left. And I mean that in the most profound way.
Eventually all these projects will go into the next phase of the cycle of creation; books will be published, plays & videos produced, and at that point, my life will be involved in not writing, for a while. But for now, writing is all I have. I love it but it feels endless. And in some ways — since I have too many projects underway at once — it feels like several balls of yarn that have unraveled in my lap and I have to untangle them and get them back into tidy, manageable balls — or into scripts and manuscripts that are completed and tidy.
I finally realized that I needed to snap out of it, stop crying and go downstairs and get more coffee. And when I went down to the kitchen, I looked at the clock and discovered that I had been sitting on my bed crying for nearly three hours. I had not even really been aware that the sun had come up. Well, it sort of came up — it’s really cloudy here today.
Jesus Christ. Talk about productive.
Anyway. On we go.
I also spoke on the phone to Valerie in Brooklyn yesterday. And when I told her about the Thug Luckless porn project (because I need cover art and she’s an artist), she was very intrigued. She found the whole concept really funny. And we ended up talking about maybe turning it into either an adult comic book or adult graphic novel. The problem with the latter being that “novel” implies some sort of story and/or character arc, of which there are none. Yet. But she wanted to put that idea into the hopper, so to speak, and think about maybe committing to illustrating Thug Luckless as some sort of adult comic/graphic novel.
It would just be so fun but she usually doesn’t actually commit to those types of long-term collaborations with me. But we’ll see. (I know — I need another project, don’t I?)
All right, well. I’m going to get going here and look at the play again. I leave you with “As Tears Go By” since I’m still listening to Negative Capability, over and over. (It actually inspires me a lot. Not many women’s records do, for some weird reason.) (I like listening to women, but they don’t usually actually inspire me, in the true sense.) (Emmylou Harris and Janis Joplin used to inspire me.)
Anyway, back in the late 1960s, when I was a little girl living in Cleveland, we briefly had this great music teacher in school. She played guitar instead of the usual piano, and we sang all these rock songs. We were only about 8 or 9 years old. We sang songs by The Doors, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones. We sang “As Tears Go By,” which I had always loved. I was not conscious of who Marianne Faithfull was at that point, I just knew that a girl had sung that song when it had been on the radio. I knew who the Rolling Stones were, but knew very little about their music because they were, you know, the Devil. (I’m not kidding — we were taught back then by the media that the Stones were evil, just really bad people because they took drugs and had been sent to jail, etc.)
So we sang “As Tears Go By” in school and I thought it was a “girl singer” song. And then one afternoon, on the radio on the school bus, “As Tears Go By” came on and this time it was sung by a man! I could not believe it. Why was a man singing that song? By the time I was 12, I was a total Rolling Stones fanatic (although I had to be secretive about it, since they were so evil; I literally had to sneak Exile On Main Street into the house– I had bought it at Woolworth’s with my babysitting money and then had to hide it outside in the bushes to make sure my mom wasn’t around, then when the coast was clear, I grabbed it and ran it up to my room and hid it there. She never found out that I had it.) Anyway, I eventually learned that Jagger & Richards had written “As Tears Go By.”
I thought (and still think) it was so cool that she sang that song again all these years later on Negative Capability. It just sounds really amazing. And of course, when I listen to her singing it now, I recall who they all were back then, but mostly I recall who I was back then — when I was just a little girl in Cleveland, so in love with music. When I would hear a song on the radio back then that I connected with, it was like it washed over me like a tsunami — it overwhelmed me when a song truly connected. “As Tears Go By” was one of those songs. (Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” is another that springs to mind, from when I was about 7. That song would just stop me in my tracks whenever it came on the radio.)
So I guess I leave you with both of those. Thanks for visiting, gang. Enjoy your Friday, wherever it leads you. I love you. See ya.
Marilyn's Room 