I just now remembered that Barnes & Noble refused to carry Neptune & Surf in any of its stores when the book first came out, all because of that story, “Gianni’s Girl.”
It offended their sensibilities that the story was an eroticized gangbang. They told my publisher that it was rape, however you looked at it, and they refused to sell it. I could understand their point, of course, but I was devastated when my publisher called with the news — they were the hugest book chain in North America. Thankfully, Amazon was already around by then, so the book sold like hotcakes, regardless. And then Barnes & Noble not only carried the Blue Moon mass market edition of Neptune & Surf, but they also hired me to write 2 erotic romance novels exclusively for them, 3 years later. So everything, you know, well things change. Don’t they? Now gangbangs are all over the place.
If you were an early bird here to the blog (or whatever time it was where you live), and caught the limited-time post, I hope you enjoyed reading “Gianni’s Girl” as much as I enjoyed writing it, 25 Christmas Eves ago.
It was truly one of those stories that I felt was dictated to me by the main character. The words came, the story came, the whole thing flowed out in one (long) sitting, and did not require any editing except for punctuation and misspellings here and there.
And it’s true — Wayne and I were having a dinner party that night because it was Christmas Eve; company was coming over, we had a ton of cooking still to do and last minute grocery shopping to do, and I was glued to my desk, writing furiously away because this amazing story was spilling out of me and I couldn’t stop it. I wrote it by hand, then typed it up a few days later. (I still have the handwritten manuscript in storage.) I didn’t even own a computer yet.
Wayne was so incredibly irritated with me that morning. He kept coming impatiently into the room: “Aren’t you done yet? We have to get going!” ME, scribbling away: “No! It’s still coming!!”
I recall vividly, both us hurrying along Broadway in the throngs of last-minute shoppers. It was a very cold and overcast day and I was sort of delirious, trying to explain to Wayne how incredible this story was that had just suddenly come out of me — though it had taken several hours for it to come out. And he was not impressed in the slightest; he was just so irritated with me.
For me, though, the story had been so vivid as it came out onto the page. I could see the entire thing — like a movie. And the part where Gianni is talking about having all that sex with his mom, and his mom always being pregnant and his dad being an abusive drunk — that part actually looked like it was in a tenement on the Lower East Side of NYC. I’m not really sure why I decided it was in Chicago. I guess because it was bootleggers and it was 1927. Although there were plenty of bootleggers and plenty of mob guys in NYC in 1927.
Anyway. I know that for obvious reasons, it can be considered an offensive story (gang rape), and the fact that it ends up being a love story kind of fucks with some readers’ heads, but I wrote it down just as it came to me. And then people seemed to really like it — well, except for the girl it’s dedicated to — “Michelle.” She did not dig it at all. She was really offended by it. She didn’t like it until years later, after it actually became popular and conveniently had her name on it. It sold something like 75,000 copies, new, in all its various English editions combined. I don’t know how many have sold in French, or as “used” books or in eBooks. (It’s in a few different eBook collections.)
Blessed By Light came to me the same way, except it was an entire novel. Someone else was dictating that story to me for nearly a year and I just wrote it as it came. After I was halfway into writing it, and had begun reading back over it with my editor, I was really startled to see how closely the female character (the “girl in the night”) resembled me. It was uncanny and disconcerting and weird, because I didn’t see it as I was writing it. However, I purposely titled Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse after that character in Blessed By Light, because it felt like it was me.
Well, okay!!
I tried very hard to stay away from my desk yesterday. I was successful but I had sort of a disjointed day because of it. I did re-watch Distant Sky: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Live in Copenhagen. It took a couple different sittings for me to get through the whole thing. I just find that concert and those songs just so amazing. Beautiful. Intense. Wonderful. Here’s “Girl In Amber” — I posted this photo briefly last night. But then everyone was visiting the photo of Basin Street in all that fog last night, so I pulled it to re-post it now:
“Girl in Amber”
And in case you don’t follow me on Instagram (I don’t think any of you do!), here’s a couple of photos I posted there:
Doris, on the table, ensuring she is first in line for Christmas dinner (this table is just for show — I eat alone in the kitchen).
The meanest cat in the world, Francis, on her Christmas chair! (Her mom, Tommy, underneath it.) (This is a vegan-friendly chair, it didn’t cost much. However, it is less than 2 years old and the cats have already destroyed it.)
Well, that’s it for now. I’m gonna go eat lunch or something resembling it. And then try to figure out what I will do next. I’m feeling like I might actually work at my desk today… (heavy sigh). We shall see.
Merry Christmas, everyone. Thanks for visiting!! I love you guys, see ya!
It has been foggy all day. It has not let up. Here is a view of Basin Street just now, as I was standing outside on my kitchen porch. Followed by a view from on the porch looking in…❤️
For some reason, all day yesterday, I kept thinking about that concert film from 2018, Distant Sky: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Live in Copenhagen. I really wished I could re-watch it. I kept thinking about how great it would sound on my new speakers, plus I just really loved that concert and wanted to see it again.
You know, I have a private email address that only about 6 people know. Two of my friends have it; one of my ex-husbands has it (the other ex-husband only texts me on my phone); and then about 3 business-related people have it. It’s so that I can be sure that emails coming from any of those people never wind up in the junk folder, and never get lost among a ton of spam emails. I won’t ever accidentally delete it, or not see that it’s there the moment it arrives.
There’s only ever about 3 active things in that inbox, and right now they’re all emails from the director of my play. Around 2:30am, though, I saw that my ex-husband (in Seattle) had emailed me. It was no less than 8 animated Christmas gifs, the one posted above being among them! I find it so funny & sweet that he does that, because he’s Chinese, Buddhist, born & raised in Singapore — and he sends me the most Westernized depictions of Christmas imaginable. It’s so funny. But he also said something really sweet to me and it was just the best little Christmas email to get at 2:30am.
And then at about 6am this morning, I was still in bed and checked that email inbox again and, lo & behold, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds had written to me!! They never write to me at that email address — they only use my main one that the whole world knows!!
Well, upon closer inspection, it turns out that YouTube has that email address — and they were the ones actually writing to me. But it was to tell me that Distant Sky: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Live in Copenhagen had just been uploaded to YouTube!! And that I could start watching it right that very second if I wanted to!
Fucking-A, right??!! Yay. I seriously really was thinking about that movie all day yesterday. I’m so happy!
I know… I’m committed to making this effort to watch only new things. (You’ll notice, though, that being “committed to making an effort” has a glaring loophole in it — you can see it a mile away.) Plus, it’s Christmas — who watches anything new on Christmas? I think it’ll be cool if I can manage to get through the next 2 days without watching It’s A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol or The Bishop’s Wife or Holiday Inn, or even some sort of old foreign film about Nazis in Paris at Christmas or something like that.
We’ll see how it goes. I am, though, going to SERIOUSLY make an effort to not sit at my desk. I am going to try to avoid the hypnotic pull of it. I really am.
Even though, last evening at the Granville Inn, I ran into Kevin — the director of my play — and his husband, Christopher. And so now all I want to do is work on some revisions of the play! But last night, Kevin — who greeted me with this amazing hug and a big smile and said really joyously, “I love you!” and it left me a little breathless because it’s been quite a while since anyone has done that to me — but he also said, “We’re not discussing work until after the holiday, okay?!”
And I said, “Okay!!” And I’m gonna try to stick to that. I really am. And if that means I’m forced to re-watch Distant Sky: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Live in Copenhagen in order to not sit down at my desk, well, you know….
I’m actually so glad that I looked really nice last evening. I was hoping to run into that older man — that widower who’s a transplanted New Yorker — because he’s really interested in my play and I wanted to give him one of the Christmas cards. He’s been really sick, but I was wondering if maybe he was feeling better and would stop in at the Inn before Christmas. So I had actually washed my hair and it was behaving splendidly — you know, silky and bouncy and just really full and not as if half of it had just fallen out in the shower and was hanging around the bathtub drain…(such is the life of hair at age 59 and a half). Plus, I had decided to wear make-up– eye make-up, that is. I never wear any other make-up anymore, even though I have a ton of it and I love make-up; I just hate wearing it now because it adds about 20 years to my face. And I spend 17 trillion dollars a year on products that ensure I look 15 years younger than I am when I roll out of bed each morning and so that I can go out bravely into the Hinterlands and have much younger people gush breathlessly that I don’t look anywhere near as old as I am!
I don’t want to ruin all that by wearing anything more than eye make-up.
But anyway. Last night, there I was, actually looking really good for a change. And I had on these cute little silver earrings shaped like cats in Santa hats with tiny bells on them (a gift from Kara last Christmas) and my little gold “Joy” pin with the tiny rhinestones. I just looked really tastefully festive and sort of “grown-up-ish.” In short: I looked nothing like how I usually look and then I ran into my director and his husband! So I thought privately to myself: oh, yay! they’ll think I look like this all the time…
All righty. Enough of that.
Nick Cave was either up really late or up very early, because I also got a Red Hand Files thingy in my (other) inbox just before dawn! I only know it’s about Christmas. I haven’t read it yet. But you can read it here if you so choose!
Right now, I’m gonna get more coffee, finish up the laundry, brush my teeth, admire my still-behaving hair in the mirror, and then get in my grown-up car and join the throngs of people who, comme moi, decided to save all their grocery shopping for Christmas Eve day — the worst traffic day of the whole year, even in a small town.
Then I will come home, not smoke Chesterfields, not drink bourbon, not sit at my desk and write… but still have a really great Christmas Eve!!
Okay. I leave you with this. It still breaks my heart to pieces (I loved this man and they killed him). But there’s still a lot of joy left there, too, gang. Death doesn’t kill love, it only transforms it. So play it loud and rejoice. And thanks for visiting. I love you guys. See ya!
Late last night, I stopped in at the gas station here in Crazeysburg because I ran out of milk again!! And I couldn’t possibly face the morning without milk for my coffee, whether the milk was organic and fresh from the farm, or non-organic and fresh from the gas station.
When I got up to the counter to pay, lo & behold! Right there in front of me, for the first time in Crazeysburg ever — or at least since I’ve been here — there were packs of Chesterfield cigarettes for sale!
My favorite cigarettes of all time.
The very reason I gave up smoking was because you could not find Chesterfields for sale anywhere in Ohio once I had moved back here from New York.
These cigarettes at the gas station were the “new” Chesterfields, with the modern packaging and filter tips. Now produced by Phillip Morris. I have no idea if they’re still the same tobacco or not. The old Chesterfields were initially filterless, and smoking just one would knock you on your ass. They seemed to have triple-nicotine. And since, back then, I always drank 101 proof Wild Turkey bourbon, filterless Chesterfields made drinking that bourbon an absolute joy! You could be both drunk and buzzed all night long.
The old Chesterfields. Produced by Liggett & Myers.
But I was so indescribably thrilled to finally see Chesterfields for sale in Ohio again — and on such prominent display in the gas station in Crazeysburg — that I automatically asked for a pack. Then I paid for it and took it, along with my jug of milk, to the car. Got in the car. I was in such great spirits! There were Christmas lights on all the houses up & down the street, and strung all over the fence in the town square (which is sort of a triangle). The black night was frosty but super clear — all the stars were shining.
I put the key in the ignition and then thought: What the fuck?! Why did I just do that? I don’t smoke.
I have not smoked in years! It was so wild. But I took them home anyway. I was just so happy to possess them again, even though they don’t look remotely the same as they used to:
I just LOVE this! Obviously, the point was supposed to be the new packaging but it’s so funny that Nick Cave is all over the photo! Well. Such are photos taken at my desk…
You can see that the new packaging is super boring, but anyway.
So. On another topic altogether.
Here is a really cute photo of my great-niece. She is almost two years old. Her name is Stevie. I haven’t met her yet. She’s the granddaughter of the sister I don’t really get along with too well. In fact, I have never even met Stevie’s mom — my actual niece, my sister’s daughter. I was always sort of the persona non grata in that sister’s life because she found me maddeningly opinionated and a wee bit on the super-duper liberal side.
However, my mom and my other sister have always kept me abreast of my niece’s world and have always sent me photos. And so now my niece is married and has a daughter. (I have photos of the wedding, too, though I was not invited…) (I do get invited to funerals, though, so that’s really fun — you know, to be thought of when everybody’s feeling wretched and devastated…) Anyway, she’s a cutie!!
All righty!!
I’m getting super excited that Christmas is basically here. I’m guessing I’ll go on a diet on Thursday. I actually am getting really sick of chocolate. I’ve eaten so much of it in the past week. I’m so ready to be normal again — or my version of normal, which is really just wide open in every area of my life.
I’m gonna close this because I gotta scoot! I gotta take some stuff to the post office, and the post office here in Crazeysburg only stays open for a couple hours in the early morning, and then a couple hours in the mid-afternoon. And if I want my stuff to get anywhere before the end of the year, I gotta get to that post office post-haste!
Have a great Monday, wherever you are in the world and to wherever it takes you. Thanks for visiting! I love you guys! See ya!!
Thug Luckless says: “Smoke your way to a merry Christmas!”
I’m not sure why this bothers me so much. Well, I know why it bothers me so much: it just feels like yet another way to make money off of Tom Petty.
There’s a new release now (and a video that one of Tom’s daughters directed) where sons of famous musicians (plus Willie Nelson) did a cover of a song Tom Petty wrote that never got released in his lifetime. It got released earlier this year, on the Geffen double-album, “The Best of Everything.”
The song is called, “For Real,” and I have a hard time listening to that song just generally. It makes me sad and it also sort of makes me uncomfortable. I almost never play it and if it comes on the stream or the CD player, I almost always skip over it. Plus I just don’t think it’s a really strong song — almost too personal, in a way. And a few months back, when I read on one of his daughters Instagram feeds that this was in the works, I wondered whythisspecificsong? And it felt to me like just a way to make more money since a.) Tom Petty can’t write any new songs from where he’s at now — or at least not songs that it would be easy for us to hear; and b.) I think there’s some sort of legal stuff going on between his 2nd wife and his daughters that’s holding up the production of a Wildflowers Part 2, which allegedly has a ton of previously unreleased songs on it that will probably sell through the roof and make everybody that much richer if they can get past fighting each other in court.
I know, I sound a little bit nasty about it— and I do remember reading, in an interview not long before he died, that he wanted to release those songs that didn’t make it into the first (massively huge-selling) Wildflowers from 1994. So it’s not that I don’t believe he wanted those other song’s released. It’s just this specific song project that feels to me like his heirs making money off of him posthumously however they can…
Anyway. Such is my opinion on that. I don’t know why I don’t just quit following these things on Instagram that perplex me or upset me or that leave me with too many unanswerable questions that I can’t quit pondering…!!
Something else happened that bothered me a whole big bunch, too. Something I overheard today that wasn’t any of my business but it just pushed all my buttons.
It involved a young guy I really just adore— from a distance. He’s the kind of guy that, if I’d been able to have a son, I would have wanted him to be just like this young guy. He’s smart, funny, independent, off the wall. (Once, I overheard him say the funniest thing. He was really frustrated about something— I don’t know what — and he spluttered out, “Jesus, I haven’t been able to get any peace since ‘Nam!” I thought that was so fucking funny. You know, he was born around 40 years after that war ended, and of course Vietnam has the reputation of having been nothing remotely close to being peaceful in any way. Why would he think to blurt that out? Just too cute.)
Anyway, this angry girl was verbally abusing him in this psychotic way and it totally reminded me of how my adoptive mother used to talk when she was on one of her psychotic soapboxes. It made my skin crawl. On the outside, this young girl seemed so pretty and “normal.” Then this rampage of ugliness came out of her mouth and then she went stalking off in a self-righteous huff. It made me feel so bad for the guy. All my maternal instincts just came rushing to the surface; I was just horrified by that girl because she reminded me so much of my adoptive mother. And I realized that I wanted to protect him from all the garbage in this world, but there’s not really a darn thing I can do about it.
Other than that, I’ve had just a really good energy day. I woke up chipper and happy and full of joy and hope. (And chocolate!! I need to get a grip on all this holiday indulgence pretty soon…..) I just think 2020 is going be such a great year, gang. I really do. And I can’t wait for Christmas, even though I’m just going to be alone with the cats and I don’t believe it’s really going to snow, but I know I’m just going to have a really sacred and beautiful day.
I hope you guys are gearing up for a lovely Christmas, too, if that’s what you celebrate. I leave you with the song I was listening to all morning — a song that makes me feel so in love. Thanks for visiting!! I love you guys. See ya.
I’m having the best morning, gang. I finally woke up feeling super happy and super frisky! I did make myself do yoga yesterday and it made a world of difference. Although I am also putting on weight because it’s that time of year…. Since my mom’s visit, there is chocolate candy in bright shiny wrappers all over the house and eggnog in the fridge and all sorts of cheesy goodness in the freezer.
In other words, I’m eating all kinds of holiday stuff that tastes so good and is just not so good for me!! But next week, austere living returns so I’m gonna just enjoy it for now.
Oh! And the royalties for December are coming in — thanks, gang. I really appreciate it. I made good money this month, and considering that so much of my potential sales were disappearing out from under me this past fall — with all those illegal downloads all over the Internet — I really do appreciate you spending actual money on the books, even though I know the books are really old!
However, I am working on getting new stuff out there.
Which reminds me — yesterday, for some reason that I don’t recall right this minute, I was looking over a chapter in Blessed By Light (my new novel) and I wound up re-reading a good chunk of that book. Gosh, I really love that book. I cannot wait for it to get published and put itself out there into the world.
It’s not as erotic as most of the stuff I write (the excerpt at the top of the page is a good indication of the level of explicitness in the book overall. It doesn’t ever get too hard core.) But it’s just a beautiful little book. It made me feel really happy to re-read it.
And I’m also really happy with where Letter #6 for Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse is going. (“Captivity” is the title of it. It’s basically about sex in the mental hospital — it won’t be the cheeriest chapter ever written, but oh well!)
I’m also excited because the director of Tell My Bones and his husband arrive back in the Hinterlands today, to spend the holidays at their mansion on the hill — their house is in town, about 20 miles from me. Not only will I finally have something festive to do for the holidays that involves other people besides just me (and the cats) (plus I’ll probably finally have a reason to wear high heels and a little black dress again), but I’m also eager to spend at least a little time going over the revisions of the play with the director.
Oh, you know, if you want to read a brief excerpt of Tell My Bones, you can do it HERE. (Click on the link that’s on that page.) And sign up for the newsletter there if you want to, too.
I’m just feeling really good about all the various projects today. Plus, I’m going to pay bills today and I have complete confidence that I’m not going to do that weird shit I did last month — wherein I paid a big chunk of bills that weren’t due yet and neglected to pay tiny things like my mortgage and my car payment! Aaach!! But it worked out at the final hour, thanks to having two ex-husbands who still really like me a lot….
Anyway. I just feel like I have a brain again — i.e: look at the bills that are actually due and pay those — and that’s always uplifting!!
Okay. Well! I’m gonna get started here. Have a super Saturday, wherever you are in the world!! Thanks for visiting, gang! I leave you with my breakfast-listening music, even though there’s narry a hint of snow anywhere around, but the song just makes me happy! All righty! I love you guys. See ya!
I now have a third little journal with a pen clipped to it that I carry around with me, and in that one, I try to figure out why I have so many fucking little journals around here! And with pens clipped to them!
I am, of course, just kidding. I still just have the two. But it is sort of insane — what it takes to keep me sane. Jesus. Just trying to keep all my many thoughts in a nice little row. And I’m so not kidding about that, gang. When I start to feel my thoughts skittering off around the edges, going to those bleak and unnecessary places — I have to do something to pull everything back to center.
For me, putting things in writing is the only process that reins things in. But sometimes it just seems overwhelming — the amount of writing I’m doing right now.
Yesterday, I happened upon a really nice, regular-sized journal that I bought up at that Mormon Temple in Kirtland a couple summers ago. I haven’t put one word in it yet. And I was thinking that I should really start keeping a regular journal again because there’s a lot of amazing stuff going on in my life these days that I might want to process as its happening…
And then I thought — really? And at what point do you think you’re going to fit that in? And then, oddly enough, one of those “Litany” things for Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse came out of me! Absolutely unexpectedly, there it was — complete and on the page. It’s titled, “Litany [Two]: The Girl in Love, Holy Spirit, Giver of Life.”
But it seems to want to come directly after Letter #6 which hasn’t fully come to me yet (the title has, of course, arrived: “Captivity”), still, I can feel it on the outskirts of my brain and I have a feeling it’s going to begin arriving today. And that’s really exciting to me, but I’ve also been battling a huge amount of depression. Like the kind that you can actually feel the weight of, you know? Like I’m physically dragging around 20 pounds of depression. I can barely move.
Hence, all the little notebooks around here to try to stave that off.
At the breakfast table this morning, I saw the school bus drive past outside and it occurred to me that today is the last day of school before Christmas vacation starts. And then I suddenly remembered that it was that first Friday night of Christmas vacation, back in December 1974, that I got raped by those 2 guys from the high school. I had been invited to a Christmas party by a guy I knew in that insane apartment complex we lived in. He was a nice guy, about a year older than me, but there were a lot of older guys at that party that I didn’t know at all. Two of them followed me home and the rest is of course history.
I never think about that night. At least not in any detail. So it was a really unpleasant thing to suddenly encounter it in the forefront of my brain at the breakfast table. And I was really fervently hoping that there weren’t any girls on that schoolbus going past who were going to have truly horrible Christmas vacations.
I was really, really hoping that.
Then I washed the many little cat food bowls and dragged myself back upstairs. I couldn’t meditate. Couldn’t write in any of my millions of little journals. I got back in bed, in the dark, and felt like my depression weighed a million pounds.
You know, I’m a woman of a certain lofty age, so I have about 3 hormones left. I like to preserve them for, you know, fun stuff. Which means that I almost never cry anymore. Back when I had hormones, I used to cry a lot. But nowadays, I don’t want to waste what few hormones I have on tears! But this morning, man, for about 63 seconds — a tidal wave of tears.
Then, afterwards — I felt a whole lot better.
I don’t really know what “crying” is — you know, if you think about it, totally deconstruct it, what is it? Why is your body doing that? I don’t know. But it’s sort of miraculous how it felt like the proverbial damn bursting and then, after all the stuff has washed over and through it, I felt so much better. Really just full of hope and I could actually smile.
So I’m feeling optimistic that I’ll get some really interesting writing done today. (And I’m gonna try to force myself to do yoga — I haven’t done any since before my birth mom came to visit. And without yoga, it gets harder to convince my body that it’s still 12…)
All righty.
Well, Paul Weller has some interesting new videos that have been going up on YouTube, called Paul Weller Presents the Black Barn Sessions. A new one is up today. If you want to go directly to his segment, it’s at about the 5 minute mark. It’s really rockin’.
Other than that, I’ve been listening to Johnny Mathis Christmas music, as well as Ghosteen again and again– trying to, you know, consider that it could be “uplifting.” Or whatever it was Nick Cave said in his Red Hand Files thingy a few weeks ago.
I can’t really remember his exact words. And it’s not that I find the album depressing — it’s that I find the imagery too enigmatic and just too beautiful, and sometimes it’s so beautiful that I can’t bare it, you know? It’s just too beautiful. I’m guessing that at some point I’ll get used to the words and perhaps they’ll slip into the background and my heart won’t short-circuit every time I hear it, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Okay-dokey. I’m gonna scoot and get to work on “Captivity” — see what that yields! Have a great Friday, wherever you are in the world!! Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya!
I did re-watch Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire last night. It had been, literally, decades since I’d seen that movie. The only thing I really remembered about it is that I had really loved it when I saw it. (Enough to have bought the video of it and kept it all these years.) I knew it had something to do with an angel and a girl in a circus, and that’s kind of all I remembered about it. (Well, the only other thing I remembered was that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were in it, sort of toward the end.)
Which is another way of saying I had forgotten practically all of it.
Wow, what a great movie. All that constant murmuring. The sound in that movie is just incredible. And the beauty of the whole concept. Of course, then I instantly remembered why I had loved that movie so much. Just a poetic work of art, on all levels. Every nuance; every murmur.
After I was done watching it, though, I was wondering why, all of the sudden, I was sort of steeped in old foreign things about death and poetry and sexuality and love between the dead and the living, and Nazis in Germany and the war…
Cocteau’s Orpheus came out in 1950 so there were still remnants of the war visible in its scenery and in the behavior of certain characters. (And I loved how Cocteau’s version of the bacchantes was to make them a women’s poetry society– nasty female critics who turned on Orpheus, who is a celebrated poet in Paris in Cocteau’s version. Too funny. Anyway.)
And I’m still re-reading Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites. It is nothing but poetry sex death Nazis… And in a wholly different way it deals with all the same stuff.
And then I realized, sort of with a shock, that Tell My Bones is all about poetry, sex and death — and love between the spirits of the dead and the living. And even Thug Luckless is about that. And certainly Blessed By Light is all about poetry sex and death.
I wonder what is going on with me? Seems like something profound is trying to get my attention.
And all this Nazi Germany stuff. Early this morning, I was lying in bed, thinking about just how saturated my childhood was with Nazi Germany. To be honest, even though I never talk about it because I just love that freight train that barrels past my door, but every time it does, I always think of the train that’s going to Auschwitz. I can’t help it. I have to remind myself that it’s just a freight train. These are not cattle cars, herding people to death camps.
But my childhood was filled with those images. Cleveland was full of immigrant Jews and so a lot of concentration camp survivors came to live in Cleveland. I was surrounded by them in my childhood. My Hebrew school teacher was a survivor of Auschwitz — her number was tattooed in blue on her forearm. It was always there, always visible to us, because she wore dresses with short sleeves. She was from Hungary. Her twin sister had died at Auschwitz and she told me that her sister’s name would have roughly translated to “Marilyn” in English. Because of that, she seemed to be very attached to me. I mean, in a nice way. I was only about 8 years old.
I hated Hebrew school. I had to go 3 times a week for several years. That particular teacher thought I was really gifted in languages and she got me a scholarship to attend an accelerated Hebrew school sleep-away camp sort of thing for the summer and I was secretly just horrified by this. I did not want to spend my summer in Hebrew school! Even though I was supposed to be really appreciative of all of it because usually girls didn’t get that kind of education — only boys did.
Well, I really wanted dancing lessons. I really wanted to study ballet and tap because I loved musicals. And I went home and begged my parents not to send me to Hebrew school all summer.
Plus I never felt Jewish at all. Even though I could read and speak Hebrew really well, and was steeped in Judaism through my adoptive family, none of that stuff resonated with me. By the time I was 5 years old, I had secretly fallen in love with Jesus Christ, because of all the paintings I had seen of him at the Cleveland Art Museum. I would stare at those paintings and I knew I remembered him from somewhere. It was a visceral response. And I was captivated by nuns, too — back then, they still wore those old-style, flowing black habits and those white wimples.
As I got a little older, I collected crosses and crucifixes and little illustrations of Jesus that I had to hide under my mattress. It’s interesting to think that I also eventually acquired a lot of sex books, like Story of O, and I was allowed to just have those things out in plain site. But the Jesus stuff — I would have gotten in so much trouble for having that!
And I also remembered, this morning, a time when I was about 7 or 8, and a little Jewish girlfriend of mine, named Edie — she and I were taking a shortcut through a field one cold autumn afternoon and suddenly found ourselves stuck in some serious mud. That thick sucking wet kind of mud that pulls your shoes right off. When we got to the other side of it, we were outside a convent. We really needed to clean off our shoes so we went up and asked if we could come in and clean our shoes, even though we were Jews. (We actually said that.)
The nuns were so nice to us. And this convent wasn’t anything like the old Carmelite stone convent I go to an hour from here when I’m having one of my suicidal breakdowns. This other convent in Cleveland was vast and spacious and majestic and filled with light and air and high ceilings. And all these truly friendly nuns, in those flowing black habits, all over the place.
By this time, my adoptive mother had survived cancer and had begun her descent into becoming the meanest, cruelest person I knew on planet Earth. And my adoptive dad was away from home more and more. My home life was becoming a terrifying place. So the warmth and the kindness and friendliness of those nuns — it was so foreign to me. I really wanted to stay there and never leave.
I’d forgotten all about that until this morning.
Well, I now have yet another little notebook with a pen clipped to it. I’m still keeping my daily Inner Being dialogue journal every morning after meditation. I haven’t missed a day of writing in it since I started it in early June. (And I tell you, it is an awesome thing. I recommend keeping one because your inner being probably has all sorts of meaningful information to relate to you.) Well, in addition to that little hard-bound journal, I now have a smaller one, cloth-bound, to have with me all day. And it’s for pre-paving every moment of the day. Making sure I’m consciously choosing how I want to respond to every single thing; how I want to experience it. Because every single thing is, once again, starting to get to me and I just don’t have the time to go nuts right now.
I am still feeling a little disconcerted that Peitor took off for London so suddenly — he texted yesterday that they indeed went there for the holidays and will be back in LA for New Year’s Eve. That’s 3 sessions of script-writing that we’re going to miss because he doesn’t want to work while they’re there. I don’t blame him. He can do whatever he wants to do, but the fact that he never actually said anything to me at all about it and just went. It sort of — well, I don’t know what. He had wanted to start working on the new TV series in January but now he’s going to have to finish mixing and mastering a few songs for his new record, then I have to be in NYC in February to start the table reads for Tell My Bones and will have re-writes to do on that.
You know — time gallops away. And I guess I would have appreciated being in the overall mix somewhere. Other than, you know, a quick text that he’s on a plane heading to London…
And then my friend in Houston who has cancer — my one-text-a-week approach is working nicely. I text once and he now replies within a day. He texted me late last night, in detail about the radiation treatments, which are making him feel even sicker, of course. But since he’s a scientist, he is fascinated by the radiation treatments. He explained to me what goes on, scientifically. And it was like he was exulting in this bombardment of science — which is perfectly okay, because it’s his experience and his world. But again, I found it disconcerting. The intense, scientific description, along with the details of just how bad the cancer is. And I was already in bed, with the lights out, when I got the text.
So yesterday culminated in a whole big bunch of images and sounds and thoughts, heaping up on me while I was in bed in the dark, drifting to sleep. Then I woke up, immediately thinking about Auschwitz and Nazis — and how, you know, actually it wasn’t really that far removed from me. And then the beauty of the nuns.
So I’m keeping this other little journal as a way to sort of not only ground myself into staying on course with the images I would rather claim, but also to help draw my preferred experiences to me– every hour, every moment, of every day.
Everybody gets to be whoever they are in this life, but I cannot let myself get derailed by any of it. I just have too much work to do, you know?
And on that note, I will get started here. Thanks for visiting, gang. I hope Thursday is good to you, wherever you are in the world, I love you guys. See ya.
Marilyn's Room 