Tag Archives: Blessed By Light by Marilyn Jaye Lewis

Decoration Day

May 25, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

When I was growing up, Memorial Day was more commonly called “Decoration Day,” because you went to the cemetery and decorated the graves of those in your family who had died in a war.

That photo above there is of my birth father, on leave from the Navy in 1965. He’s the one in the glasses, smoking a cigarette.

He didn’t die in a war. He died at 53, from cancer caused by Agent Orange, which he was exposed to repeatedly in Vietnam.

He was in the Navy for 20 years, from the time he was 17, and he was an active SEAL for most of that time. He spent a lot of time in Vietnam and had some very serious drug and alcohol problems because of everything that happened to him there. (Meaning, he eventually had a hard time coping with all the people he had killed, and he felt that he had killed them, basically, for no reason at all.)

He’s 20 years old in that photo. I was 5 by then and living in Cleveland. He didn’t know I even existed until I was 28 years old. It’s sufficient to say that he was really angry, just heartbroken, that no one had told him that I had ever even been born. He didn’t find out about me until I was completely grown. It killed him that he had totally missed my childhood.

However. In an interesting twist of fate…

When he first got into the Navy, when he was still in his late teens, my dad was stationed in the Philippines and one day, outside a bar that was frequented by American sailors, he found a tiny baby girl in a trash can – still alive. She’d been abandoned. He took the baby to an old, retired prostitute and he sent that woman money every month, to take care of the baby. And he did that until the “baby” was 18 years old. He knew that the little girl had survived, but after she turned 18, he didn’t keep in touch with that old woman anymore and did not know what became of the girl.

Even though my dad was only 15 when I was born, he was already in jail in Ross County, doing 6 months for stealing from a store. When he got out, he went to North Carolina to live with his older sister, my Aunt Jo, pictured there above, sitting in the doorway of her trailer home. She helped my dad get his criminal record cleared so that he could join the Navy when he was 17.

My Uncle Ralph is playing the guitar in that photo. My dad also played guitar and sang and wrote songs. But my Uncle Ralph became professional at it, went to Nashville and worked steadily with Tammy Wynette and George Jones, and a bunch of other really famous Country & Western greats. He eventually had his own band and had a couple of hits on the Country charts.

My Uncle Ralph is the only one in my dad’s family who’s still alive. Here’s a photo of my grandpa (my dad’s dad) and my Aunt Bobby Jean and my Uncle Earl. This is back when they all still lived in eastern Kentucky, in the early 1940s, before my dad or my Uncle Ralph were born. They’re all dead now.

My grandpa is the one in the overalls. They’re all sitting on the bumper of his old truck.

My grandpa was a horse trainer and a farmer, and he also played guitar and sang and hung out in bars and got really drunk. He died young from liver problems.

Here is a photo of my great grandpa. He’s the one standing on the top right. He is with all of his brothers – my great-uncles. My great-grandpa, Ashbel, was an Attorney General for the State of Kentucky. I don’t know if he played guitar or sang, but he definitely did not hang out in bars and get drunk…

My great-grandpa and his brothers, in Kentucky.

And here is my great-great-grandpa. He was a Kentucky State Senator. Kentucky was a split State, meaning that some of the State fought on the side of the Union, and some on the side of the Confederates during the Civil War. My great-great-grandpa was a Confederate, an absolute Rebel, through and through.

He died in the Battle of Cynthiana, during the Civil War, and this is a postcard of the monument that honors the soldiers who fell in that battle. His grave is marked by one of those little white gravestones in that circle. He’s actually buried there.

The Battle of Cynthiana War Memorial, Cynthiana, Kentucky

They were the nicest family, ever. And once they found out about me, they never once treated me like I was illegitimate or anything. They were all singers, songwriters, guitar players. My dad, in particular, thought I was a great songwriter and wanted me to leave NYC and go to Nashville, where I had family in the music business. But I didn’t. I certainly had a TON of country influences in my songs, but my songs were still more folk than country.

My name was Dory when I was born, btw.

My adoptive family changed my name to “Marilyn Joy.” (Even though my legal name is now regarded as Marilyn Jaye, it’s actually Marilyn Joy.)

So that’s that, as they say.

In an unrelated topic….

I don’t know what it is about Luxembourg, but, man, does that seem like it was a great show last night. I’m so serious. And, as you know, I have seen every single photo from the Conversations with Nick Cave that have been taken this year & posted to Instagram, and the photos on Instagram from the show last night are remarkably different.

You can feel it coming through the photos, you can hear it in Nick Cave’s voice in the (really short!!) video clips posted there, too.

I don’t know what happened there last night, what the difference was, but it seems like it was magical. Honestly. I’m not just saying that. The best photos so far definitely came from Luxembourg last night.

Oh, and at one point a guy from the audience was actually sharing the piano bench with him! Sitting next to Nick Cave, while he was singing “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry.” (Which sounded really great with just him and the piano.)

Loyal readers of this lofty blog no doubt recall that the seat I was hoping to get at the show in Town Hall in NYC was “next to him on the piano bench” but I was truly just joking. So when I saw that photo last night, I was sort of alarmed, you know? I had no idea that kind of thing really happened.

Anyway. It was just amazing, palpable. It has to have been just an incredible show.

Okay, let’s get that holiday happening here, gang! (You’re probably completely astounded to learn that I will spend most of my holiday at my desk, writing! But eventually, I’ll go out and buy all the flowers, soil, etc., wash down the patio furniture that’s out on the porch, and get that all happening. And, yes, I will finally rake up all those darn dead leaves from the fall…) (I’m sure all my neighbors will be glued to their windows, saying: “Come look! She’s finally fucking doing it!!”)

If you live in the United States, have a great holiday. Otherwise, have a wonderful Saturday, wherever you are in the world. I did not listen to any music during breakfast today, for some reason. I guess I was just digging the bird songs! But thanks for visiting. I love you guys. See ya.

PS: A happy belated birthday to Bob Dylan. He turned 117 years old yesterday. Something like that… He’s pictured here with Tom Petty in the mid-1980s, from that period when Tom and the Heartbreakers agreed to be his backup band and go on tour with him.

Of course, I adore Bob Dylan. And have since I was a young girl, just learning how to play guitar and to write songs. And he was one of the main reasons I wound up going to Greenwich Village and being a folk singer. But I loved him even more when I read his statement to the press after Tom died: “It’s shocking , crushing news. I thought the world of Tom. He was a great performer, full of the light, a friend, and I’ll never forget him.” Okay, gang. See ya.

Buona giornata!

May 23, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

It was another one of those incredibly beautiful mornings around here, gang.

I awoke at 5am to that mighty chorus of Muskingum County birds! All the windows were open, a warm breeze was filling the house. My bed was so incredibly comfortable, and I was, like, totally aroused. Like, for real.

I’m not gonna complain or anything. Because I’d rather spring from the depths of sleep totally ready to make love, than, you know, wake up and think, oh crap, it’s another day.

Still. I’m just not sure where that’s coming from and it’s happening a lot lately. And it wasn’t because of my dream. I remembered my dream and it was interesting & complex, but it certainly wasn’t anything that could be considered even remotely erotic.

So who knows. But it’s a wonderful way to wake up. And it’s happening a lot now.

It was a great day yesterday. I made good progress with Chapter 22 of Blessed By Light. Made good progress in both the Italian lessons and learning the new guitar material, too.

Oh, and I stopped in at the hardware store in town and bought a small pair of wire cutters. I guess I’m committed to becoming the Queen of Guitar String-Changers in Muskingum County now…

So it was just a really good day.

I guess loyal readers of this lofty blog know that I’m on Instagram. I actually joined Instagram when it very first launched, but I hate social media, so I never did anything with it. Until Sandra forced me to get active on Instagram for the sole reason that she didn’t want to.

She hates social media worse than I do. But since I write for her and, in some ways, work for her, I agreed to do it. Mostly to promote her projects. But once I really got on Instagram, I started to just love it.

So I’m on it a lot. But 95% of the people I’m following – I have no clue who they are. Not even the tiniest clue. I mostly follow painters, photographers, and musicians from all over the world. And a lot of the people I follow are extremely famous, and yet I still have no clue who they are. I can tell by their photos that a heck of a lot of people in the world do know who they are, but not me. But I still enjoy looking at their photos. Each photo is a little life story unto itself.

And when it comes to the 4% of people that I follow on Instagram who are famous and I do know who they are, well, as you know already, I get totally pulled in to their photos. And some of those photos make me seriously ponder. Some times it’s what they’re not saying that just astounds me. And so I ponder.

I’m a top-notch ponderer.

Dana Petty (Tom’s widow) doesn’t post very often and when she does it’s usually short videos of butterflies in her garden or something like that. But this past week, she’s been posting more personal stuff about Tom and the past and the loss. And posting at weird times – like at 3am. And I could tell she was grieving. Plus she was having a birthday.

Yesterday, she posted a photo of herself and her immediate family, out to dinner in LA, celebrating her birthday. And she looked positively ethereal. Really just ageless and just so pretty. All that long, straight blonde hair. And she never seems to wear much make-up. She’s just this genuinely pretty woman, who looked about 17 on her birthday. Honestly. So I wrote something to her about that.

And what she wrote back really gave me pause, you know? It is so clear that none of this is easy for her, at all. That she’s trying really, really hard to just keep on “keeping on”.

Instagram can be just so revelatory in that way.

I follow his daughters, too. From a distance. It makes me feel kind of creepy to do that. To “follow” people’s children. I mean, they’re grown women, both artists, and both so much like they’re dad as far as they’re temperaments, and their politics. They’re outspoken and sort of iconoclastic.

But I try to stay clear of people’s kids. And famous people’s kids are all over Instagram. But something about it just strikes me as so strange. Inherited fame, I mean. And being on Instagram because of that.

One famous kid of a famous person that I absolutely adore is Theodora Richards. I truly adore her, but I still won’t follow her because I think it’s creepy. I follow her dad, of course, because I’ve been in love with Keith since I was 12 years old.

But Theodora is just like Keith. Like, seriously. She’s really pretty, but looks more like Keith than like Patti, and has this awesome mind of her own. She doesn’t seem to give much of a fuck about what anybody thinks about anything. Plus, she does stuff. Actual stuff. She doesn’t just “model” – Keith has a seriously huge contingent of models in his sphere. Successful models. Super models, even.

I have nothing against models, you know. But they just don’t interest me. I was a professional model in my late teens, before moving to New York, so I know that it’s hard work and hard to be a really good model. You have to figure out how to become a complete blank so that whatever you’re wearing takes over you, and not the other way around. Designers don’t want your personality; they want their designs or their ideas to become your personality.

So if you have a lot of thoughts in your head that are of interest to you, you might not want to become a model.

This is an actual conversation I had with my agent – my last conversation with him – when I was a professional model. I was 19:

HIM (matter-of-factly): “No one gives a fuck what you think. You’re not being paid to think. You’re a piece of meat, and if that bothers you, then you’re in the wrong business and you better get out.”

ME: (Said nothing. Turned around. Left. Got out.)

The entire agency tried to apologize for him, and kept calling, wanting me to come back. But, honestly, I was a writer. It just wasn’t for me.

Theodora Richards is not a good model, because her attitude and unruly personality take over everything in the picture. Even though all she’s doing is just standing there. Her attitude is larger than life and it’s all you can see in the shot, and that’s definitely not what a designer wants. I’ve noticed, though, that when she does do some modeling, she’s always almost entirely naked, which I think is a really good indicator that she doesn’t give a fuck what other people might want her to wear.

Anyway, I love her! But I refuse to follow her on Instagram. She bleeds over sometimes into Keith’s feed, but that’s as far as I go.

Okay!! I leave you with 2 things today. Some of what I wrote yesterday in Blessed By Light. And then what I was listening to at breakfast today, Good Good Day, by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.

So have a good, good day, wherever you are in the world! Thanks for visiting. I love you, guys! See ya.

[Excerpted from Chapter 22, Blessed By Light. He's just survived a heart attack, his best friend has been killed, he's been forced to quit smoking after nearly 60 years of being a smoker, and now the press has found out who his new girlfriend is and where he's living. He's trying to stop taking it out on her and just make love.]

I love you, okay?

Let’s just start there. And then build on it, go places with it. Find a rhythm with our bodies that puts us in sync with ourselves and with everything that we call sacred in this world, this life, and what we’ve come to know about each other. And let’s make love.

It’s so fragile, honey; all of it. In a heartbeat, a gunshot, or a darting stray cat on the road, it’s all over.

And, yes, there’s the Light. And, yes, it blesses us, all of us, ultimately. I know this for sure. But here we are for now. Still among the living. Staking our claim in it, together. In life and in love.

Come here. Right now.

Lie on top of me.

You look so beautiful when you’re naked.

✽✽✽

Who are we now? When I hold you in my arms like this, who are we? We were once naked strangers together, remember that, honey? It wasn’t so long ago, either.

Now I know every curve of you, every round or flat or secret place, and every sound you make that goes along with it, with touching you there.

I thank God that we are never again gonna be strangers to each other. We are eternally connected now. Here or in the hereafter, honey, there is always gonna be a part of you that belongs to me. You’re my girl.

And I’ll never forget that night when you were astride me, my arms full of you; your breasts pressing against my chest, and my cock all the way up in you. George was with us. But, for a change, he was the one sitting it out. He was right next to us on the bed, though.

But in that moment, you were all mine and I was all yours and you looked down into my face, your hair hanging loose, falling so soft all over me. Candle light dancing in the room.

And you said to me, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear you at first, “You’re mine,” you said. “Mine.”

And I could see in your eyes where you were speaking from – that fully aroused place. I couldn’t have filled you up fuller if I tried. You were right down on me, taking every inch of me up inside you, which is usually not easy for you to do.

I was overwhelmed by you that night.

Your arms at either side of my head. You were completely surrounding me, and you kept whispering it right in my face. “Mine,” you said. “You’re mine.”

I didn’t know if George heard you. It didn’t matter. He probably did. But what I really heard, and maybe what he really heard, too, since he knew me so well for so long, was that you knew by then that, except for that wife I had loved more than life itself, there had been way too many girls.

All those years of me living my life without you in it.

Until that first night I saw you, when my heart was pulled right up into you from out of nowhere.

Honestly, I did not know I was gonna stay. I was taking each day as it came. I thought you were, too, but I really didn’t know and didn’t ask.

And then you said: Mine.

And I surrendered to you. Right then. To that word. I became yours. Although you didn’t know it for sure because I didn’t say it. But my heart surrendered to that sound: Mine.

And I thought to myself, Okay, baby. Forever, and always, and only.

You don’t ever talk about getting married. I don’t think you want that. I don’t know if I wanna take that road anymore, either. But I belong to you. I know that for sure.

And I know for sure that it’s what I want.

Move over, come on.

Lie back.

I wanna get on top of you, and get all the way in.

Honey, do that thing you do with your legs up over my shoulders.

I wanna listen to those cries you make, those tiny whimpering sounds that make you sound like such a grown up girl. I need to hear that right up close to my ear, honey. Right now.

Oh fuck.

I love it when you make that sound.

Hold on to me. This is where the rhythm comes in for real.

And I have never missed a beat.

Jesus Christ. Who the hell is at the front door?

✽✽✽

It’s my girls.

What are they doing here at this hour? Why the hell didn’t they call first? Or at least send me one of those angry-daughter texts that they’re both getting so damn good at.

Crap.

You just stay here. Let me find out what’s going on. The two of them together. It can’t be good. They’ve definitely come loaded for bear.

See the little cloud up in the sky
It’s a good good day today
See the little cloud pass on by
It’s a good good day today
Mary comes now, let Mary be
Can you see her down on the street?
Mary’s laughing ’cause Mary sees
That she’s a-wearin’ that dress for me

There can be times
Yeah… When all things come together
Yeah… Under a clear sky and you can believe
Yeah… You hold your breath for this moment
Yeah… But do not breathe for this day I know
Is a good day, yes I know
It’s a good day, yeah I know
Today…
Hear her feet skipping up the stairs
It’s a good good day today
She is the answer to all of my prayers
It’s a good good day today
Mary comes now, she don’t knock
‘Cause she’s runnin’ on her own little clock
Mary’s laughing ’cause Mary knows
That this day was made for us
And any fool knows… yeah
And any fool sees
That the future… yeah
Is a-down on its knees
But let ’em all cry, let ’em weep
Let those tears roll down their cheeks

‘Cause I can believe in the one
That is standing in front of me
Oh this day, don’t you know
Is a good day, yes I know
It’s a good day, I told you so
Today…
See her breasts how they rise and fall
It’s a good good day today
And she knows I’ve used that line before
It’s a good good day today
Mary’s laughing, she don’t mind
‘Cause she knows she’s one of a kind
Mary’s happy just to be
Standing next to me
And any fool knows
Yeah…
That the wind always blows
Something to someone
Yeah…
Once in a while, so let it rain, let it fall
Let the wind howl through your door
‘Cause right now for this moment
I’ll forever be
Standing next to her
On this day, which I know
Is a good day, yeah I know
Oh, it’s a good day, I told you so
Today…

c- Nick Cave

Watch Out! Here Comes Trouble!

May 22, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

I didn’t move much from the desk yesterday, but oddly enough, instead of having more sentences in Chapter 22, I now have noticeably fewer.

It was just one of those days.

I stared at the manuscript. Read it. Re-read it. Re-read it, yet again and then still more. Stared at it some more, too. Wrote some stuff. Deleted it. Wrote some other stuff. Deleted that, too.

And then realized that the sentence that had come before it was the real culprit and had to go. And then on & on, until I now have a 5-sentence opening paragraph left for Chapter 22 and that’s it.

10 hours at the desk yesterday yielded less than I’d started out with.

But the good news is that I didn’t fuck up the coffee today! It looks just like coffee’s supposed to look and tastes like coffee’s supposed to taste. And I’m feeling really confident about the prospects for Chapter 22’s growth this morning. I know the Muse is hanging around. I can feel him.

I just have to make that 20-mile trek into town and buy food and then we’ll be good to go around here.

I had my first quiz in Italian last night! And I didn’t do so terrible!

I did okay, actually. But I think that, for now, most of my correct answers were just subconscious guesses based on the similarities between Italian and French and I know French pretty well. But it was only my first week. And I have a year to learn Italian. Plus the app is still really fun. I still look forward to doing it every day and feel a little disappointed when the daily lesson is over. So that says a lot right there.

And I worked for a couple of hours on the guitar last night. I still have a lot of ground to cover in the new material before I can incorporate it in to teaching piano. So I have to sort of absorb it at breakneck speed. But it really is fun.

Sadly, though, I have to confront the fact that I need new strings. I have been playing guitar for [heavy sigh] 50 years. And I still hate changing the strings. I usually don’t ever pull the “helpless girl” card in any area of my life. I take care of myself, come what may in this world.

However.

When it comes to changing my guitar strings, I go from this gal:

To this gal:

And I live completely alone now in the middle of fucking nowhere. Who’s gonna help me change my guitar strings??!!

When I played professionally in NY, my bands consisted almost exclusively of guys. And I don’t know what it is, but they seem to change guitar strings like they’re in a pit crew for NASCAR or something. They do it so fucking fast, it’s ridiculous.

I would always try to change my own strings, but they would have to just stand there and smoke, like, an entire pack of cigarettes and I’d still be trying to change the one string. Until, finally, one of them would just go insane and grab my guitar and say, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, just let me do that for you!”

And then the string would be changed, snipped, and in tune in a nanosecond.

So I got used to guys changing my guitar strings. Even though, in the rest of my world, I’m perfectly capable of, you know, doing stuff.

However, the time has come where I have had to face the fact that I really need new strings. Since the guitar store is 20 miles away and (I’ve discovered) really easily avoided, I forced myself to order some Black Diamond silver strings online. They should arrive momentarily.

And if the UPS driver doesn’t happen to play guitar…

Well, all in all, this is going to be a really big year for me, all the way around!

All righty.

Well, I’m learning new stuff every day. And yesterday, I discovered that people in Copenhagen prefer not to post to Instagram in English. So I’m only making an educated guess when I say that they all seemed to love Nick Cave’s Conversation last night!

However, what they do do, is post photos in color! None of this artsy black & white stuff, like the diabolical Norwegians did. So now I’ve discovered that the very same suit in all these different photos from last night – yes, from one concert – can look either olive green-ish, gray, or beige-ish/tan.

So, clearly, me and this obsession with Nick Cave’s oddly colorless suit, that I don’t even understand how it got started anymore. Well, clearly, since this tour is going to go on for most of the summer, and since I have a ton of fucking stuff in my brain already, I need to stop obsessing about his suit; stop pondering it so intensely on my phone and stop trying to figure out what color it actually is.

Clearly, that way madness lies; let me shun that!!

Okay!! (Methinks I’m probably still gonna obsess about that darn suit, but we’ll just see.)

Meanwhile, gang, have a wonderful Wednesday, wherever you are in the world!! I leave you with this!! My breakfast-listening music from the past couple mornings. Johnny Cash singing The Long Black Veil. Thanks for visiting. I love you, guys! See ya!

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?!

May 21, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Well, for starters: the coffee. But I think that’s the only thing I’m gonna screw up today!

I think my mind was wandering when I was setting up the percolator last night because the coffee came out looking almost like water this morning. Unfortunately, I slept in until 6:15am today, so rather than be patient and wait and make a whole new pot, I opted for those caffeine drops in a glass of water and off we go.

I am so sensitive to caffeine, though, that those drops will either make me hone in on my laptop for hours and write THE most amazing chapter in Blessed By Light today, or I’ll vacuum the entire house and then maybe go outside and rake leaves or something!

Yes, I know it’s the height of Spring! But a heck of a lot of dead fall leaves are still in my front yard and on my front porch and in heaps in my front garden and also strewn heavily about on my front sidewalk. And if you’re curious – yes! I am the only one on the whole block who still has dead leaves hanging around, and quite a prodigious amount, at that.

I do have lawn care guys all summer, but so far it’s only been one guy who’s come this month and he’s had his hands full just trying to contend with the staggering amount of weeds around here that we affectionately refer to as “my backyard.”

The other lawn care guy, who is of Native American ancestral heritage, has been in the wilds of incredibly beautiful Coshocton County at a Pow Wow (which I think means bonfires and a lot of drums and smoking a lot of weed, but I’m not 100% positive about that) and he won’t be coming around to help until next week – wherein, I imagine this place is going to start looking really nice because Memorial Day weekend is when I always plant all the flowers in the flower boxes and the outside of the house starts to look so pretty that all the neighbors overlook my absolute inability to give a fuck about raking my leaves in November when everybody else gets out there and does it.

(Another thing I refuse to do is shovel snow. And the minute it snows, all my neighbors are out there, dutifully shoveling their 2 feet of fucking sidewalk! But I refuse to be drawn in to their guilt trips because I have an enormous amount of sidewalk. Not just in front of my (dead-leaf-strewn) house, but I have a corner lot and the sidewalk along the side of my house goes clear past my barn to the alley in back. In case you’re curious, that’s far. It’s just not fair. It’s way more work than any of my neighbors have to do so I just refuse to do it. I’ve noticed that the snow always eventually melts anyway.)

Yes, me. Homeowner extraordinaire!

Okay!

Well, yesterday was so cool! Not only am I making actual progress with my studies of Italian this time around, but in an effort to help the guy learn piano without teaching him how to read music (which is something he doesn’t want to learn), I was investigating teaching methods that rely on improvisation and that dispense with music notes, theory & composition entirely.

(I’m glad I know how to read music. However, Music Theory & Composition, in case you were curious, gang, will just kill you. It will just turn you into a flat dead thing inside. It will pulverize your brain with a heavy wooden meat mallet and it will take a pair of wire cutters to your musical imagination and snip it right off. I took 2 grueling years of Theory & Composition many, many, many moons ago so I know whence I speak.)

But I found a teaching system that is just awesome, gang. I spent a few hours going over it last night. I only spent a handful of minutes (so far) going over the piano stuff, but the guitar stuff was too cool. It is so different from anything I was ever taught by a bazillion guitar teachers when I was growing up and it was really interesting. I got my guitar out and was practicing that stuff for a couple of hours last night. It’s all just fret work, but it’s a whole different approach to it.

I spent enough time looking over the piano stuff to know that I am going to have a whole new way of relating to the piano, too, when all of this is said and done. So it was just really cool.

Between this new way of learning Italian and this new approach to music, it just shows you that if you live long enough, new things come into your consciousness that erase anything old that was really bad.

But the flip-side of that sentiment… I was also thinking a lot last night about Nick the hit man for the Mob; still just thinking about all the probabilities and probable outcomes that I had never considered before. And up until last night, my conscience had taken solace in the fact that he would have been about 80 now anyway and I liked to imagine that he wasn’t even still alive.

Until I googled him.

Alas, he’s alive & well and still living in Manhattan. Shit, you know? That doesn’t help my conscience at all. That horrible last time I saw him, when he wanted to have “a little chat with me”, and he picked me up in a limo and we drove about half a block to an “Italian” restaurant in Midtown, mob guys everywhere. I was still just 20 years old and absolutely terrified and he, in essence, tore me a new one for killing his baby.

At the time, even though I was too scared to say anything, it made me angry because it was my baby, too, and it was not a decision I had really wanted to make. It was horrible. When I had come out of the anesthesia in the recovery room, there was a radio playing and – I kid you not – Queen was singing “Another One Bites the Dust.” And they were actually singing the chorus when I came out from under and heard it. I sobbed uncontrollably. The irony was just so not funny.

I cried when they were putting me under and sobbed when I came out from it, because I really wanted my baby but I thought it was the right thing. I couldn’t in good conscience have a kid whose father was a paid killer, right?

And yet, when I was 28 and finally met my own real dad – a man I absolutely worshiped… He’d been a Navy SEAL in Viet Nam from 1965 until 1975, when Saigon fell. And he killed more people in those ten years than you and I can possibly imagine. More than he even remembered. And he was paid to do that.

What is the real difference there?

But I totally adored him and he loved me like nobody’s business. More than anyone in my life had ever loved me.

And I deprived 2 people of that potential because I guess I thought I knew everything.

I’m not sure yet how to get my conscience to calm the fuck down, but life does indeed go on.

Okay. I’m gonna get started on the novel here now. And then I’m gonna practice my Italian, then practice my guitar, and wait for the Instagram photos to come in from Copenhagen, where Nick Cave is having a Conversation tonight. And I’m just gonna let everything be all right. It was all such a long time ago.

Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you, See ya.

Have a Happy Sunday, If You Dare!

May 19, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Gosh, it’s a beautiful day here, people. Just perfect.

All the windows are wide open, and they were like that all through the night (21 windows here). So when I awoke at 5am, I was already in an erotic swoon.

The house was filled with the sounds of the birds singing. I think I could hear every bird in all of Muskingum County! And there was a hint of a breeze. The sun was just starting to come up. And the magnificent silver maple that’s right outside my 2 front windows creates a sort of sanctuary for me in my room, so it was just so erotic to lie there in my indescribably soft & comfortable bed, sort of surrounded by the amazing leaves on that tree, and the sound of all those birds. I’m not sure why that’s erotic to me, but it is. All that energy of life was just sort of pulsing through me.

That silver maple is an enormous old tree – twice as tall as my 2-story house. And, yes, it’s very, very close to my house and is very, very old. I love this tree. It has made an enormous difference in how my mind works, you know? It shelters me, in a way – in a sort of “psychic” way. But it also just engages me with so much life, so much energy. And I am praying that the tree is gonna outlive me.

(Most of the Home Insurance people I contacted, however, did not want to bank on the tree outliving me and most of them refused to insure my home because of that tree being so old and so “right on top of my house”. But we won’t go there right now.)

[UPDATE: Here is a view from my bed, although it’s no longer before dawn, obviously. – Ed.]

My bedroom windows – the view from my bed. All those leaves are from the one maple tree.

I’m not sure if I’m going to work on the novel today or not. I’m kind of in a dreamy mood here, which usually doesn’t bode well for “focusing.”

It’s just sort of a weird energy day – maybe the full moon is involved, I don’t know. But I’ve been out of bed for 2 hours and I’ve changed my shirt 6 times! I’ve had 6 different shirts on in 2 hours. (For some reason, I’m okay with the bottom half of what I’m wearing today, but I can’t decide on a tee shirt that doesn’t make me crazy.) (Oh, and I officially have Old-Lady Arms!! I briefly put on a black tank top and there they were; after having been so good to me for nearly 59 years, my upper arms are now wrinkly, old lady arms!! Alas, it’s going to be a cold day in Hell before I put on that tank top again…)

And speaking of clothing that makes me crazy, Norwegians are diabolical!

The first Instagram post from the Conversations with Nick Cave out of Oslo last night was in full color and clearly shows Nick Cave wearing either a black suit or maybe a dark blue suit. I can’t tell for sure, but it’s definitely not the beige-ish one. However, he’s not on stage, he seems to be maybe outside the stage door? So it doesn’t count. So I waited for other posts to come in from Oslo last night, and every one of those diabolical Norwegians posted their Instagram photos in black & white!!! What the fuck is that, you know? How can I possibly tell what color that other suit is?

It was just too funny. Why the fuck do I have to get so obsessed with this fucking suit?! I was actually doing just fine until I saw all the black & white photos, and then it was, like: okay, you’re doing this on purpose. All of Oslo is just fucking with me…

All righty!

Jack White and the Raconteurs have a new album coming out in a few weeks, and the song they dropped on Friday, “Help Me Stranger,” is really catchy and addictive. I love it! But don’t just take my word for it – try it out on your own wee bonny ears and see what you think!

But, alas, as catchy as that song is, that’s not what I was singing this morning as I was lying there in my little swoon in my tree-protected bed! No, not at all! I was singing about gamboling lambs and babbling brooks!! So I also leave you with “Breathless”. (I love the little bunnies in this video, gang. They’re too cute.)

And on that happy note…

Have a really happy Sunday, wherever you are in the world. Thanks for visiting,! I love you guys. See ya.

What Will I Do with Myself?!

May 18, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Peitor and I won’t be having our usual Saturday morning conference call to work on the micro-short film scripts today.

His father-in-law in England died. So he’s off to London. But he has some sort of airport layover for several hours on Wednesday, so we’re going to work then. While he’s in the airport. I don’t know if I will regale him yet with my newfound mastery of Italian.

We’re such workaholics. God forbid we just take a week off. If we didn’t have so much fun working together, we probably would. Plus, I get the feeling that he prefers to not sit in an airport for hours, talking to his husband. He’d rather be distracted.

It’s funny, but even though my second marriage was just bursting with all sorts of dysfunctional issues (and I mean bursting), we always traveled well together. When we were traveling, we always had a good time. We talked a lot; we laughed a lot together.

Until Copenhagen.

Overall, we had a good time in Copenhagen, but in the hotel room, we were talking about something. He was sitting on the bed, I was standing over by the closet. It was the middle of the afternoon. I don’t recall what we were talking about, but I suddenly felt buried alive in an avalanche of ennui and I thought to myself, I’ve got to get a divorce.

It was really sad, but at that moment, it was over for me. It took me a couple more months to actually say it out loud. I can fight off pretty much anything except ennui. I can find all sorts of reasons for staying with someone if my mind is still actively engaged.

Of course, in the middle of all that ennui, I had met Mikey Rivera. And I was trying really, really, REALLY hard not to fall in love with him. Well, I was already in love with him because it was love at first sight for both of us, but I was trying really hard not to do anything about it.

And he, Mikey, was being very restrained and respectful because of course he knew I was married. But he would call me on my private number and say, “Just coffee, come on. I gotta see you. We’ll just have a cup of coffee.”

And that’s all it would be, just coffee. But always the most intense cup of coffee known to man. Because I was trying so hard to figure out what the hell I was going to do about my marriage, while staring across at Mikey from the safety of my fully clothed cup of coffee. And Mikey was sort of, you know, sitting across from me, patiently thinking: There has never been a woman on Earth who has ever NOT fucked me, so I have all the time in the world.

He was a walking Latino sex machine. And we used to listen to Tom Jones records all the time. His Greatest Hits. We each bought a copy of the same CD and played it constantly when we were apart.

My advice to you is that if you’re trying really hard to not have sex with somebody whose sole reason for being on the planet is to have sex with you, DON’T listen to Tom Jones, for Christ’s sake.

And then it seemed like everywhere I went, a Tom Jones song would suddenly spring from some sort of sound system. When I was in London, getting that award for Neptune & Surf, “It’s Not Unusual” came springing from some sort of muzak in a clothing store and the song literally overwhelmed me and I knew at that moment that I was going straight back to New York to fuck Mikey Rivera…

Which I did, finally. We went to one of those glamorous “fuck motels”, which were all over New York back then – you rent a room for 4 hours and your marriage is pulverized by the time they want the room back.

I totally blame Tom Jones for making Mikey Rivera impossible to resist. (And never mind his Greatest Hits, but his versions of “She Drives Me Crazy” and “Sex Bomb” were all over the sound systems in NYC back then. It was just a losing battle.) (Yes, if you’ve read my novel Freak Parade, then you recognize all of this; this is where all of that came from.)

Okay, well. since I’m not working with Peitor today, I’m just gonna hang out and work on Blessed By Light.

And btw, my obsession with Nick Cave’s suit seems to have subsided. Now I’m trying to figure out if I should give one of those tickets away. Mostly because I still find it so baffling that I now have tickets to 2 shows. And I’m going to be up to my eyeballs in rehearsals for my play. And I feel like everyone, especially Sandra, is going to think I’m insane.

ME: “Okay! I’m outta here! Just carry on without me.”

THEM: “Where are you going this time?!”

ME: “To go listen to total strangers ask Nick Cave a bunch of questions.”

THEM: “But didn’t you just do that?!”

ME: “Um… yes, I did.”

So I keep thinking I should give one of the tickets away. But there’s no way I’m giving away the Lincoln Center ticket, because not only is it an incredible seat, but the theater itself is unbelievable! But if I give away the ticket to Town Hall then what do I do about my suite at the Algonquin Hotel? That suite costs 17 thousand dollars a night! Am I gonna just go and sit there?

THEM: “Where are you going now?!”

ME: “I have a suite at the Algonquin Hotel.”

THEM (curious and intrigued; their prurient interests peaked): “Really?! Are you having a sexy rendez-vous?”

ME: “No, I’m just gonna sit there. And be unmarried.”

THEM: “But, haven’t you been unmarried for, like, 17 years already?!”

ME: “Yes, but not at the Algonquin.”

Well, something like that… Anyway. I really, really want that room, you know? So then I think that I ‘ll keep both tickets and go to both shows and have my fucking room, finally.

Plus, I really wanna see Nick Cave.

It’s not like it’s my fault or anything that I have this embarrassment of riches right now.

Okay!! Let’s get Saturday happening around here, gang! I hope it’s a good one, wherever you are in the world. I leave you with this! Something to end your marriage by, if indeed, that’s on your list of things to do today! Thanks for visiting! I love you guys. See ya!

All the Stars in their Courses

May 17, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Yesterday was a good day.

I finally finished Chapter 21 in Blessed By Light and also saw the breakdown for Chapter 22 in my head. It’s going to be another one of those chapters that gets broken down into a/b/c/d. And the titles will be:

Sinners
Infidels
Compadres
Diamonds in the Fire

And I think there’s going to be a great big bunch of sex, with his daughters coming to visit unannounced in the middle of that. And, as usual, it won’t go well! Nothing having to do with his daughters seems to ever go well in this book, even though it’s so clear that he loves them. Or he’s trying to.

Anyway, I always get excited when a chapter is completed and I can also see the next one so clearly.

Also! Sandra called yesterday! Yes, when I had finally given up on ever hearing from her again… (not really)

We actually chatted for awhile. And it took a lot of that icky stress off my mind that was starting to accumulate there – you know, stress gathering in the corners. So I have her pinned down for rehearsals with the director here in August for Tell My Bones, and then a whole week back in New York, with Nick Cave at Town Hall right in the middle of that. And she even thinks that those can be tech rehearsals with the musicians and singers, too. (I’m of course hoping the director will agree.)

Which also means that my next trip to New York after that will be for the actual performances of the staged reading, and from there it goes to Florida. So my life just got a whole lot easier, in terms of endlessly driving back & forth to New York.

Except that she also said she’s planning on doing a few staged musical pieces from The Guide to Being Fabulous in NYC (our other play), which I’m going to have to do some script re-writes for. But it’s at a really high-profile Off-Broadway venue so I’m super excited about that, too. (The Guide to Being Fabulous is the same play we’ll be doing a first-run of in Toronto.)

I’m guessing that all this stuff will happen in early spring, at the same moment that I need to be in Italy, overseeing a writer’s retreat. In Italian.

(I’ll just say here that the folks in Dusseldorf posted a whole lot of photos on Instagram last night of Nick Cave at their Town Hall. Wow, what a beautiful venue. Just a gorgeous theater. He wore the same suit, though. Or perhaps he has 17 hundred that only look the same. But it was the same non-color thing. But the lighting on the stages is always so beautiful, so maybe it’s all just part of the overall lighting/color thing. Or maybe it’s just his new favorite suit and he can’t imagine not wearing it right now. I actually have no clue.) (I know, I’m obsessing about the suit. Honestly, his suit was the very first thing I thought of when I woke up this morning at 4:40am. I don’t know what’s going on with me and that suit.) (As always, though, the people in Dusseldorf were in heaven.) (Actually, I don’t know if the people in Dusseldorf are always in heaven. What I meant to say is that, like Nick Cave fans everywhere, their response on Instagram to the show last night was off the charts.)

Okay! Enough of the parenthetical intensity.

Monday, I start giving piano lessons! I’m really, really looking forward to that. although he swears up one wall and down the other that he doesn’t want to learn how to read music, just learn how to play the piano. I’ll tell you, though; when you’re just starting out on the piano, it is the easiest time to learn how to read music. It truly is. But whatever he wants, is cool. I certainly don’t want to be one of those Nazi-ish piano teachers.

I’ll say here, though, that most of my piano teachers were wonderful. It was only that one at the Conservatory who was so mean. I actually had a couple of piano teachers who really helped me stay sane, for awhile, anyway. The two teachers knew each other, actually. One of the teachers quit and so the other one took over.

We had a soundproof music room in our house back then, which is where, of course, I had my lessons. And the first teacher, a man, told me, in that soundproof room, that he wasn’t going to be teaching me anymore. And he told me it was because of my mother (adoptive). My mother was an abusive terror. And he actually told me that he was worried about me being in that kind of household, but that he couldn’t take it anymore and was sorry to be abandoning me, because he thought I was really talented.

That was a very hard thing to hear, and, obviously, it stuck with me. I was 12 at the time.

And then his friend, a woman, took over teaching me. She came into it knowing ahead of time the problems with my mother and so I guess she was able to handle it better. But still, you know, in that soundproof room, she would sometimes say, “Are you okay? You know, if you ever need anyone to talk to, I’m always here for you.”

I was still young, though, and had no clue I was in such an abusive home. I just assumed that all mothers were like that behind closed doors, wanting to smash you down and make you disappear.

However, both of my parents were really supportive of my music. Well, of me playing the piano. They were not thrilled at all when I went to New York with my guitar to be a singer-songwriter.

Anyway. I digress. A little.

I’m looking forward to giving piano lessons. In a small way, it will help me undo everything that ended up being so awful.

Okay, have a great Friday, gang! Wherever you are in the world. I’m gonna get crackin’ here on Blessed By Light – maybe even go so far as to wash my hair today!! You just never know. Thanks for visiting. I love you guys. See ya.

Me at age 12. Quite the piano player by then.

Molto Bene!

May 16, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Ciao, gang!

Yes, as of yesterday, I began studying Italian again. It gives me about a year to get thoroughly, totally, and 100% fluent. Yay! We shall see!

Of course, I don’t need to be fluent. I really only need to get from the Rome airport to the train that takes me to Perugia. Still, as long as I’m studying it, why not try to finally learn the language, right?

I bought the Mondly app. So far, it’s actually really fun. Yesterday, in addition to a bunch of other stuff they threw at me very quickly, I learned how to say: “This is my mother, this is my father, this is my sister, and this is my brother.”

I feel 100% certain that these are 4 sentences I will never need to say while in Italy, but for some reason, these sentences “took,” while the other stuff they went over yesterday, I have already forgotten. But it was only my first day…

And it actually is really fun. It’s set up like a game and it moves pretty fast, so you just sort of have to jump in and your brain starts clicking. It was a nice break from sitting, literally, for hours in front of Blessed By Light yesterday, with very little new stuff coming. I got, maybe, half a page and I was in front of the manuscript from 7am until 7pm.

I took a little time out, of course, to become fluent in Italian. And I also actually left the house yesterday!

Yes, I made myself go outside and take a walk. It was a gorgeous day, so I made myself walk over to the cemetery. And once I was there, you know the views are so lovely. It’s on a hill looking over the valley, which is full of cornfields that are just now getting planted, with tons of gorgeous hills in the background, trees everywhere, and everything is just so green for miles and miles. And the sky was perfectly blue with those fluffy white clouds. So I stayed a little while before turning around and heading straight back to the cramped little desk.

Loyal readers of this lofty blog no doubt recall that I always go to the part of the graveyard where all the founders of this village were buried, nearly 200 years ago. They have the best view of the valley, too.

I usually hang out and talk with them, because I’m writing a really fun & sexy murder mystery “starring” them as the frisky dead people who live in the fictional town of Hurley Falls and must solve a murder among the living, in my other novel-in-progress, Down to the Meadows of Sleep. But there were some people in the churchyard across the way, mowing the grounds, and I didn’t want them to think I was completely nuts so I didn’t speak to any of the gravestones yesterday. But it was a beautiful walk. It really helped me clear my head.

BTW, thanks for the really kind words yesterday re: the excerpt from Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse. I definitely appreciate it.

Even though it’s presented as erotic love letters to the muse, it’s sort of an erotic memoir at the same time. I’m thinking it’s creative nonfiction. I’m only about 30 pages into it, because I’m juggling about 17 zillion projects at the same time and I really want Blessed By Light completed and off my desk as soon as possible.

I’m guessing that Sandra is still someplace really noisy because she has yet to call me re: rehearsals, and I am now resorting to texts that say things like, “Please let me know when you can chat,” “When can I call you?” “Please call me!” – things like that. And still nothing. It gets frustrating because what I need to chat with her about will take about 5 minutes… I know she’s in rehearsals for something else right now, but it makes me antsy. So that added to the fun of sitting at my desk and staring at a manuscript for 12 hours yesterday.

Also, I have to say that I’m really happy that so many people in Germany are posting photos on Instagram of the Conversations with Nick Cave going on over there right now. Everyone is totally, totally loving it. Mostly they’re saying this in German, which, as you now know, is a language I don’t wholly understand. However, most people are using at least some English and it’s clear they’re loving it.

The only thing that perplexes me is that Nick Cave seems to be wearing a sort of beige-ish colored suit. He’s worn this, so far, at both shows. A sort of “absence” of color and I’m not understanding that. It seems like he usually wears black or this beautiful shade of blue.

So that gave me more to ponder as I sat and stared at the manuscript for 12 hours: Why is he wearing beige? What’s up with that? Is it really beige, or is it just the lighting? I actually asked myself that stuff many times yesterday even though I knew, for 100% sure, that no answers would be forthcoming.

Yes, I really am that nuts sometimes. I can’t stand when a manuscript refuses to write itself. It makes me crazy and my mind wanders.

But actually on a related note…

My replacement copy of B Sides & Rarities arrived in the mail yesterday. I discovered only recently that I accidentally gave that CD boxed set away to charity when I was selling the other house and putting a bunch of stuff into storage, thinking I was moving back to New York.

I was actually going through a lot of grief back then – meaning, I was grieving. Over a lot of things. A lot of loss. And I wasn’t thinking clearly. At all. And stuff that should have gone into the storage piles, went in the “give to charity” piles, and I actually accidentally gave away a lot of stuff I loved. And I didn’t discover this for a couple of years, when I finally bought this house here in Muskingum County and took everything out of storage.

First, I had to deal with the very sad and real fact that I gave away every single Tom Petty CD except for their Greatest Hits. You can imagine that this distressed me last year, when I had to confront what my mind had done. That it had lapsed like that (and that’s only part of the weird shit I was doing, but grief does that to you). And then I had to go about buying them all over again.

It was only a couple weeks ago, when I went looking for B Sides & Rarities, to play in the car, when I discovered that it, too, was gone. And that was the original boxed set from when it first came out, about 15 years ago, or something like that. Plus, a lover had bought that for me. It had been a gift. He sent it to me from San Francisco right when it came out because he knew how badly I wanted it. It was so cool when it arrived in the mail, you know? I was so happy.

And I gave the fucking thing away.

Anyway. So I bought it again, too. But the cheaper version that doens’t have the box. And it arrived yesterday. And it made me think about how crazy I can be and I hope that it doesn’t happen again.

In honor of attempting to not be crazy, I took The Big Jangle out of the CD player in the kitchen, and listened instead to Nobody’s Children during breakfast. Granted, this is still from the Playback collection, and Tom Petty is still dead, but this CD contains songs that were never released so they don’t bring back any sort of intense & beautiful memories from my fair and bonny girlhood.

(Frankly, Nobody’s Children has a lot of sort of “dirty” songs on it -sort of the “naughty” songs that were never released – and I’ve listened to it a lot while having great sex. Actually, not to insult anyone, but I think the CD itself caused the great sex, and that the sex would not have been as good had another CD been playing! Don’t take it personally, though!)

Well, it’s something that I can’t actually prove either way at this point, because all those lovers are gone from my life and I’m not gonna call them out of the blue now and ask them to come out to Crazeysbrug – a village that no one on Earth has ever heard of – so we can have sex while listening to something else and see if the sex is still as good; but the upshot is that when I play the CD, even during breakfast, there is a bit of the Pavlovian response… So that was frisky & fun at 5:33am.

Okay, gang!! I’m hoping that the manuscript lurches ever onward towards its completion today. Meanwhile, I’m gonna leave you with all of this:

First, 3 sort of obscure-ish Nick Cave songs that I absolutely love. I think you could say that, technically, they weren’t released, either.

The first one is on B Sides & Rarities, the other two, I don’t know if you can actually get them anywhere but they’re on Youtube.

The last song is probably my very favorite Tom Petty song from the entire 6-CD Playback collection. It was never released, but it’s on Nobody’s Children. It’s a sexy little song with Lenny Kravitz providing bass and some backing vocals – as well as some very sexy little memories pour moi!

Okay! Enjoy your Thursday, wherever you are in the world!Thanks for visiting, gang! I love you guys. See ya.

Shoot Me Down

I’ve Got Another Woman Now, Dear

I Do, Dear, I Do

You Come Through

The Delights of Anonymity in the Hinterlands!

May 14, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

First of all. Some of you may know that Doris Day died yesterday.

She was 97. She was an incredibly effective animal rights activist. I loved her movies when I was growing up. And as an adult, I supported her animal rights organization for decades. It was awesome to watch her make truly meaningful changes to the welfare and legal rights of animals in this country. (And in her private life, she was a Christian Scientist, who fully believed in Jesus’ power to heal, and she stood by that, even though a lot of people ridiculed her for it. In my estimate, she really was just an incredible human being. Plus, she was from Ohio!)

Image result for doris day be kind to animals — Doris Day R.I.P.

I named one of my little feral kittens after her. Here’s Doris (now 6 years old) at my kitchen sink, back in early March. (Lovely to look at, but, alas, you can’t touch her or she will scratch you silly because she’s feral.)

Which reminds me that, after Daddycakes died (he was her father), I couldn’t bring myself to wash the bathroom floor. He had left little footprints there and I couldn’t stand the thought of removing all traces of him, you know? He’s been dead a month now and I noticed this morning that the little paw prints have pretty much faded away.

Anyway.

My ticket arrived yesterday to see Nick Cave at Town Hall in September. Now all I have to do is remember to bring the darn thing to New York. Only 4 months away. Shouldn’t be too tricky. I’ll just staple it to my forehead and wear it until September. Perhaps seeing it in the mirror everyday will remind me to take the darn thing with me.

I realize that had I chosen the digital option, I wouldn’t have this potential memory problem, but I really wanted to have the ticket stub after it was over. (Of course, it cost 17 hundred million dollars more to get an actual ticket and have it mailed to me, but oh well.)

(Plus they have this “ticket insurance” thing. Where, you’re online and you’ve just purchased your ticket after an 8-minute barrage of truly unpleasant sensory perceptions. The screen is telling you that you’re almost ready to thoroughly finalize the purchase you’ve just made; American Express has already pinged! you on your phone to alert you that someone has already used your card number to purchase some sort of ticket online, “do you recognize this purchase?”; and yet TicketMaster still highly suggests that you purchase ticket insurance to insure that the ticket you’re in the process of really, finally, thoroughly purchasing really actually happens and then belongs to you. Unbelievable. They highly recommend you do this because chances are high that something will go horribly wrong with your purchase and the only way to guard against their fucking up is by spending a few dollars more, even though the sole reason they even exist is to simply sell tickets to people…So I bought that, too.)

So, I highly recommend to myself that I bring the darn thing with me to New York.

Okay!

Today is a lovely day!! Sunny and mild. All I’m doing today is laundry and working on Blessed By Light. Maybe do a little yoga if I can tear myself away from the laptop. I don’t have to run any errands because I already did all that yesterday. In fact, I don’t even have to leave the house until maybe Thursday, and only then if a friend of mine from in town needs a ride to the airport.

Loyal readers of this lofty blog no doubt recall that last year, I let this same friend keep his vintage 1965 VW camper van in my barn for the summer while he went off to Montana. (This is not his van but it looks exactly like this. It’s so cool.)

Well, he’s doing the same thing again this summer and so this past Sunday, he came by to put his van in my barn. And then I had to drive him back into town.

I can’t emphasize enough, gang, how much time I spend at my desk writing. I write, then write, then write again, and then write a little more. Now that the Mormon missionaries have stopped dropping by, I interact with basically no one.

I might say hi or just exchange meaningless bullshit with people I barely know, but other than that, now that I’ve moved out to the Hinterlands, I rarely meaningfully interact with anybody in person. I talk to plenty of people on the phone in LA or NYC, but that’s it; nothing too meaningful in person. So it was actually really interesting on Sunday, driving my friend into town. I don’t really “know” him at all. Last year, I overheard him saying that he needed a safe, dry, free place to store his van for 5 months so I offered him my barn, and so now we’re “friends.” But I don’t actually know him.

On Sunday, we sat on my porch for a few minutes so that he could smoke half a cigarette, and in those few minutes he told me about a trip he took to Denver to attend a Grateful Dead concert several years ago, and what he told me about that trip (not the concert, just the trip) revealed so much about him.

And then in the car ride into town, he was talking about some roses he had gotten for his mom since it was Mother’s Day, and, again, he revealed so much about himself – simply by the words he was choosing, the things he was choosing to say. And it also magnified what he was choosing not to say. I found it just so interesting.

Of course, we all do this all the time – communicate in this way, choosing words over other words, facts over other facts – but since I rarely interact with anyone meaningfully anymore, I guess it’s just really noticeable to me now. It came into such tight focus, this process of communicating with spoken language.

Yesterday while I was out, without really wanting to, I was listening to this ridiculous conversation between this guy and this girl, they were about 30 years younger than me. It only mildly got on my nerves, but when the young woman said, “If a guy wants to fuck a girl in the butt that much then he should just fuck a guy,” I actually said, “Oh, I totally disagree with that.”

I actually said this, out loud. They looked at me, stunned, The girl said, “Really?” Like she honestly couldn’t believe that girls might like anal sex, for one thing, or that I had just spoken. And they both looked at me, like they really genuinely wanted to know what I thought about anal sex, and I thought to myself, Jesus Christ, the one time you decide to say something meaningful out in the Hinterlands, THIS is what you choose to say??!!

So I didn’t say anything else. I just sort of smiled. I knew my desk was calling, needing me to come back home and to stop talking to people all unsupervised and stuff.

I’m hopeful that today will yield all kinds of wonderful things for the novel. I’m also hopeful that maybe Sandra might even call me – I’ve been trying to get her to call me for over a week now because I need to talk to her about some important stuff re: rehearsals for Tell My Bones. On Friday, she suddenly texted me from NYC and said, “It’s really noisy where I am right now but as soon as I get somewhere quiet, I’ll call” and that was the last I heard…. Perhaps today she will at long last be someplace quiet. We’ll see!

Meanwhile, enjoy your Tuesday, wherever you are in the world!! I did indeed go back to listening to The Big Jangle during breakfast this morning just because it makes me happy and I thought, so what? It’s better than wanting to cry first thing in the morning, you know? So I leave you with this! One of the jangliest of the big jangles. Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys! See ya!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2CXaAzg6Z4

She threw down her golden band
Crushed it with her feet into the sand
Took her silent partner by the hand
Yeah yeah oh yeah yeah

Somewhere near the edge of town
She said she was torn and turned around
“Can you help me cast this evil down?”
Yeah yeah oh yeah yeah

We’ll drive for the line now
There’s nothing to be lost
You and I will cross over
With no second thoughts

Dreams fade hope dies hard
She cups her eyes and stares out at the stars
Says “I feel we’ve traveled very far”
Yeah yeah oh yeah yeah
Yeah yeah oh yeah yeah
Yeah yeah oh yeah yeah

c – 1978 Tom Petty

Evolving Past This

May 13, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

I dropped off to sleep in very high spirits last night. And then awoke in this sort of “not good” place.

I think it’s an energy thing.

You know how it feels when you know you are evolving past things in your life? Not just outgrowing things, but you can sense that everything around you, the reality you’ve pulled together for yourself, is shifting. Maybe morphing into the next adventure, but you can’t completely see it yet.

That’s how I feel around here. Things are changing. It’s not a bad thing but for some reason, I’m feeling blue and I’m trying to sort of tune my dial to a better feeling energy here this morning.

A really cool thing happened last night, though, as I was drifting off to sleep. You know that very early place between awake and dreaming where you can become somewhat lucid? I suddenly realized that I was in a room with about maybe 20 people and they were sitting down, talking among themselves, as well as talking to me.

I awoke slightly and then realized that this is a potential version of that writer’s retreat I’ll be giving. Perhaps the “ghost” version, or the “as yet to be filled in by physical reality” version. I was talking to an older woman and she was very passionate about something.

It was at that exact moment, while talking to her, that I became lucid and experienced myself talking to her. And quickly after that, I awoke. And I realized that this is the other side of the equation. Meaning, I want to do things in life. I have dreams or goals. I know they always involve other people but it never occurred to me in such vividness how a goal or a dream that’s in the process of manifesting brings the energies of others to you as it’s in the process of manifesting. The energies, I guess, pull together until an experience completely fills in and we then experience it as “real.”

I realized that this dream had been a gathering of potential co-creators who are all in the process of manifesting something in their lives that was going to be really joyful. And that it centered around that writer’s retreat.

Over the years, I have taught some really gifted young writers. Writers who wanted to make that transition into being professional, selling their work, getting book deals or selling a screenplay, etc. I know what they’re up against and I try to be realistic with them about rejection if only to give them some emotional armor, but overall, I try to be as encouraging as I can possibly be. Because that part where you do have to be realistic is only the beginning part, and it is completely outweighed by what comes next, when things start to click and you do start to make sales, and get readers and start to develop relationships with publishers or producers or what have you. It absolutely does happen, especially if you’re a gifted storyteller. It absolutely will happen, if you stick with it.

And there is always that moment that arrives when, as a teacher, I cut them loose, because I know I’ve taught them what I could, that they need to go out and try their own wings, and that now I’ve become more of an editor than a teacher, and frankly I charge a whole lot more to edit you than to teach you. So off they go into the world.

I know they’re gifted. I know a gifted writer when I read one. I’ve worked with hundreds of writers over the years, and I’ve been blessed to have had so many close colleagues who were or are incredibly good writers. I can tell in less than a page of reading, if someone has the gift. But as far as younger students go, I have seen so many of them let the fear of failure that comes with those early rejection letters, turn into “I have to have a job to pay the bills and I need to focus on that right now.”

And then I know, sad as it is, that it’s as good as over. I don’t ever say it, but in my heart I know that they’ve opted for safety and conservatism because of fear. And now they’re going to get bogged down in responsibilities that will make everything about having a life of art be just that much more difficult.

I’ve never been about playing it safe, ever. I’ve always been wildly at the other end of that spectrum. I have lived most of my life in fear, things having nothing to do with my writing, but stemming from physical and sexual abuse, where I learned to feel that I was utterly alone and on my own from an early age. I can look on that as a gift now because it gave me stamina, and helped me develop a relationship with my idea of God that, in turn, taught me all about faith. The depths of faith. And also the depths of beauty in this world, and the blessings of kindness. And of course, underscoring all of that, the beauty of love among people who might not even know each other.

I have a deep appreciation for all those things about humanity because I’ve seen the other side of that and it’s just horrible. And so love and beauty and kindness become sacred, you know?

I really want to be in an atmosphere again where people are already in their craft, in that understanding of what they want to put into the world, past that point of fear or uncertainty, where art can really blossom or flow. And it was beautiful last night to realize that I’m not the only one who still wants that. All I have to do is set out that beacon and the writers will come.

For most of my adult life, I had projects that involved bringing tons of talented writers and artists together. The advent of the Internet was instrumental in letting that happen so fluidly. Other-Rooms.com, MarilynsRoom.com, and certainly the EAA were incredibly successful ventures in that regard. But they took over my life. They grew to be 24/7 endeavors and I had next to no time left for me. And certainly with the EAA, I came up against the laws and censorship stuff with this country’s Government. In the past, I had worked for publishers who either literally went to prison for publishing and distributing “pornography” or who’d had to spend a fortune fighting the Government in court. I know that it can happen and that was so much more than I’d bargained for, so I began to step back.

Even though the writer’s retreats will require a huge amount of work for me, since each separate retreat will also yield the publication of a book that I have to basically “curate” from start to finish, each retreat will be bracketed by “only 2 times a year,” at most. And I’ll still have the rest of the year for my own adventures. So I feel really, really excited about that.

Plus, I’m in the process of putting together with Valerie in Brooklyn some initial cover art for 2 of the books I have in progress right now (I do this to avoid, at all costs, any more covers that feature girls in their underwear.) Here they are as they stand right now.

Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse is a book I began writing in January. This one is graphically erotic, creative nonfiction. It pretty much is exactly what the title says it is.

And of course Blessed By Light. This is a novel about an aging, successful musician, grieving the unexpected death of his 2nd wife, falling in love again, revisiting the scope of his life and his career, and the specters of success, love, loss, despair, triumph and redemption, and what that has done to his family and to himself. It’s almost finished. It has a lot of erotic elements in it, but it is literary fiction. The cover art is still in the creative process. No lettering yet.

All right. I’m gonna get going around here and try to turn the energy of this day around, posthaste. I see that there’s a Red Hand Files newsletter from Nick Cave in my inbox and those are always incredibly interesting. Perhaps it will set the tone for his Conversation tonight in Hamburg, Germany! (Lucky Duck-sters!!)

Okay. Thanks for visiting, gang. I tried really hard not to listen to The Big Jangle this morning, in my efforts to adjust to this idea that Tom Petty is in fact dead. It was depressing – that absence of sound. I’m gonna have to re-think all of it , the whole 9 yards.

But I love you guys! See ya.