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.
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!
Well, this is just weird and I feel terribly guilty about it. But it was just too weird.
I wanted to see how that Town Hall theater in Dusseldorf was spelled, so I went to the LIVE section of the Nick Cave web site but the Dusseldorf event was gone, and then I saw, by chance or whatever you call it, that another show had been added in NYC, at Lincoln Center, for Saturday 9/21, when I will already be there in town.
So I clicked on it and saw that tickets were going to go on sale in 3 minutes. So for some reason, I clicked on the “tickets” button anyway, and the tickets were already on sale. And there before me was a little link that said: Get the best seat available, and so, out of curiosity, I thought, well, what is the best seat available? And so I clicked that link, too.
And it was like the best fucking seat. And it was available. And it was just so weird. No feeding frenzy. No nothing. Just an amazing seat in the 4th row of the Orchestra, sort of to the side. And I thought, what the fuck is this? A moment before this, I didn’t even know the concert was even happening.
So I bought the ticket. I clicked the link and they basically said, Here you go! Here’s your ticket.
And it just didn’t seem real.
And now I feel terrible, because some person out there is going to want at least one ticket for either show, and I now have 2 good tickets for both shows.
And I don’t really even understand how that happened.
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.
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.
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!)
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.)
Doris at the kitchen sink.
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!!
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
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.
Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse
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.
Blessed By Light
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.
It actually offends me less and makes about as much sense as most of the book covers I’ve been given over the last 30 years.
It’s a losing battle, though, one which I gave up fighting a long time ago. And except for Richard Kasak (a publisher who died quite a few years ago), I only got the covers I wanted when I designed the books myself.
And I only bring this up today because yesterday I was rudely awakened to something that really bothered me. (Yesterday was a big day for that kind of thing.) I was trying to investigate further this Neptune & Surf French audio book link I had seen because I wanted to write to my publisher in Paris.
I soon discovered it’s not really an “audio book.” Meaning, it’s not the entire book. It’s excerpts. Still, I’m pretty sure the amount of content included violates my contract. But I was soon overwhelmed by too many things that sort of “assaulted” me that I got depressed, gave up and said, I’m not dealing with this. Just let it go, Marilyn.
This particular French edition has been out for 8 years already and I had completely forgotten that the publisher changed the title of the book from Neptune & Surf to Sex in America. That had bothered me when it happened, even though, technically, I understood what the publisher was getting at, I still thought that it both: a.) only vaguely summed up what the book was about; as well as, b.) hugely overstated what the book was about.
Then they gave it this horrible cover, even though I had asked them not to give me a cover picturing a girl in her underwear. Technically, she’s in sparkly stockings and a necklace, so I guess she’s not really in her “underwear”. However, when I finally saw the cover back at my desk in America (where I was probably having Sex), it quietly enraged me, since I had specifically asked them, en francais!, not to do this.
Then, I remembered that they had deleted the novella, The Mercy Cure, from this edition because they thought that it was “too complicated.” This meant that this edition only contains 2 novellas, Gianni’s Girl (one of my most popular stories ever, about Italian bootleggers and a gang-rape in Chicago in 1927 – that’s so American, right? – but I was glad they didn’t tinker with that), and the novella Neptune & Surf – which they changed to Neptune Avenue. (And, yes, technically, that title is easier to grasp and perhaps makes more sense, but I gave it the title of Neptune & Surf for very specific reasons, mostly because the story was written for and dedicated to Holly and all of our wonderful years of hardcore debauchery together on Coney Island. The title means a lot to me and to her.)
But all of that taken together means that no one on earth would possibly connect Sex In Americawith Neptune & Surf unless they were psychic in some sort of seriously scary way.
Plus the price of the book – a mass market paperback (in French) containing two novellas – is almost 17 dollars! That seems crazy to me.
So that depressed me. I don’t like broken links in the chain of commerce and product identity.
(And it also bothers me that Little, Brown, in London, somehow managed to put out into the international search engines that “Marilyn Lewis” is the author of their digital edition of Neptune & Surf, even though, all over their website, I’m “Marilyn Jaye Lewis”, which makes a huge difference because there are about 500 billion women in the world named “Marilyn Lewis.” Yet another annoying broken link in the chain of commerce and product identity!)
Anyway, at the beginning of the digital reading, the French woman who reads the excerpts of Neptune & Surf (aka Sex In America) says very complimentary things about the book and about the caliber of my writing. Extremely kind things. Which was nice. Still, the whole thing is prefaced by the concept of: Good writing in bad books and about how this is sort of a dirty secret of publishing houses – this good writing in these bad books that are hidden in dark corners of bookstores. (All of this was said in French, by the way, which only made it sound more authoritative.)
I probably don’t have to tell you that this really upset me. Even though most of my books have sold well and have not been relegated to dark corners in bookstores. I of course understood the point she was trying to make and it’s a public conception that I’ve been up against throughout my entire career.
It’s upsetting to think that all these decades later, I’m still up against this. Yesterday was just not a good day for me. First, the entire universe seemed to want me to come to terms with the reality that Tom Petty is dead, and then come to terms with the reality that people will only find out that I’m a good writer if they happen to find themselves furtively lurking in the dark corner of a bookstore…
Plus that whole feeding frenzy over buying the Nick Cave ticket yesterday morning was also very disturbing to my equilibrium. (At Town Hall, it’s called Nick Cave Words + Music, btw, not Conversations with Nick Cave.) (I don’t think this means that he’s just going to say a bunch of words, and that he only saves actual “conversations” for people who aren’t American…)
Anyway, normally, I refuse to participate in stuff like that. I just can’t stand that feeding frenzy set up. And I’m sure this morning’s sale will be so much worse, since it’s the regular tickets.
Obviously, I want all of Nick Cave’s endeavors all over America to sell out. [UPDATE: Town Hall indeed sold out in under half an hour – Ed.] Loyal readers of this lofty blog are probably really tired of me bemoaning the fact that most non-big city Americans do not even know who he is. Still, I was so seriously tempted to just abort the whole thing yesterday, it was making me so insane:
CLICK, Oops! Sorry, that ticket’s gone! Try again! CLICK, Oops! Sorry, that ticket’s gone! Try again! CLICK, Oops! Sorry, that ticket’s gone! Try again!
Over and over and over. And it happens at warp speed. You’re watching all the little blue dots on the seating map disappear in nanoseconds. Jesus fucking Christ, you know? What is that? It’s one of the things I hate about doing stuff online.
I would not even do something like that for myself, if for some convoluted reason I had to buy a ticket to hear myself speak. I’m definitely someone who moves quickly to: Fuck this shit, and then goes back to whatever it was I’d been doing. But, alas. Not for Nick Cave having a conversation. (And in that movie, 20,000 Days on Earth, when we go with him to his “therapist’s” office? Oh my god! That was the most ingenious thing I ever saw in my life. I’d probably sell my house to afford a ticket to go to therapy with Nick Cave.)
I digress. I’m just saying, I don’t like that kind of thing – buying tickets in that fiercely competitive way. I feel like I’m being spiritually eviscerated by the Internet. And I don’t even have a question I want to ask him. Well, actually, I have an unending list of questions I want to ask him. Daily, I’m asking him questions in my head, from the moment I wake-up in the morning until I go to sleep at night, but these are not questions that would interest anyone else on earth. And a lot of the questions people do ask him are actually really, really cool questions. I’m actually very eager to hear what other people want to know.
So I stuck with it and got my ticket… And I’m happy, but the process sucked the life out of me for awhile.
So yesterday was a challenge. But I’m going to try to make today a lot better. This morning, at breakfast, I was once again listening to The Big Jangle (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, from the Playback collection) and just loving every moment of it, but also thinking, Man, these songs are over 40 years old. He died. Shouldn’t I be putting it to rest now? But the tears started to come again and I just can’t go there. I can’t. I have to shift gears and tell myself, He’s alive and well and only 30 years old and living inside my little tabletop jukebox.
And life, as it were, goes on….
Thanks for visiting, gang. Hope you have a perfect Friday wherever you are in the world! I love you guys. Seriously. I mean that. See ya.
Well It didn’t feel like Sunday
Didn’t feel like June
When he met his silent partner in that lonely corner room
That over looked the marquee
Of the Plaza All-Adult
And he was not lookin’ for romance
Just someone he could trust
[Chorus:]
And it wasn’t no way to carry on
It wasn’t no way to live
But he could put up with it for a little while
He was workin’ on something big
Speedball rang the night clerk
Said, “Send me up a drink”
The night clerk said “It’s Sunday man, …wait a minute
Let me think
There’s a little place outside of town that might
Still have some wine”
Speedball said, “Forget it, can I have an outside line?
[Chorus]
It was Monday when the day maids
Found the still made bed
All except the pillows that lay stacked
Up at the head
And one said, “I know I’ve seen his face
I wonder who he is?
And the other said, “He’s probably just another clown
Workin’ on something big”
I know, I’m hopelessly plebeian, but that is probably my favorite line from A Streetcar Named Desire.
I first read that play when I was about 15 and it was one of those lines that seared straight into my heart and I immediately put a lot of faith into those words ; God was going to somehow manage to be there for me, even if He was gonna wait until I really, really, REALLY needed Him before regaling me with that miracle at the 11th hour.
Of course, in the play, it’s all about a woman needing a man to take care of her and she thinks she’s finally getting one. That’s a concept that has always been, even at age 15, indescribably foreign to me. Why on earth would I want a man to take care of me? Then he would have the power to tell me what to do!
Even though I really love dominant men, I am definitely not the kind of person who responds well to being told what to do. It’s a strange, hazy, jagged sort of line, isn’t it? Not something that can be sorted out in a single, lighthearted blog post, I’m guessing. (It’s interesting to note, though, that I respond really well when someone puts actual thought into how best to subvert my churlishness by making something sound like a mere suggestion and not a mandate. My enormous ego assuaged, I can then do what you ask and still trot along happily behind you, my merry tail wagging away once more.)
However! Yes! I digress. That’s not at all what I was going to post about!
I was going to talk about Blessed By Light and how inserting a single clause within a sentence yesterday completely heightened the dynamic of what I had been trying to say for 3 days without understanding for 3 days what I was really trying to say!
The clause was “who now embodied everything I ever was in my youth” and it just made everything hit the stars, you know? I really just sat there and stared at the manuscript and went, Whoa. Where did that come from?
Hence, my Tennessee Williams’ line, Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly. Or the Muse. Take your pick. I lean more toward Muses than God. But it’s still a great line that often comes to me when I’m just really, really happy.
I only got 2 more pages written after that yesterday, because the phone calls that I knew were coming came and dealt with 2 other projects I’m working on and it set my mind off in other directions. Try as I did to reel my mind back in, it just never happened. But I still had just a beautiful night. I am just so happy with everything.
And the weather has been just incredible the last few days. It has made everything almost feel magical. I took a walk to the Dollar Store yesterday (the only store in the whole village except for the gas station across the road from it, where you can buy cigarettes, chewing tobacco, M&M’s and stuff, and nothing but the finest libations: beer and cheap wine, and windshield wiper fluid). And on my walk home, I was looking fondly at my house in the distance as it came ever closer, and I simply couldn’t believe how happy I was. All of my projects are just going so well.
I don’t define myself solely by my writing, but my writing does account for about 98% of how I look at myself. I don’t care if that’s a good idea or not; it’s just how it is. And when the writing is going well, all is right with my world. I have the best muses ever.
I still have to deal somehow with this explosion of stuff on the Internet, where people seem to be doing renewed projects with past books of mine, and I haven’t seen royalty statements from these publishers in a few years. I posted here recently about the interesting hardcover editions of a novel of mine that never came out in hardcover, but which are selling for $203 per copy. And then I noticed an audio book of Neptune & Surf! In French! How nice! Were you planning on ever telling me you had done that?? Methinks not! (But I have to write that letter en francais! so it’ll take a little while.)
So there’s still little headache-type stuff that I have to figure out how to deal with, but it’s all okay. Everything will work out.
Okay, in about 34 minutes and 44 seconds, I’m gonna get my ticket to see Nick Cave at Town Hall, and then I’m gonna get crackin’ here on Blessed By Light. [UPDATE: I got my ticket, a really good seat in the front of the balcony, dead center, but wow, what a feeding frenzy that was. The pre-sale tickets were gone in about 12 minutes. – Ed.]
I hope you have a really productive and happy Thursday, wherever you are in the world! (Assuming it’s still Thursday wherever you are in the world!)
I leave you with yet another really cool song from my breakfast-listening this morning. It’s from The Big Jangle – by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, 1978: Shadow of a Doubt (A Complex Kid). I really love this song. The melody is just great. And once you decipher all the lyrics, it’s so fucking singable! All right. Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you. See ya.
There goes my baby
There goes my only one
I think she loves me
But she don’t wanna let on
Yeah, she likes to keep me guessing
She’s got me on the fence
With that little bit of mystery
She’s a complex kid
And she’s always been so hard to figure out
Yeah, she always likes to leave me with a shadow of a doubt
Sometimes at night, I
Wait around ’til she gets out
She don’t like workin’
She says she hates her boss
But she’s got me asking questions
She’s got me on the fence
With that little certain something
She’s a complex kid
And she’s always been so hard to get around
Yeah, she always likes to leave me with a shadow of a doubt
Just a shadow of a doubt
She says it keeps me running
I’m trying to figure out
If she’s leading up to something
And when she’s dreaming
Sometimes she sings in French
But in the morning
She don’t remember it
But she’s got me thinking ’bout it
Yeah, she’s got me on the fence
With that little bit of mystery
She’s a complex kid
And she’s always been so hard to live without
Yeah, she always likes to leave me with a shadow of a doubt
Sybil is the girl up there on the book cover. Doomed to come into her hormonal peak in an era when most Americans were more comfortable with women being one-dimensional!!
(And I’m guessing that the author, “Joan Ellis,” was really a guy.)
But I guess it made for some good, solid reading. Yes, indeedy.
God knows, I was no stranger to these kinds of trashy paperbacks when I was young; they were just everywhere in the early 70s. Just everywhere. But I was not their target audience, that’s for sure.
Even though this era in erotic publishing in the US was sort of a “golden era” for the genre, it did absolutely nothing for me. And I was the horniest child imaginable, so it wasn’t that. It was the writing. It was not good! I was only 13 when I read Story of O and that was, like, from some other celestial realm. It took my breath away, it was so erotic.
For me, it all came down to the quality of the writing. It really did. I guess if you aren’t into dominant men (as I am and always have been, since about, I don’t know, age 6?), the quality of the writing might not mean anything at all to you. But I’ve known women who weren’t into dominant men, and women who weren’t even into men at all, who were still blown away by the writing in Story of O.
Wow. Well. that was certainly an unexpected tangent at 6:11am!
What I was intending to write about was something a little bit different. But not much.
Last evening, I finally did get some energy going. My brain connected. I had Chapter 21 of Blessed By Light open in front of me. I was tweaking some stuff already written there and feeling primed to get some new stuff down, and then suddenly Peitor texted me.
I don’t keep my ringer on when I’m writing but I do keep my phone on the desk, so I saw that he was sending text after text after text. Which always means something important is on his mind, so I looked at the texts. And then suddenly, Valerie in Brooklyn started texting me, too. She’s working on some sample cover art for me and I needed to hear from her, so I was trying to read that, too. And then suddenly my dad called.
All of this happened at once, completely at the same time, at around 7 in the evening. And no one had texted or called me all day. Suddenly, all my mental energy was re-routed toward my phone, which basically derailed any creative stuff getting written yesterday.
But the stuff from Peitor was really cool. He and a handful of creative people in L.A. (except for Peitor, I think the others involved are all women), anyway, they’re starting an artists’ retreat in Perugia, Italy.
Peitor lives a good portion of the year in Italy and England. And he agreed to take over this property for a friend in Italy and run it. And it’s amazing and really lovely. And it’s upscale, you know. Really nice. It can house & feed 60 artists at one time.
Peitor is a composer and producer, and he scores films and TV and stuff. And the women onboard are, like, award-winning photographers for National Geographic, and artists in other disciplines, and other writers, as well as TV & film executives. All based in L.A.
They are getting their opening programs together for when the retreat actually opens again, and Peitor texted and asked me if I’d like to try to oversee some sort of erotic writing program there. Not for beginning writers, but more for writers who specifically wanted to write in some sort of erotic vein and the end result is a book of collected stories or pieces that are erotic in some way and written during the retreat. So, overseeing a retreat in Italy, as well as a publication. (And, of course, wine is involved – the drinking of it, not the production of it!!)
And, of course, I was, like, YES!!!! with a zillion exclamation points. We then texted for over an hour, hashing out the details. So you can see why I never got back to the novel last night. My mind went off into this whole other realm.
I’ve taught writing before. It’s not an easy thing to do. And I was very picky about who I would take on as students, because it’s hard enough to help good writers become better writers. Trying to teach someone who thinks they kinda might like to write…that’s just not even in a ballpark that I know how to show up in.
So, I can see how an undertaking like this particular retreat could require an enormous amount of energy from me, directed at a lot of people at once, and people from all over the world. I speak French and a little Mandarin Chinese, but that’s it. Everyone’s gotta speak English, otherwise I’ll be useless. Yet, just because a writer might speak English, it doesn’t mean they’re thoughts slide together in the same way that a native speaker’s does, right? Still, I find the whole idea just really exciting, however it turns out.
But I think I totally passed out from exhaustion before 11pm last ngiht and then I was up at 4:11am, all excited about life and unable to fall back to sleep. Teaching that guy piano, and now this artists’ retreat in Italy. On top of all the other really cool projects I’m doing right this very minute. I was also lying there wondering what seat I’m going to get when the tickets go on pre-sale for Nick Cave at Town Hall tomorrow morning. I know I’m going to get “a seat,” but will it be the seat I want? What is the seat I want? Actually, the seat I want is, you know, on the piano bench right next to him, but I’m thinking that’s not actually a seat that’s being offered…
I finally got out of bed at 5am, went downstairs to merrily feed the many scampering cats. We listened to The Big Jangle by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers all during breakfast. What a great CD. (It’s from the Playback collection.) It has all of my favorites from that period when I was 18-21 years old. Gem after gem, and not one of them longer than 3 minutes. It’s pretty much: verse/chorus, verse/chorus, bridge, chorus, out. But just wonderful rock & roll songs! All of them infused with that intense attitude he had when he was young.
It all just made for a great start to another sunny spring morning around here.
(Oh, you’ll notice that I reloaded Boy, If You Want into the music player. This is a demo we made in my boyfriend’s bedroom, on his 8-track, in 1984. He was a drummer in a different band. We used his bass player and a lead guitar player that they knew. It’s just a demo, the sound quality on the acoustic guitar is terrible, but I always liked the demo, overall.)
Okay, on that note! I’m gonna get crackin’ around here on the novel because I know for sure I have 2 phone calls coming today that I need to take. I leave you with one of my favorite Tom Petty songs of all time! (Isn’t it everybody’s??!!) Here Comes My Girl, from 1978!!!
All right, gang. Thanks for visiting. I love you, guys. See ya!
Marilyn's Room 