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Don’t You Worry ‘Bout Me

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Well, from the sublime to the ridiculous — after all those mornings of not wanting to budge from bed until long after the sun was up, this morning, I was up and out of bed by 4:30. What the hell, right?

I guess just go with it.

I have a lot to work on today. Not only Letter #5 for Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse, but also Peitor and I are supposed to work on our script for a few hours this morning over the phone. (For our micro-short known variously as “Lita’s Gotta Go” or “Lita’s Got to Go” or “Leta’s Got to Go”, or the Swedish subtitle, “Lita maste ga.”)

Anyway.

Wow, Instagram sure was pink last night.

I didn’t stop working until about 10PM last night, and that was the first time I’d gotten on Instagram all day, and quickly discovered an ad campaign or Vogue layout or both for the Vampire’s Wife’s pink dress.

Then I awoke around 3am, thinking about that pink dress campaign and how it sort of has the feel of a visual offshoot of the Ghosteen album cover — soft, pink, harmless. Not that the album cover is pink but it does have pink in it and it does feel intensely harmless. Like it could be a mural on the wall of a child’s nursery. And it struck me that the two projects combined — the new album and its subsequent merchandising and upcoming tour, and the pink dress merchandising campaign — is not just the processing of grief, but inadvertently the merchandising of grief, on a huge scale.

You know how I ponder things, and sometimes I ponder things past the point of no return, because I certainly don’t want to see Ghosteen that way. But it is part of the job: you make the record, you have to tour, sell tickets, sell the merchandise, hopefully sell the record itself; earn your living (even a guy’s “gotta make ends meet/on Jubilee Street” right?).

The dress doesn’t really weigh on me as much. Although, I don’t support women’s fashion overall, whether it’s the puritanical conformity of the Vampire’s Wife dress, or the sort of horrific complicated torture chambers of Alexander McQueen’s fashions, and everything in between. I realize, at the bottom line, women’s fashion is really just about the mind of the designer, but the overriding consequence of “women’s fashion” still bespeaks of the trivialization (and sometimes the attempted annihilation) of the minds, unique identities, and bodies of women. You know, there’s just no way around the decades, and decades, and decades of that symbolism. I’ve always been attracted to style icons — Bianca Jagger in the 1970s rushes to mind — but an overall blanket of “women’s fashion” has always sort of repelled me (the primary reason I didn’t last long as a professional fashion model when I was in my late teens — my own agent, the man responsible for getting me employed, yelling at me in front of the entire office that if I didn’t like being treated like a piece of meat, I was in the wrong business. And he was right.). (And then my adoptive dad coming to town and taking me out to dinner and finding out that I was working as a professional fashion model: “If you want men to think you’re stupid, Marilyn, then being a model is the best thing to be.” Thanks, Dad.)

Well, anyway.

I do love where men’s fashions have gone in this current century, though. Men’s fashions used to be just as annihilating of a man’s psychological freedom, his spirit. And now, with magazine’s like Another Man especially, men’s bodies, their personae within the fashions, within the mise en scene, seem to have become liquid art. Just something so invigorating and uplifting to look at there. To my mind, at least.

But I’m digressing. I was just lying there at 3am today, thinking about Ghosteen and the necessary fact of having to merchandise it, and then wondering what on Earth that would really mean. Are you ultimately merchandising the death of a child? My mind can’t really even begin to go there. It was so disturbing. I’m hoping, of course, that the experience is something that helps audiences transcend some specific grief; find release, maybe? Not just be swept into some sort of oceanic abyss of emotion, being that it will be on that frenzied scale of a live concert. That ultimately uncontrollable emotional scale. (I’m guessing you can tell that I don’t go to concerts, either. They just have become this huge, unwieldy “thing”. A veritable sea of “too much.”)

Skeleton Tree felt so different to me, as a record. There was still a lot of grief there, but it did feel like individual songs. And even while they were equally abstract, there were songs that I could viscerally connect with in terms of my own life — “Girl in Amber,” “Distant Sky,” “Jesus Alone,” and “I Need You.”

Ghosteen just seems so sweeping and not as if it contains separate, individual songs that you can just sort of toss out there in a song lineup. And it’s just a devastating album — in its grief, its beauty, its overwhelming, abstract imagery.  It might be easier if it wasn’t a sort of “concept” album; if it wasn’t a sort of microscopic focus on the byproduct of emotional chaos brought on by a child’s death. But I guess that’s sort of obvious, isn’t it — it would all be so much easier if it wasn’t that. Jesus. I just can’t process what it means to create a (hopefully) cathartic work of art about grief, about life, love, death; and then have to, you know, “take it on the road!” and wear a pink dress.

Just forever and ever, right? The death of a child has been unbearable. Psalm 137 (KJV) springs horribly to mind — and that’s from twenty-five hundred years ago.

Oh god. Some mornings,you know,  life is just a wee bit stultifying.

But then I started thinking about David Byrne and how he has this really popular show on Broadway right now — American Utopia. I hope I get to see it. The Broadway cast album is out already, and it made me think of that Talking Heads song that I used to just love – “Don’t Worry About the Government”. Such simple times, you know? Early days in NYC. Life, even in its turmoil and awfulness, its drugs and booze and poverty and violence, was still new and still full of kinetic excitement for me and my friends. Daily.

But being in my early 20s, and being age 59 now — you can’t compare the two. You just can’t. There’s that pesky thing of experience fucking that comparison all up.

Still, it did make me go on YouTube at around 4am and play that song and realize that I still know every glorious word to it. And I remembered just how much that chorus meant to me, spoke to me, in those days.

Anyway. I gotta get started here. Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya!

“Don’t Worry About The Government”

I see the clouds that move across the sky
I see the wind that moves the clouds away
It moves the clouds over by the building
I pick the building that I want to live in

I smell the pine trees and the peaches in the woods
I see the pine cones that fall by the highway
That’s the highway that goes to the building
I pick the building that I want to live in

It’s over there, it’s over there
My building has every convenience
It’s gonna make life easy for me
It’s gonna be easy to get things done
I will relax along with my loved ones

CHORUS
Loved ones, loved ones visit the building,
take the highway, park and come up and see me
I’ll be working, working but if you come visit
I’ll put down what I’m doing, my friends are important

Don’t you worry ’bout me
I wouldn’t worry about me
Don’t you worry ’bout me
Don’t you worry ’bout me

I see the states, across this big nation
I see the laws made in Washington, D.C.
I think of the ones I consider my favorites
I think of the people that are working for me

Some civil servants are just like my loved ones
They work so hard and they try to be strong
I’m a lucky guy to live in my building
They own the buildings to help them along

It’s over there, it’s over there
My building has every convenience
It’s gonna make life easy for me
It’s gonna be easy to get things done
I will relax along with my loved ones

CHORUS
Loved ones, loved ones visit the building
Take the highway, park and come up and see me
I’ll be working, working but if you come visit
I’ll put down what I’m doing, my friends are important

I wouldn’t worry ’bout me
I wouldn’t worry about me
Don’t you worry ’bout me
Don’t you worry ’bout ME…

c – 1977 David Byrne

Quick Tuesday Afternoon Update!

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Okay, for reasons related to publishers, my short story “After Hours” has been removed from the above linked drop-down menu, From the Vault.

I replaced it with two other short stories, of a similar temperament (meaning erotic but not as hardcore as some of the stories in the vault).

The stories added are:

The Epicures : a previously published short story that eroticizes food and wine and that includes sexually graphic depictions of sex with food and eroticized simulations of childbirth, so squeamish readers should be forewarned.

August on the Lake: an erotic short story about fellatio and divorce. It originally appeared in French. I don’t think it appears in English anywhere, except here and in my collection The Muse Revisited, Volume 3.

I also decided, after a zillion months, to update the excerpt in the section above titled, Excerpt: The Muse Revisited. If you are the sole person left in the English-speaking world who has never read my short story, Anal, from 1994, here’s your chance to unburden yourself of that uncomfortable moniker!

But please be forewarned: The story contains sexually graphic depictions of anal sex that, even after all these years of being in print, will still not be suitable for all readers.

Okay! Back to your regularly-scheduled Tuesday programming!! And I’ll get back to mine!! See ya!

Image result for vintage drawings of naughty little girls getting spanked

Well! Now We Know Just How I Feel About That!!

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Yesterday was sort of magnificent.

Letter #5 for Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse began its transmigration from the ether to the page!! I was not really expecting it, so I was really excited.

It’s titled “Hymn to the Dark” and it begins with the idea that angels can be pretty dark, that they aren’t always about “hallelujah,” but that my Muse has shown me that the dark can sometimes be glorious.

So it goes to some beautiful  (& erotic) places.

The title came as a sort of play on Novalis’ famous Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night; Germany, 1800).

Novalis’ real name was Georg Friedrich Philipp, Freiherr von Hardenberg. He lived only from 1772-1801. And Hymns of the Night is an often heart-rending poem of grief that he wrote after his beloved Sophie died (very young) and then he died shortly after her, at age 29. They both had consumption.

The poem was a sensation when it was published in Germany in a literary magazine,  Athenaeum 3 (in 1800), and the poem heralded the birth of German Romanticism.

The book (it’s a long poem mixed with prose), is a staple of Divinity studies and so I’d read it when I was studying for the ministry.  But I think that Christian theologians only look at one specific segment of the poem and don’t really consider the entirety of what Novalis wrote. Even while he does do an uncanny job of capturing what the idea of Christ brought to masses of people who moved out of paganism and into monotheism and then needed to re-frame their idea of Death.

I’m making the poem sound scholarly, but it’s not; it’s really fluid and deep and beautiful. Still, Novalis has a really succinct grasp on how three different eras of Western humanity dealt with the loss & grief of death, and since it was still only 1800 A.D., he ends with the Christian era, nailing it precisely:

“No longer was the Light the seat of the gods or their heavenly sign — over themselves they drew the veil of Night. Night became the mighty womb of revelations — the gods drew back into it — and fell asleep, only to go out in new and more splendid forms over the changed world.”

But in the beginning of the poem, where he’s talking only about his own deep grief and deep loss, he is surprisingly modern and doesn’t represent traditional Christian thinking at all, so why Christians sort of seem to ignore that part is a bit of a question mark for me. But it’s that early, non-Christian, part of the poem that moves me most. Lines about how the secret heart remains true to the Night, where creative Love comes alive, and how we owe everything to that Love (and you can easily read several passages of it as implications of erotic love):

“Won’t Love’s secret offering ever burn forever? …Only fools misrecognize you… They don’t feel you in the grapes’ golden flood — in almond trees’ wonder oil — in poppies’ brown juice. They don’t know that it’s you hovering around a tender girl’s breasts making her womb heaven — and don’t suspect that, out of old stories, you, opening heaven up, come and carry the key to the Dwellings of the Blessed, quiet messenger of infinite mysteries.”

“Doesn’t all that inspires us bear the color of the Night? It bears you mother-like, and you owe all your magnificence to her. You’d evaporate inside yourself — you’d crumble away in endless space if she didn’t hold you, tie you, so that you became warm and, flaming, sired the world.”

His beginning premise seems to be that the Night saved him from his grief and returned his passion, as well as his lover, to him; that in the Night, he engages in some sort of erotic  coupling with her soul once more. And at the very end of the poem, he seems to be plainly speaking about it:

You come, beloved —
The Night is here —
My soul’s enraptured —
The earthly day’s past
And you’re mine again.
I look into your deep dark eyes,
See nothing but love and bliss
We sink onto the altar of night
Onto the soft bed —
The veil is gone
And, lit by the warm pressure,
There glow the pure embers
Of the sweet offering.

None of those sentiments are encouraged in true Christian theological mindsets. Unless, of course, you’re subversively dressing it up in the guise of how you feel about Christ. But Novalis isn’t talking there about Christ at all; he is plainly talking about Sophie’s soul coming to him at Night after her death.

Well. All right. I have truly digressed there. I only meant to say that Letter #5 of Girl in the Night is underway… And won’t it be fun!

Anyway, yesterday was wonderful and I’m thinking today might hold more of the same wonder. I will indeed make time to drive into town and buy groceries!! Yay! That’s always fun — having food in the house.

(And I did go to the gas station yesterday and I begrudgingly bought the smallest bottle of milk available. And then, while making my way to the counter to pay for it, I passed through the candy aisle.  I am not a big candy-eating person, at all. However. What to my wondering eyes should appear but a Kit-Kat bar in dark chocolate!! I did not know they made such a thing! I do love dark chocolate. So I bought the darn thing, and four-hundred-and-ten calories later!!!!!! I had eaten it in its entirety and it was incredibly good.)

Okay-doke, gang. Oh — Nick Cave sent out a Red Hand Files newsletter today. (Linked there.) But only read it when you truly have the time to contemplate his always-eloquent reply. If you hurry through it, you will only do yourself a disservice.

I am, of course, joking, This time, his reply was only 2 words long. (If you’d like to know which words, they are linked above.)

Okay. I’m gonna scoot!! Thanks for visiting, gang. I’ll leave you with something somewhat appropriate, somewhat not, for today’s ramblings.

This is the song I personally played (over & over) when I graduated from Divinity School (Magna Cum Laude, but on my heady way to nowhere because I just see Christ so darn differently than everyone else does.) It was in December, so it was around Christmas and this song was appropriate to the season. While I do not believe in transubstantiation, I do believe this is a truly beautiful (and beautifully sung) hymn. (It’s actually about Easter, but we sing it at Christmas…) Okay, I love you guys. Have a splendid day!! See ya!

Panis angelicus
fit panis hominum;
Dat panis caelicus
figuris terminum:
O res mirabilis!
manducat Dominum
Pauper, servus, et humilis.
Te trina Deitas
unaque poscimus:
Sic nos tu visita,
sicut te colimus;
Per tuas semitas
duc nos quo tendimus,
Ad lucem quam inhabitas.
Amen.

Three! No, Four (!!) No, FIVE!!! No, SIX!!! Cars Coming Right At You!

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Yes, that is currently me, in the happy intersection of life.

I have three projects, front and center on my plate. All of which call out for my attention; all of which engage and delight me: Tell My Bones rewrites;  Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse (erotic memoir letters);  and In the Shadow of Narcissa (memoir of childhood).

Then I added Thug Luckless to the stack of projects — a porn thing I’m writing that I really, really love but I’m basically writing it just to sell it.

Then, of course, Peitor and I got back on our writing schedule for Abstract Absurdity Productions.

And then I heard from Sandra last night that our other theatrical project, The Guide to Being Fabulous, is once again moving to the forefront in Toronto. (Translation: TONS of rewrites needed there, plus a trip to Toronto for an initial roundtable with the director and the producers at the theater.)

It’s like standing in an intersection and having 6 projects coming right at you, all of which make you really happy, and all of which require 100% focus, attention, concentration. But if you don’t make a decision immediately about which one to focus on, they are all going to run you over.

I think this is why I’ve been staying in bed a little later every morning, even though I’m still awake every day at 5:30 am.  Still going down to feed the cats, eat breakfast, listen to music at the kitchen table — in short, enjoying my peaceful little early morning solitude time. I then go back upstairs to meditate and then center myself by writing in my Inner Being journal thingie. And THEN — I go right back to bed and stare out the window.

Because, by then, it’s still only about 6:30 in the morning; it’s still dark out. There’s no imperative reason to get dressed while it’s still dark out and sit down at the desk and try to tackle that now daily question: which project am I going to focus on first? That daily question that is starting to make me insane. (In a good way, but nevertheless, insane.)

And undeniable proof that I’m staying in bed too long in the mornings is that this morning, I ran out of milk for my coffee!!!! I cannot drink black coffee, and so I never run out of milk. To me, that ranks as a terrible (albeit, First World) catastrophe: Snuggly fall morning in October, still in my PJs, still in my quiet pre-dawn place and suddenly out of milk for my coffee.

Fuck.

I only drive into town once a week to buy groceries. It’s 25 miles each way, so that’s an hour of driving. I drink organic milk, too, so that’s why I buy my milk in town. There is of course milk readily available at the gas station. Two minutes from here.  And even though it’s actual milk, you know; it works. It makes my coffee not-black. But still. Come on. I’m surrounded by farms here for miles and miles and miles. I want my organic milk. But the gas station is not going to carry that and yet only the gas station is open at that lowly hour of the morning… (Which reminds me, yesterday, I was out on the main road that heads out of town, where all the farms begin, and I actually saw a bull trying really hard to mount a cow who kept  sort of scurrying away from him — if cows can be referred to as “scurrying.” It was funny.)

But I digress. My point is that I did indeed run out of milk, which never happens, which tells me that I’ve been hanging out in bed too long, drinking way too much coffee…

But how do you prioritize projects when every single project you’re working on is something that makes you really inspired? Or feel fulfilled, or what have you. My brain gets sort of jumbled. And when that happens, stress sets in.

(I think I will blame my Muse, for being too intensely and wonderfully muse-like. But I’m not gonna shut off that valve, no matter what.)

So, here I sit. At my desk. Dressed. Black coffee in my enormous autumnal coffee mug. I have no clue what I’m going to work on first today. And the morning is already half-gone. (And I need to get my ass to the gas station and buy some fucking milk. Because black coffee sucks!!)

But I’m happy! So that’s cool.

And while I try to figure out what the heck I’m doing today, I leave you with my breakfast-listening music from this morning! I just love this song: “Crow Jane” from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, from something like a million years ago (or 1996 — something like that).

Thanks for visiting, gang. I hope Monday is just a really great day for you, wherever you are in the world!! I love you guys. See ya!!

“Crow Jane”

Crow Jane Crow Jane
Crow Jane
Horrors in her head
That her tongue dare not name
She lives alone by the river
The rolling rivers of pain
Crow Jane Crow Jane
Crow Jane Ah hah huh
There is one shining eye on a hard-hat
The company closed down the mine
Winking on waters they came
Twenty hard-hats, twenty eyes
In her clapboard shack
Only six foot by five
They killed all her whiskey
And poured their pistols dry
Crow Jane Crow Jane
Crow Jane Ah hah huh
Seems you’ve remembered
How to sleep, how to sleep
The house dogs are in your turnips
And your yard dogs are running all over the street
Crow Jane Crow Jane
Crow Jane Ah hah huh
“O Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson
Why you close up shop so late?”
“Just fitted out a girl who looked like a bird
Measured .32, .44, .38
I asked that girl which road she was taking
Said she was walking the road of hate
But she stopped on a coal-trolley up to New Haven
Population: 48”
Crow Jane Crow Jane
Crow Jane Ah hah huh
Your guns are drunk and smoking
They’ve followed you right back to your gate
Laughing all the way back from the new town
Population, now, 28
Crow Jane Crow Jane
Crow Jane Ah hah huh

c – 1996 Nick Cave, Martyn Casey

Yes! Coffee’s Ready!!!

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Yes, I confess!! I am blogging from bed again. My cup of coffee on the night table beside me once more.

A different cup, though. Still autumnal, but this one is really huge.  Requires fewer trips downstairs:

Enormous autumnal coffee cup requires that I leave the bed less!

 

I’m also  blogging in the dark (I only turned on the lamp to better regale you with the photo), plus I’m blogging without my glasses on and hoping for the best!

As much as I love summer and truly hate to see it end (grieve when it ends, is more accurate), I sure do get used to the quiet coziness of fall mornings in a hurry. I cannot emphasize enough how cozy my bed is in the dark, when there’s a little chill in the air.

Kevin is supposed to come by sometime today with his dad to come get his VW camper van from out of my barn.  It’s always so great to see him, if only for a few minutes! He is definitely a wonderfully quirky guy.  Just a delight to know. About 20 years younger than me. Born and raised out here in the Hinterlands.

The first thing he said to me yesterday was, “Are you still giving that guy piano lessons?”

Funny how, when someone is gone for a few months, their perceptions of you remain back in time. Alas, no; I’m not still giving that guy piano lessons. He did finally move to the new house and took his piano out of storage, but he also got a new girlfriend and she moved in with him and he wasn’t making any dedicated time to practice.  So sadly, it was really just wasting my time.

Regardless, though, it was enough time to help me reconnect with myself musically, so that was perhaps the hidden blessing within that whole experience.

But between all the writing projects and trying to learn Italian every day, my intellectual plate is kind of full. If I still had my own piano in the house and could teach here, without having to do all that driving, I would probably be able to be a little more tolerant of people not practicing enough between lessons. Otherwise, to me,  it just feels like a hobby for them, not something serious, and I end up thinking, “Jesus Christ, do you have any clue how busy I am?”

That said… this morning, as I was lying here, doing absolutely nothing besides drinking my coffee, I was reflecting on how incredibly great it feels to do absolutely nothing.  Just lie here. Even while I’m getting excited about Letter #5 of Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse forming on my inner horizon. I’m not sure yet what it’s going to be about; I can only feel a darkness to it and a depth. No words are forming yet. So I’m excited about all these things I’m writing, but it sure feels good to lie in bed for an extra hour or two in the dark and do nothing!!!

There has also been some interesting stuff going on regarding both of my adoptive parents. It has given me food for thought. I don’t actually know if my adoptive mother is still alive; I’m guessing she is.  But I’m also guessing that if she is dying, no one is going to rush to alert me because they wouldn’t want me to pop up and contest her Will. (Yes, I think that highly of all of them…)

Anyway, my adoptive dad has nothing to do with any of them, But I was lamenting this morning that my relationship with him has really begun to deteriorate again. Part of it is me just becoming this total emotional minefield now.  It doesn’t matter if he tries to be nice (in his own nearly unidentifiable way of being “nice”), I make sure to keep moving all the active mines so that he’s gonna step on one of them, no matter what.

I’m just awful. Like I’m not going to give an inch anymore. I’m just one big minefield, loaded with active mines that are constantly shifting around so that he can’t possibly make any headway with me at all right now.  Pretty much everything he tries to say to me is WRONG. I don’t know if I’ll stay like this forever, but it’s definitely who I am with him right now.

Okay, well. On that cheery note!!! Have a great Sunday, wherever you are in the world. It is of course Tom  Petty‘s birthday today.  Have some cake or something, okay?

(From before he even moved to LA — a really long time ago!)

Okay, I love you guys! See ya.

It Seems That Things Are Getting Better!

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It is a really glorious October day here today.  I’m feeling a little more centered than I’ve felt in well over a week. Balanced, I guess.

Yesterday’s work with Peitor, over the phone, was really just great. Not only productive, but also it was really so much fun going over the script and all our notes for the script and both of us being kind of amazed by it. Some of it is intense, but on varying levels, all of it is funny.  We hadn’t worked on the script since July, so it was just fun to realize just how much work we had already gotten done on it before life went off in various intense directions.

It was also just great to be working with Peitor again and not feeling so isolated. I love writing, and I usually don’t mind that I have to be alone while doing that. But sometimes I really do feel intensely isolated. So it was great to be creative but have someone to laugh with, too.

And the movie is going to be so fucking cool even though it will only be about 8 minutes long.

Okay.

Well, tomorrow would have been Tom Petty’s 69th birthday so there are memorial concerts all over the country for him this weekend and the proceeds go to his 2 favorite charities in LA — mission charities that help the homeless and homeless children, and maybe homeless addicts, or something like that. I don’t really remember the exact charities. But a lot is going on.

I am doing incredibly good about all this. Only an occasional twinge of sorrow and then only when I think of him from the late 70s & early 80s — sometimes that whole Tom Petty era really still gets to me. The loss of that. His incredibly intense and wonderful youth. But overall, I’m good.

Both of his daughters are in my Instagram feed but I don’t usually pay too much attention to either of their feeds because they are both very intense, outspoken women — both artists and extremely political.  I usually find both of them a little disarming. But for some reason, it feels rude to just unfollow them. But this weekend, one of them posted just some horrific stuff involving animals in peril, it was just awful, so disturbing. So I’m guessing she’s still having some really deep issues about her father’s birthday & his death. (Last year, she was intense, as well, but not in this horrific way.) So very public. All of it. I’m sure that has got to make everything so much harder to process.

But right at this very point in time, I’m coping with all my own issues of loss. I really am. I’m feeling that sense of perspective that’s calmer or perhaps more accepting of things? And not just various deaths, but other issues of loss that I’ve had to confront over the last few (extremely difficult) years, especially revolving around my adoptive mother. All of it is easing up now. It really is.

All right. Well I’m gonna scoot. Thanks for visiting, gang. I leave you with two things. A photo of Tom Petty with his granddaughter shortly before he died:

Tom Petty In LA with his granddaughter, Everly.

And a great song of his off of Damn the Torpedoes, their breakout album from 1978.  This is a live  version from that time period, in London, but Tom sings  his original lyrics to the song. On the album, Jimmy Iovine, the producer, made him get rid of the drug references.

All righty! Enjoy what’s left of Saturday, wherever you are in the world, gang. I love you guys. See ya.

 

Just One of Those Days

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(MINI UPDATE:  I forgot to mention that Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds will be going on tour in support of their new album, Ghosteen, beginning in April 2020 !! One thing that fills me with an inordinate amount of relief is that I don’t have to try to buy a ticket to any of that madness… However. Tickets begin going on sale next Friday.)

Okay. Back to the original post…

I have to say that, as much as I love and utilize Amazon when buying so many things, when it comes to people making money off of my allegedly out of print books, it makes me want to tear my hair out.

Well, my hair is perhaps one of my more outstanding features, so it makes me want to do something else equally frustrating. Not sure what.

And I’m not talking about anyone selling those used “collectors” copies of my old paperback books that frequently fetch hundreds of dollars (as opposed to the $7.95 – $12.95 it originally cost when the publisher published it.) I’m talking about people who are selling brand new copies of books of mine that are out of print, that allegedly sold out of their print runs a long, long time ago. Sometimes, as in the instance I mentioned here before, early in the summer, someone is selling hardcover editions of When the Night Stood Still — one of my out of print books that never came out in hardcover. Ever.

And the way that particular title is distributed is stupidly complex so it becomes impossible to figure out who is actually selling it. And I’m guessing it’s being published by print on demand.

Two things really confound me. One is: Why that particular title? It wasn’t my worst book, but it’s not like it’s a book that flew off the shelves (in 2004, no less). So that confounds me. Why only that particular title? A real mystery to me.

The other thing that confounds me — and I’m not going to say which title it is because I don’t want anyone else to go flocking to it and buy it — but the title is ranking decently in sales in a couple of different Women’s Books categories on Amazon. (Another book of mine that was published in 2004.) That one really irks me because, if it’s showing up in sales rankings, someone is actually making money there.

In both of these instances, the true publishers have been out of business for years. And nowadays, it is so easy to scan and then “publish” a book by printing it on demand.

In other instances — involving eBooks of mine that are published by huge publishing houses — I see now that they’ve dropped their prices drastically on certain eBook titles of mine and that is of course cutting into sales of similar eBook titles that I publish myself. (in other words, they’re drastically underselling me.)

It is just so fucking frustrating. I try not to focus on it, you know. Just keep moving forward and put my energy in that forward direction and not look at life through the rearview mirror — and I guess just be appreciative that people still want to read these really old books… grumble grumble grumble

All righty. That’s my rant for today. My phone chat with Peitor is happening here momentarily, so I’ve got to get into the headspace of script-writing and out of the headspace of frustration. I was glancing over the script thus far and realized that I recall next to none of the details, so I need to really go over my notes before the phone chat.

I want to mention quickly, though, that none of the cats have gotten to the palm tree!! I did see that a copy of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems was lying on the floor this morning, so obviously one of the cats attempted to get near the tree and gave up when a book fell down on them. So, it’s working!! Yay!!

Okay. I’m gonna scoot. And try to reclaim this frustrating morning. I hope you have a happy Friday, wherever you are in the world!! Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya.

New Coffee! New Morning!

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Yes, it’s another one of those slow-starting mornings. I’m still in bed, a cup of coffee next to me on the night table. I’m just lying here, staring out the window at the intensity of another lovely October morning.

Cloudy. The wind blowing the autumn leaves into a swirl.

I’m blogging from bed so I’ll be brief. Got my plate super full again so I’m trying to conserve my brain power. Working on both Thug Luckless and Tell My Bones pretty much at the same time. And one project is pure porn, the other is pure poetry. And then on my inner horizon last evening, I saw that Letter #5 for Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse was  taking shape!! And tomorrow morning, bright & early, Peitor and I get back to work on our micro script for Leta’s Got To Go, the first micro short that we’ll be producing for Abstract Absurdity Productions.

Yeah, so. Getting out of bed this morning was a little delayed.

Oh! I had a dream about Nick Cave last night. You know how, whenever I dream about him something about it comes in duplicate, plus the dreams are always utterly indecipherable?  Plus I always wake up immediately after the dream so it’s always really pronounced in my mind, which makes their indecipherability all the more frustrating.

This time I dreamed that there were 37 things he was willing to do on the train, but 37,000 things he was willing to do in the other place.

And there you have it. The dream in its entirety. I woke up at around 4:30 with that hovering in my brain and thought, oh my god, what the heck does that mean??!! It was sort of anxiety-inducing, my inability to make sense of it, least of all, at that early hour.

It might have something to do with Ghosteen, I don’t know. But yesterday I couldn’t let go of that song “Hollywood.” It is just so haunting. (I still think I shouldn’t link it here but it is on YouTube.)

All right. I’m gonna close and try to figure out how best to focus this day — in which direction: porn or poetry?  Have a wonderful Thursday wherever you are in the world. Thanks for visiting! I love you guys. See ya.

The corner where I live, this time last October.