All righty!! The Labor Day holiday is here! The last gasp of summer is upon us!
I noticed quite a few cars heading off to work this morning, around 5:30am. So I guess a number of my neighbors are working on this fine American holiday that’s supposed to celebrate not working!
Ah, well.
I’m working, too, of course! But yesterday, I finally finished that segment of the play that I’d been struggling with for over 2 weeks, sent it off to the director in NYC, and he really loved it. And I actually do, too.
I finally, finally nailed it. And it only amounts to a lowly 2 and a 1/2 pages (!!), but it’s a story arc that shifts us from joy into something dark and turbulent, and none of it takes place in real-time; it all takes place within a painting within a dream. So it just took me forever.
The next segment is tragic, but I have a grasp already on how I want it to play out. So I’m feeling really good. I don’t mind working my life away.
And speaking of working our lives away… this morning, Nick Cave announced a million more Conversations in Europe for January 2020 !!!
Or maybe just 8? Whatever the true number, more Conversations are coming in January. However, I’m still not seeing Crazeysburg on that list of upcoming shows, and we are only a hop, skip, and a jump (and a jump and a jump and a jump and a jump and a jump and a jump and a plane and a bus ride) from let’s say, Germany… and there are at least 14 people here who would likely be willing to brave the January weather and make that 3-block trek in the ice and snow to our humble Town Hall… I guess 14 people will simply have to wait for Providence to shine upon them some other time.
Okay, gang. If you’re Stateside and having a cookout today, or going to the lake, or any of those really fun & cool things that I will once again not be doing, have a really great time!! Thanks for visiting! I leave you with what I was listening to this final morning of summer… a true heartbreaker, as we say goodbye to what we long for. But so very lovely. I love you guys! See ya!!
“Que La Vie Était Jolie”
Que la vie était jolie
Près de toi au long des jours
Aujourd’hui tout est fini
Dans les bras d’un autre amour
Au matin s’en est allé
Celui que j’ai tant aimé
Et je pleure sans espoir
Sans espoir de le revoir
Je voudrai ne plus penser
A la joie à nos baisers
Malgré tout j’entends sa voix
Qui me dit tous ces mots-là
Mes amis ont essayé
De m’aider à oublier
Mais je reste sans désir
Je suis triste à en mourir
Une fille est à son bras
Y’a pas longtemps, c’était moi
C’était moi qui l’embrassais
Et j’y croirai à jamais
Que la vie était jolie
Près de toi au long des jours
Aujourd’hui tout est fini
Mais je t’attendrai toujours
Okay, gang. I don’t think I can really post much here over the remainder of the holiday. I’m really, really pressed for time with the rewrites on the play.
If I don’t return soon, then have a great holiday weekend if you live Stateside!
Only one photo out of Iceland last night from the Conversation there with Nick Cave. So either the people in Iceland are really well behaved, or truly iconoclastic and they shun things like Instagram. So, only one photo (but a nice one!). And yet still people keep posting from Helsinki…
Anyway!
Okay, I gotta scoot!! And as always, if you’re heading out for one last summer vacation, take one for me!! I love you guys. See ya!
For whatever reason, the gods decided I would suddenly start listening to old Bruce Springsteen albums yesterday.
It began yesterday afternoon, when I hit that wall while working on Tell My Bones and needed to just collapse on my bed for a few minutes and try to stop overthinking.
Stopping the overthinking is pretty much an impossibility for me. What I do is find some new thought stream where I can start overthinking about something else. But I always pretend that I’m going to just relax and stop overthinking…
But when I do collapse and try to stop thinking, I usually like to listen to music and suddenly that old Springsteen album, The River, fell into my field of vision in my Amazon stream.
I used to really love Bruce Springsteen. Ohio in the 1970s was huge Springsteen territory and he toured Ohio relentlessly back then. I saw him many times. The River was the last album to come out while I was still living in Ohio, and it came out right at that juncture where I moved to NYC. So for me, The River is oddly both filled with Ohio memories and very early memories of NYC.
It was never my favorite album of his. I liked a handful of the songs on it and that was it. (It’s a double-album, so there are a lot of songs on it.) And the titular song, “The River”, reminded me way too much of what life felt like in Ohio, and so I just played the album less and less as life went on in NYC, and then amazing albums like Nebraska and Born in the USA came out, and I never played The River again.
Well, I scrolled through the song titles in The River yesterday and saw that I recognized quite a few of them, had no recollection of some of them, but when my eye hit “The Price You Pay,” I stopped and thought, I’ll play this. I don’t remember it, but I know that I used to really love it.
That song goes back almost 40 years now. I usually play my music really loud, and yesterday was one of those days. So I flopped down on my bed, stared up at the ceiling and the song began playing, overtaking my room, and it was, like, holy fuck; this song is my whole goddamned LIFE.
Suddenly, everything I had lived since 1980 sprang into clear view, and then every girl I had been and every dream I had had in the 1970s jumped in there, too. And I realized that I did manage to live all my dreams to one extent or another, and I did sacrifice so fucking much in order to do that and I did pay a huge price for it; specifically, I got 2 divorces and never got to have any children. The scope of my life felt sort of devastating. Not necessarily in a bad way, but certainly in an overwhelming way.
You know, my life has been extremely hard. But only because I have always refused to let myself be squished down and pushed into some sort of box. I have always just seen life the way I see it, and I have always felt the need to express the way I see my own life, and usually that has wound up making a lot of people feel really challenged and uncomfortable. And then of course that often used to make me feel bad, but I couldn’t see how I could be anybody else but myself.
And the repeated sexual assaults and the rape stuff happening to me while I was in school — that stuff was directly related to the type of person I was, someone who just couldn’t back down. Even though it would have made my life so much simpler. And it just built up after Greg died. Right after he died. None of those boys gave a fuck that I was dying from grief inside; they only saw me as a girl who wasn’t a virgin. They would not leave me alone. And I’ve always been the type of person, even if I’m scared to death, I will always speak up for myself and defend myself. And that just pissed them off more until everything just blew up, in a horrible way.
But I always got back up somehow and was just still myself.
Still, pretty quickly, I learned to just accept that, for some reason, being myself meant that the stakes were always going to be high. Even in my final year of high school, when Greg had been dead for 3 years already, some muscle-bound jock in the hallway at school told some other jock, “That girl’s a whore.” So I said, “You’re an asshole,” and it made him look like a total idiot. Even though I knew there was a 50-50 chance that that type of guy would find me after school and rape me, too, and that thought actually did scare me; I wasn’t a whore and he was an asshole and I was not going to not defend myself. In the hallway at school, no less.
Anyway. That type of attitude was underlying everything I was once I got to New York and started to have my real life. I know that my life could have been so much simpler if I could have learned how to turn a blind eye to things, or to back down even a little bit. And I’ll tell you, I would have loved to have had a simpler life. Many’s the time when I was deeply wishing I wasn’t me. Times like when my trust fund was removed, or when I was disinherited all over the place. But lack of money isn’t going to make me become someone else.
Whatever. I can’t help it. I’m still just me. But now that I’m inching toward the closing chapters of my life, I see that there was indeed a price to pay. I’m guessing I still would have lived my life the way I did, even if I had known all of the consequences beforehand.
Also, yesterday, Dana Petty posted 5 very short videos of Tom Petty at Fenway Park in 2014. I watched it a couple times because it was sort of transfixing. First, they were alone in the limo, approaching the stadium and he was so quiet, so introspective. Just staring out the window. He was 64 years old at this point. She said something to him and he really quietly, distractedly, said “Yes.” That was it. Then they got out of the limo and the Heartbreakers were already there and no one even said hello to him; just silence. Then some other backstage footage, then him onstage in front of tens of thousands of people, singing, “She was an American girl, raised on promises,” and the crowd going crazy. Then him coming off the stage and he was wired; just full of adrenaline, chatty, smiling, joking, posing for very quick photos with security people, then getting on his bus. For a split second, Dana caught his face at an angle where I totally saw the young Tom Petty, from when he was maybe 30, back when he was such a rambunctious fighter. Just a flash of it– right there in his face when he smiled. It broke my heart. I saw the whole thing, you know, in a flash: He was 30, then he was 60, then he was dead.
Almost 2 years now since he died. For me, now, it feels like his whole life was just some movie I saw that I really loved. It feels almost like he never really existed. He was a dream I had or something; one that I dearly loved. So much grief has shifted inside me and has slowly become something else. When I play his records, it gets very dicey for me; I never know when all those old feelings will surface in a sort of tsunami of love and loss. And it occurred to me that it has got to be so hard for Dana Petty to grieve normally because social media can just make everything remain so immediate. She’ll post some sort of photo or footage of him that is remarkably interesting or beautiful, and then thousands of people will immediately “like” it. That dopamine rush of social media, you know? Those crippling feelings of grief and of loss, and then you post your grief out into the world and then have thousands of total strangers “like” it in the space of a heartbeat.
How can you really process any sort of loss in that atmosphere? I don’t know. It all seems so strange.
Okay. I’m gonna get started here this morning. The director texted last night, wanting to see the new pages, so I have to focus. Have a great Saturday, wherever you are! The Conversations with Nick Cave resume tonight in Iceland! That should be cool (no pun intended), assuming that people who live in Iceland are rule-breakers, that is, like those folks in Helsinki were, and they post to Instagram when they’re not supposed to!
All righty! Thanks for visiting. I leave you with an opportunity to consider the price you pay. I love you guys. See ya!
“The Price You Pay”
You make up your mind, you choose the chance you take
You ride to where the highway ends and the desert breaks
Out on to an open road you ride until the day
You learn to sleep at night with the price you payNow with their hands held high, they reached out for the open skies
And in one last breath they built the roads they’d ride to their death
Driving on through the night, unable to break away
From the restless pull of the price you payOh, the price you pay, oh, the price you pay
Now you can’t walk away from the price you pay
Now they’d come so far and they’d waited so long
Just to end up caught in a dream where everything goes wrong
Where the dark of night holds back the light of the day
And you’ve gotta stand and fight for the price you pay
Oh, the price you pay, oh, the price you pay
Now you can’t walk away from the price you pay
Little girl down on the strand
With that pretty little baby in your hands
Do you remember the story of the promised land
How he crossed the desert sands
And could not enter the chosen land
On the banks of the river he stayed
To face the price you pay
So let the game start, you better run you little wild heart
You can run through all the nights and all the days
But just across the county line, a stranger passing through put up a sign
That counts the men fallen away to the price you pay, and girl before the end of the day,
I’m gonna tear it down and throw it away
I am just in the most amazingly blissed-out mood this morning.
The weather here in Crazeysburg is perfect. Just unbelievably perfect. Cool, but still warm enough to have all the windows open – yay!!
When I finished meditating, I opened my eyes and discovered that I was looking out a section of the window where I could just see the sun coming up through the leaves of my maple tree. Just absolutely dawn beginning, you know. And I don’t mean this Dawn, either. Although there is nothing at all wrong with them!
But just to see that sun coming up right at that moment, you know? It made my heart smile.
I think today is going to be a really good start to a peaceful holiday weekend around here. Stateside, we celebrate Labor Day on Monday. Labor Day used to be a holiday celebrating Labor Unions, but now it’s more of a holiday that celebrates shopping and, thus, all those non-Labor Union workers are forced to work!
When I was a wee bonny lass growing up in Cleveland, holidays were holidays and nobody worked. Cleveland was what was called a Blue-Collar town; lots of strong (rather corrupt) labor unions, and so lots of holidays, including Sundays. On Sundays, Cleveland shut down, except for gas stations and an occasional restaurant. It was a day for going to church and then being with your family.
It is kind of amazing how hugely that has changed in this country and gone to the extreme side of commerce and consumerism, but far be it from me to try to turn back that tide.
I don’t know if it’s still like this in NYC or not, but, in a similar vein, it used to be that if you didn’t go to the liquor store in NYC before it closed on a Saturday night, you would be booze-less all day Sunday. Now, at least around here, you can buy booze on Sundays, but most places make you wait until after 12-noon. You know, give the churches half a chance to dissuade you…
Well, I seem to have digressed!
Yes, a holiday weekend is upon us and I know I don’t have to tell you how I am going to spend mine, right??!! Working on the play! Every free fucking minute.
I did get into a very interesting place with it yesterday — I’m still in this really difficult segment that I have been in for something like 2 weeks already. And, yes, the director has since gone back to NYC. But he has still been very supportive and patiently focusing on that “one step at a time” idea. (Whereas, I focus on the “goddammit,why can’t I write this fucking play???!!” idea.)
But yesterday, I found my way into some dialogue that was finally resonating for me, so I’m hopeful that I have at last really found my way in. The overall, arching premise is there, because, as you perhaps recall, I have already written this play 17 hundred times!! But the characters have little to no depth in regards to the new dialogue. So that is where I am hoping to have my breakthrough.
I talked with Valerie in Brooklyn for awhile yesterday, and she was experiencing the same shock & sadness regarding the summer being over and not being ready for it yet. And she concurred that July flew by in a mere heartbeat. So it made me feel kind of better about how I’ve been feeling over here. You know, now I know I’m not alone in this melancholy over the fleeing of summer.
Oh! I had an interesting dream about Nick Cave last night. He wasn’t physically in it; he had sent me 3 things. My favorite of the 3 being a bowl of macaroni & cheese. It was in a really round, white bowl. And it was made with white cheese instead of orange cheese, so a lot of whiteness was going on there. But it was hot and I was really happy, because macaroni & cheese is probably my favorite thing in the world. And he had sent me 2 identical videos, compilations of stuff, and the videos were digital streams but I could still hold them in my hand. However, I woke up before watching the 2 videos, or even eating the mac & cheese.
Still, I thought that was interesting and I have no clue what it could have possibly meant. And, you’ll notice, that once again there is that duplicate thing happening — I posted a couple months ago about how, when I dream about Nick Cave, there are always 2 of the very same thing in the dream. Last time, he emailed me 2 really large panes of glass in the shape of Australia. And this time, 2 digital videos that were the same.
And on a related note!! Not a whole lot came out of Norway last night on Instagram. And only one of the posts was in black & white this time, so, clearly, last time they were doing that excessive “posting in black & white” business on purpose– you know, to specifically drive me crazy. I’m going to try to not hold it against them as an entire country, though.
And people from Helsinki are still posting. They seem to have just had an amazingly amazing time. I’m not being facetious, either. And the photos from inside the theater itself looked really cool — stairways that seemed to be lit up and looking like they went off in interesting directions to nowhere; M.C. Escher-like. (I know!! It’s so hard to believe that I’m writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning play while still finding time to endlessly ponder the stairways of theaters I will never visit in my lifetime that are thousands of miles away!!)
All right, gang! I’m going to close and get to work around here. I leave you with this!! It’s actually a really great pop song, gang! You should listen to it!! I’m posting it only because of the aforementioned thing up there. I hadn’t actually thought about the song in decades,but I used to just love it. And so I just played it and discovered that I still love it!
(And while playing it, I recalled, vividly, that I was watching the Tony Orlando & Dawn Variety Show on TV that night that I was babysitting in the swinging 1970s apartment complex when I was 14 and the dad came home early, wanting to fool around. That was the time I called my 16-year-old girlfriend, to see if she wanted to come over and fool around with him instead, because he creeped me out and I just wanted to go home. And so she did.) (And I remember her standing under my bedroom window, later that evening, and tossing pebbles up to it so that I would come to my window. And I did. It was summertime. We weren’t in school. And she told me that they’d fucked on the living room floor and then the mom came home early, but they didn’t get caught. But she said that the mom & dad got in a fight anyway because the mom came home and found a different babysitter! I mean, my girlfriend actually called all that out to me, out loud, up to my window. What a weird era that was. And I don’t know if I said it out loud or only thought it, but I do remember being appalled that they had sex while his kids were sleeping upstairs.)
(This is also the same girl I posted about several months ago, where we got arrested and taken to jail that same summer and her dad blamed me. He blamed me for everything she did. I’m not overstating that in the slightest. Every time that guy laid eyes on me, he wanted to kill me.)
Anyway. I leave you with a really cool song this morning that has some really unexpected memories. Enjoy!! Thanks for visiting, gang! I love you guys. See ya!
“Candida”
The stars won’t come out
If they know that you’re about
‘Cause they couldn’t match the glow of your eyes
And, oh, who am I
Just an ordinary guy
Trying hard to win me first prizeOh, Candida
We could make it together
The further from here, girl, the better
Where the air is fresh and clean
Hmm, Candida
Just take my hand and I’ll lead ya
I promise life will be sweeter
And it said so in my dreams
The future is bright
The gypsy told me so last night
Said she saw our children playing in the sunshine
And there was you and I
In a house, baby, no lie
And all these things were yours and they were mine
Whoa my, Candida
We could make it together
The further from here, girl, the better
Where the air is fresh and clean
Hmm, Candida
Just take my hand and I’ll lead ya
I promise life will be sweeter
And it said so in my dreams
And, oh, who am I
Just an ordinary guy
You know, I’m trying hard to win me first prize
Oh my, Candida
We could make it together
The further from here, girl, the better
Where the air is fresh and clean
Whoa my, Candida
Just take my hand and I’ll lead ya
I promise that life will be sweeter
And it said so in my dreams
It was with great joy that I watched the trash collectors collecting my trash yesterday. Honestly, it helped me feel a restoration of sanity around here, knowing that I had paid that fucking bill. And the 2 other bills that had crept up “past due.”
What a weird feeling that was last week, when they didn’t stop to collect my trash. Sort of the confirmation that I was really soaring off into La-La Land around here. That is the cheapest bill I have, too. Something like $9 a month. Anyway. That felt good; watching the trash go.
I’ve also acquiesced to the window-closing thing that I have to do around here now. I close a few of them late at night and then just open them again mid-morning. Just like a normal person would do.
It was 54 degrees Fahrenheit when I got out of bed today. Honestly, at any other point in my life, I would be rapturously rejoicing over this perfect weather, you know? It’s just this darn deadline for the play that makes me feel as if summer passed me by. And it also occurs to me that next August, when it’s back to being 102 degrees when I get out of bed in the morning, I will be wondering: why the fuck didn’t I enjoylast August’s perfect weather when I had the chance??!! So I’m trying to do that while I have the chance.
Then I also did all the paperwork for my TSA Pre-Check, and will go for my interview on Tuesday. Yes, behaving like a human being who flies in airplanes again. I’m trying really hard to just be normal.
(And I also applied for that special International Customs dispensation, that removes any traces of internationally-known pedophiles who attached themselves uninvited to one’s illustrious pornography career. It only costs an additional 17 thousand dollars, but I felt it was worth it!) (I am, of course, kidding about that. There is no special International Customs dispensation for that. Instead, I opted for the Special Notarized Document showing that I did everything the FBI asked me to do so please leave me alone now. That only cost me an additional $2, so I opted for that.) (I am of course kidding about that, too.)
What I am doing, though, is just trying to let everything go. And fly in airplanes again and stuff like that. I realize that being out of my mind half the time is just part of my charm, but it sure gets tiring.
And I have also discovered that I don’t really like those new hair-volumizing products from France that I posted about recently. They smell great and they do give me volume at the roots, but like most hair products that allegedly give one’s hair volume, they make the rest of my hair super frizzy. I can’t stand that. So rather than get rid of all my mirrors, I’ve decided that I’m once more going back to my tried & true Avalon Organics. Honestly it’s the only stuff that works. (If you don’t have untreated silver hair, let me tell you, it’s really frizzy. It’s nothing at all like the hair you had as a wee bonny girl — or even as a wee bonny 30-year-old.)
(Me, as a wee bonny 30-year-old. Say goodbye to that hair forever.) (Heavy sigh)So, even though I have not yet cleaned my house (and this is really just getting beyond ridiculous, gang — the dust and the cat hair — but I know I will have to clean it top to bottom before I go to NYC because my birth mom will be staying here to take care of the cats and I don’t want her coming in my kitchen door, seeing the disaster and then turning around and leaving. Actually, what she would do is clean my house and I don’t want that, either.).
But anyway, aside from my house needing to be cleaned, I am really starting to feel like a regular person again. Even though I’m still working on rewrites of the play.
And of course, on that happy note, I’m gonna get back to it. I leave you with my breakfast-listening music, the song about the Lime Tree Arbor. A beautiful song. I’ve been playing The Boatman’s Call since Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files newsletter the other day. I guess it’s an appropriate album to listen to as summer departs. (His Conversations will be back in Norway tonight. We’ll see if the Norwegians continue to post pictures to Instagram in black & white, or if that other time was just done specifically to drive me mad…)
Okay! Thanks for visiting, gang. I gotta get moving here. Have a really nice Thursday, wherever you are in the world!! I love you guys. See ya!
“I Do Love Her So (Lime Tree Arbour)”
The boatman calls from the lake
A lone loon dives upon the water
I put my hand over her
Down in the lime tree arbour
The wind in the trees is whispering
Whispering low that I love her
She puts her hand over mine
Down in the lime tree arbour
Through every breath that I breathe
And every place I go
There is hand that protects me
And I do love her so
There will always be suffering
It flows through life like water
I put my hand over hers
Down in the lime tree arbour
The boatman he has gone
And the loons have flown for cover
She puts her hand over mine
Down in the lime tree arbour
Through every word that I speak
And every thing I know
There is hand that protects me
And I do love her so
Meaning, the exact time that the first bird starts singing around here in the mornings now.
A far cry from 4:15, which is when they would begin singing in late spring — that heady season when I felt like I had all the time in the world.
Even though the director texted me late last evening and relieved some of my pressure — saying that he really loved where the new pages in the play were heading, giving me that insight I needed to give the section more emotional depth; none of it changes that the summer really is almost over and I have way too much of the play left to rewrite.
Not that it’s so many pages; it’s that the pages left are crucial ones that need an indescribably focused amount of my concentration.
However, this morning, when I awoke stressed at 4:28am, I realized that I needed to change everything. Well, not everything. I just needed to change the angle from which I was looking at my trip.
There’s just no way I can be in any kind of meaningful “rehearsals” by mid-September when I still have all this contractual stuff with the director to work out before hand, and now the budget is really huge so I have no clue what Sandra’s going to want to do regarding staged readings. So I decided to just let Cosmic Timing take over and step back and allow something higher to figure out my life and stop trying to constantly connect the dots.
And I decided I would talk to my sales rep at Honda and just let him decide if I should lease the new car before I went to NY or after I came back. I have to stop worrying about the car. I’m turning it into a drama in my head and it just doesn’t need to be one.
And then I decided I want to get rid of that idea of staying in 2 different hotels when I’m in the city for Nick Cave, even though one of the hotels is the Algonquin. I decided to get an airbnb, instead, and just stay for 3 nights in a row — in Manhattan: Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and just hang out, have the meetings with Sandra and the director and then just do whatever I want. Not worry about going back and forth to Rhinebeck in the middle of those 2 Nick Cave shows. It just wasn’t making any sense to do that. It was making me nutty.
So I just gave up trying to connect the dots. Just let life happen because it’s going to happen anyway.
I also decided that I’m not going to the cemetery today. It’s funny how, some years, I will just barely notice the anniversary of Greg’s death; and other years, it becomes very active in my memory; and sometimes I’ll go to the cemetery; other times, I don’t. I don’t know why that is.
I do know that going to the cemetery makes me sad because it always becomes so clear to me, when I’m there, that everybody else forgot about him a long, long time ago. No flowers there, ever. No nothing. Just grass growing. It has been just so many years. Life went on.
I have a hard time with certain aspects of that, even though, overall, I understand that’s just the way things are. I don’t want to get morbid about any of it. But sometimes life just confounds me. It doesn’t seem to make any sense. What the heck is it — life, I mean. You know? What is it?
Plus, I’m not ready to find out if his mom has died now, too. That would be sort of final, right? His long ago doorway into this world being gone forever now, too.
This summer, he has been all over my thoughts. I just don’t know why. Late yesterday afternoon, I decided to set Tell My Bones aside for a minute, get it out of my brain completely and work on one of the chapters in Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse. They aren’t actually “chapters,” they really are more like letters; creative nonfiction memoir type letters. Anyway, the next “chapter” has been sitting on my desk, halfway finished for months now and it’s one that has a lot to do with Greg. It’s about sexual intercourse — the specific actual thing. It’s titled “A Beach to His Waves.” And while working on it for about 8 hours last night, it was funny to see how, when I am in love with a guy, I will just do anything for that guy. Anything. My focus becomes like a laser beam and nothing peripheral exists, really, except my love for that guy.
I find that so curious since, when I don’t love a guy (which is almost all the time; I don’t fall in love easily), I am indescribably independent. Self-involved. Uninterested in anything besides the constant creative thoughts that are in my head. Live alone; die alone; just be a sort of constant, eternal loner. But, Jesus, fall in love with a guy? Suddenly it’s like: Oh, yeah; my very reason for being; I forgot I had one. And then almost nothing else matters but “the guy.”
Anyway, so I’m going to be working on that chapter again today, too — the 45th anniversary of his death. Even though the chapter is only partly about him, it’s still kind of fitting.
There’s another Red Hand Files newsletter from Nick Cave in my inbox. It has something to do with PJ Harvey because I saw the picture at the top, but I haven’t read it yet.
And people in Helsinki like to post to Instagram!! Everybody loved the Conversation that Nick Cave had there last night. Even the ones who didn’t post in English — judging by the amount of exclamation points and the many rhapsodic emojis… Everyone seemed incredibly blissed out. And I mean incredibly. He is giving another one there tonight.
So, that’s me, for now. I gotta scoot. I’m just gonna let life happen to me today. I’m just gonna write. Do yoga. Do laundry. Stop trying to figure everything out. It is utterly impossible anyway.
I leave you with this, it was my favorite record at the time of Greg’s death. He didn’t care one way or the other about David Bowie, but he didn’t mind that I played the record all the time. Obviously, since Greg had very long blond hair and blue eyes, you can guess why this song became really difficult for me after he died. But it’s still a really, really cool song.
Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you more than words can say, guys. See ya!
Oh my god. You know how sometimes you open your inbox and there’s an email in there waiting for you, and you open it and it makes you just think: what the fuck?
For me, that was yesterday.
Wayne, my 2nd ex-husband, is in Nepal right now, just tramping around. And yesterday, he emailed me from a cafe there. I won’t tell you everything he wrote, but the main thing he said was that he was in a cafe in Nepal, listening to “Breaking Glass.”
He said he would explain when he got back to NYC.
I can’t wait.
“Breaking Glass” was not the first song I ever wrote, but it was the very first song I ever performed as a professional singer-songwriter in New York City. I was 21 years old. It was at Gerde’s Folk City. I performed other songs immediately after singing that one, but, technically, that was the first one I ever sang for an audience. (It was well received and it was the very best night of my life.)
Several months later, the song was recorded on vinyl for Fast Folk Co-op, which was run by the late Jack Hardy. Now all those records are in the Smithsonian and Smithsonian Folkways Records offers them for sale on the Smithsonian website.
I was on two of those records before I left the Co-Op and sought non-Suzanne Vega-pastures beyond the West Village, because she was making my life as a singer-songwriter there exceedingly difficult (also known as “a living hell”). (I won’t use the “B” (female dog) word in regards to her, but I will allow you to think it quietly amongst yourselves, and I will also allow you to wonder if I might not be harboring even nastier words, even allowing you to consider, for a moment, the enormous range of my vocabulary and the sheer volume of nasty words I have access to in my brain… and then the blog post will resume.)
How on earth Wayne came to be listening to “Breaking Glass” while in a cafe in Nepal is really an interesting question. I’m guessing he downloaded it to his iPhone from the Smithsonian website, but I don’t know that for sure.
But then I wondered, how would he even know that song was available for sale online? My folksinging days were all part of my life from long before I even met Wayne. I was married to Foun Kee back in those days. And then I wondered if maybe Wayne had been on my Wikipedia page and found it there. (A page, I might add, that is not at all current and not entirely accurate. And even though I really honestly appreciate whoever it was who created that page, I wish that whoever created that page would go in and update it. Anyway.)
Why on earth Wayne would want to look at my Wikipedia page, I don’t know. After all, he has the full & vibrant, unending gift of having known me in person — my indisputable insanity having overflowed within his very domicile — forever imprinted in his very being now. Why he would want to read about me (somewhat inaccurately) online is a complete mystery.
But then it made me wonder if he’d been to my blog. (This thing you’re reading here.) And then of course, I immediately hit the proverbial “rewind” and thought of all the stuff I’ve posted here publicly about both of my marriages, but certainly about that marriage specifically, and it just made me sort of cringe.
Oops. Um. Well, shoot. Sorry about that.
I don’t know. I am always operating under the majestic delusion that no one I know personally reads my blog.
I know that a stalwart few of you have been reading my blog for a really long time now. This specific blog has only been here on WordPress for a few years, but I’ve been blogging online since 1997, before it was called blogging. And my most popular blog was when Marilyn’s Room was housed at GoDaddy. Back then, I had thousands of readers every day, and a huge portion of those readers were colleagues from all over the world. Another huge portion of those were family members, both estranged and not-so-estranged.
It made me insane. Everyone reading over my shoulder like that. Everybody had an opinion about what I wrote and they would email me and let me know what it was (sometimes not very nicely, either). Eventually, I left GoDaddy, pulled down my web site, and started a very obscure blog here on WordPress.
And I loved it. The mental liberation. I had, like, maybe 2 readers. And because you really had to hunt diligently to find me, I figured those 2 readers actually just wanted to read my blog and not find constant fault with my thinking. Or at least not email me about what they thought my faults were.
Eventually, though, it became excruciatingly clear that blogging in obscurity kept your overall career really obscure. So I put the URL back and sort of became “public” again. I don’t have thousands of readers anymore, because I haven’t published anything new in a long time, but I do have hundreds of readers, every day, from all over the world and yet I still blog away as if no one I’m blogging about is ever gonna read the darn thing.
So that was sort of a rude awakening, and even though Wayne’s email yesterday was extremely friendly, and so it gave me hope that he hadn’t just been reading my blog or he probably would have said something more akin to things he said while we were married (i.e., “I really love you, Marilyn, but you know, sometimes I just want to push you down the fucking stairs”), it was still a sort of warning flag that I ought to maybe think things through a little more before, you know, plastering it to the blog.
Well, I promise to give it some very serious consideration and I will get back to you about that soon.
On another topic…
This morning, gang, was so beautiful. When I awoke, the sun was just barely coming up; it was clear and crisp and gorgeous outside my bedroom windows. As usual my mind was overflowing with the Muse, and Eros was everywhere. However, it was only 58 degrees Fahrenheit. That is quite cool for August. A chill was in the air. I still had all 21 of the windows in the house wide open, you know? So the cats were pretty darn frisky in that chill and I had to put on my flannel bathrobe when I got out of bed and went down to the kitchen.
But the chill was bittersweet. It made me realize that, yes, summer is indeed waning. Fall is just around the corner. And even though fall means Nick Cave in New York City (!!) (yay!!) (his Conversations resume in Finland on Monday!!), it also just plain means the summer will be over soon. I need to get a grip on life. Get it to slow down somehow.
Part of the insanity of spending the entire summer at my desk, trying to re-write Tell My Bones for the 17 hundredth time, is that I lost track of a lot of things — to an escalating degree. Not only did the State send me my new & delightfully updated, delinquent, School Tax bill, but also, on Thursday, it came to my attention that the trash collectors did not collect my trash. I wondered why that was, when they’d clearly collected everybody else’s trash. Crap. Then I remembered that I hadn’t paid that fucking bill. So I had to run to my computer and pay that fucking bill. And then the gas bill came: Did you forget something last month? You’re a little behind here.
Ditto on the electric bill.
Then the local Cub Scout troop came by, to see if I had my non-perishable grocery contribution for the Food Bank… ME: “Is it time for that already? I thought I had until closer to the end of August?”
THEM: “This is closer to the end of August, ma’am.”
(Wow. Welcome to La-La land. I really need to finish the re-writes on this play.)
But I just don’t want August to leave me yet! Loyal readers of this lofty blog no doubt recall how much I love bluebirds and what they symbolize to me (actual happiness – the kind I didn’t have for most of my life but do indeed have now). Well, here is the calendar that’s been on my wall all month. How poetic!! How can I possibly let it go??!!
Yes!! Bluebirds!! Of happiness!! Just for me! I don’t want to turn the page…
Anyway. I gotta get started here, gang. Plays don’t re-write themselves.
I leave you with me, circa Summer 1982. I was an extremely shy folk singer back then. When they asked me to be on this record, I was over the moon. This is me & my guitar, and Mark Dann playing bass — he also engineered it. Jack Hardy produced it.
Okay, thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya!
“Breaking Glass”
I was doomed to live in New York City
On a block where accidental babies
Went out with the trash;
We shared a two-room apartment,
Tiny and cold
To the tune of a love, by winter,
Growing old
And the sound of an angry young woman
Breaking glass.
I recall our lives were never empty
There were tears enough for the third who entered
And beckoned your past;
The hours you kept were deceitful
And it had to show
The passion of time she burned
I couldn’t control;
I was trapped in my raging fury
And breaking glass.
CHORUS
There’s no telling how the coming of love
Will find us
There’s no guessing in what way
It’s gonna set us free
There’s no doubting that the anger of love
Can break us
When our actions don’t even come close
To the people we wanna be most
And our dreams don’t work out as the glories
They’d promised to be.
Without excuses I left the table
Well, I ran like hell while I was still able
I started anew;
I’ve lost some weight and I’m strong
And happy now
I got over the fiery anger, though
I don’t know how;
The songs we knew, they don’t drive me crazy
Well, I stopped the drinking and being lazy
It’s over at last;
The painful sheer rejection has
All gone past;
The tunes of deceit and loneliness
Fading fast;
Gone are the days of anger
And breaking glass.
CHORUS
There’s no telling how the coming of love
Will find us
There’s no guessing in what way
It’s gonna set us free
There’s no doubting that the anger of love
Can break us
When our actions don’t even come close
To the people we wanna be most
And our dreams don’t work out as the glories
They’d promised to be.
c- 1981 Marilyn Jaye Lewis
First of May Songs, BMI
Wow, so judging from my Instagram feed, it seems like everyone I know (and then some) went to see the Stones in LA last night.
As much as I adored the Stones for, like, 50 years, I cannot imagine wanting to go see them anymore. And, actually, the times when I did see them, I didn’t actually enjoy them live. I thought their records were better. But technology being what it is now, it could be that they’re lots better live now than they used to be.
(Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, though, were always an incredibly great live band, even way back in the beginning — with electricity but before technology!)
I still love Keith, of course, and Ronnie and Charlie, but Mick just gets on my nerves now. I used to find him entertaining and funny, but now he just sort of creeps me out. Not just the enormous amount of energy he seems to put into not aging, but that whole thing with his girlfriend a few years ago, when she hanged herself around her 50th birthday, after a photo of him in a bathrobe on a hotel balcony in Paris with a 27-year-old ballerina appeared in every single tabloid known to man…
Can you imagine, if he put as much thought into what to give people on their 50th birthdays as he puts into trying to figure out how to not age…?
Anyway. I don’t think anyone, anywhere, ever really owes the world an explanation for anything they’ve done, unless they want to give it. There’s a built-in retribution to everything — a balance that occurs — for everything that happens in the world, whether or not we ever personally see it. But people only owe themselves explanations, and if they feel kind, generous, loving, what have you, maybe they choose to give explanations to their loved ones, in private.
So it isn’t that I think Mick owed any of us an explanation for his choices re: who he wants to sleep with, but when he actually said in an official public statement that he couldn’t understand why his girlfriend would want to hang herself…
I don’t know. I think a 9-year-old could have seen the picture from Paris and understood what might have been behind that 50-year-old woman’s despair.
Even though he could have gone to his grave offering no explanation at all & I wouldn’t have personally minded, I would have liked him better had he offered something that looked sort of similar to the truth. You know, something like: I’m in my 70s now and I just need to be with women who are younger than most of my children. Otherwise, I feel old. If people can’t handle it, well, that’s their problem.
Something like that.
I personally, had a great time on my 50th birthday. I was with somebody I’d known forever, who always knew how to make me laugh, and we were doing incredibly fun, you know, “stuff” together in the family room of all places (and then his grown son suddenly called long distance in the middle of it, with some sort of urgent need to catch up & say hello, which was so incredibly awkward for my friend but made us laugh really hard once he got off the phone).
Anyway. I didn’t mind turning 50 at all. I don’t mind aging. Plus, for me, menopause came so early that I was long over it by the time I turned 50, so I didn’t have that looming, or anything — menopause, alone, can sometimes be really hard on women’s self-esteem and the severe hormonal fluctuations can sometimes cause women to feel (imagine this) suicidal. (I don’t think rock stars are taught that in school, though, so I don’t think his possible ignorance of that fact was his fault.)
Also, my dear friend Peitor in Los Angeles was producing a record for Charo at the time of my 50th birthday (a record which turned out to be a huge comeback hit for her on the Dance charts), and he had her call me at home to sing me “Happy Birthday.” If you don’t know who Charo is, rest assured, it is quite an experience to pick up your phone and have Charo on the other end of it, singing to you.
Charo & Elvis, who, sadly, did not live long enough to have Charo sing to him over the phone on his 50th birthday.
But if people still want to go see the Stones, that’s totally cool. And judging from all the Instagram comments, the show was spectacular. Everybody had a ball.
Dana Petty was at the show, too; she posted to Instagram from the parking lot. And the other day, her dog had a birthday — it turned 11. So she posted a photo of the dog when it was just a little puppy. Honestly, that’s the main reason I love Instagram. Where else would I get to see a photo of Tom Petty’s dog when it was a little puppy? He was so private when he was alive; he rarely let photos of his home life be available to anyone. Now that he’s dead, his various family members post amazingly lovely photos.
In fact, here’s one, of Tom and the same dog, grown; a photo I don’t think we ever would have seen on Instagram if Tom were still alive. (I guess that’s one reason that I’m glad he’s dead — I get to see all these wonderful candid photos of him that make me wish he were still alive.)
All righty!! I’m gonna get more coffee here and get to work on the endless play… Although I hope it won’t feel endless when it’s finally on the stage.
Thanks for visiting. Have a terrific Friday, wherever you are in the world!! Here’s what I was listening to this morning at breakfast, as the stupid school bus went by at 6am!! I refuse to believe the damn summer is OVER!!! I love you guys. See ya!
Yes, I actually slept 8 hours and I never do that. I feel like a functioning human being again.
Let me explain something about Eros, gang. Loyal readers of this lofty blog are no doubt aware that I essentially went kicking & screaming into my career. By age 12, I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I was thinking I was going to be a songwriter, but I was already writing short stories. Really strange short stories.
Luckily, it was the 1970s (yes! the 1970s were actually good for some things!), and I had really amazing teachers at school. They were open-minded and excited about change and about passing that on to us, the students. So I got “A”s on stories that would have probably gotten me expelled in other political eras (which came both before and after the 1970s.)
I wasn’t trying to upset people, or anything. And I didn’t know that I was writing anything that might upset anyone. I was just writing the stories that were in my head. And the stories weren’t always school assignments; I would just write stories.
One afternoon, when I was 13, but we were already living in that awful apartment complex that I’ve written about recently, I was home alone, sitting at the kitchen table, writing a story about two grown men who were lovers. Not exactly a topic I knew anything about, but for some reason, the story was coming out of me. I remember this so vividly. I was writing about how one of the characters knew his own body so well, knew what he liked to feel sexually, that it made it effortless for him to make love to another man’s body.
I was writing that when my mom came home and walked into the kitchen. She said, “What are you writing?” ME: “A story about two men who are in love with each other.”
She stared at me, really strangely, and said, “What do you mean, ‘in love’?” And I said that they make love to each other.
She actually sat right down at the kitchen table and said, “Can I read that?” I was very excited because she was actually taking an interest in me and not just exploding at me in her usual awful, horrible way.
So I let her read the story thus far, and at that point, it ended at the aforementioned spot. After she read it, she just sort of stared at it and then she looked at me. And she said, “I never really thought about it like this. I think maybe you could be right. What made you think of this?”
ME: “I don’t know. I’m just writing what’s in my head.” And she was so incredibly nice about it — I can’t stress enough how unusual that was for her. However, she said, “Honey, I wouldn’t show this story to anybody. You might upset people.”
Culturally, of course, we’re talking only 4 years after the Stonewall Riots and gays were barely tolerated, not that I knew anything about that yet. But my mom saying that to me was the first time I learned that things I wrote could maybe upset people.
When I was 14, a story I wrote for English class was about a transvestite fashion model who lived in NYC (I was always writing about only the things I knew first hand!) and how it was a secret — everyone thought the model was a woman, including the readers of my story, until the scene where the model gets out of her shower and sees her actual body in the mirror — the body of a man — and how it devastates her to have this body and so she takes sleeping pills in order to get through the night.
I got an “A++++” on that story. No one ever even talked about transvestites back then, least of all in the Middle-of-Nowhere Ohio. There wasn’t even Cable TV yet, no MTV, no nothing. And it’s not like I had some fresh-from-college, starry-eyed English teacher. She was a black woman in her mid-60s, close to retiring. When she handed me back my paper, she just looked at me and said, “What on Earth made you think of this?”
I honestly didn’t know, but I do think that it’s extremely interesting that during that same time-period, Sandra (the transgender actress I now write plays for in NYC), was, in real life, becoming a successful fashion model in Montreal and no one knew that she was actually a man. Everyone assumed she was a physical woman. Until she got arrested & deported for an expired work visa — then a handful of people found out and Sandra was devastated. It wasn’t too long after that, that she got her surgery. Still, it’s ironic, isn’t it? I didn’t meet her until years later.
Anyway, I’m digressing. But by my late teens, my short stories were getting blatantly erotic and I didn’t know what to do about it. I could not stop it from happening. The only way to stop it was to simply not write them. I was taking a short story writing class that I had to drop out of because the stories my brain insisted on writing were really embarrassing to me.
It took me a long time to come to terms with my stories. It really did. For a long time, I would write the stories, because I physically had to write them; they needed to come out of me. It would make me crazy to try to block them. The words would literally come into my head and just hang around in there until I put them down on paper. So I would write them to ease the pressure, but then tear them up and throw them away. It wasn’t until my friend Valerie began to seriously encourage me, that I began not tearing up the stories and, instead, sending them out for possible publication. (This was in the late 1980s and there were so many avenues for publication back then. It was an amazing era for literary erotica in the US and the UK.)
It wasn’t until 1994, though, when my best friend Paul began dying from AIDS (it took him about 5 years to die), he told me that I really needed to follow my heart — in every area of my life. (For one thing, he didn’t think I should have married Wayne. He thought Wayne was too conventional for me. It took me forever to see that Paul was right.) But Paul encouraged me to really make a commitment to my fiction writing. And so I did. I gave up the songwriting and focused exclusively on my fiction, even though it terrified me to do that because I knew that it was, for the most part, socially unacceptable to do that — to put all of my focus into writing what other people called porn.
But five years later, when Paul was suffering from severe dementia and could no longer talk, could barely communicate, I flew in from NYC to visit him at the nursing home and I was able to tell him that Neptune & Surf had been published (it had taken me 4 years to write it) — and, for the type of book it was, it was really greeted with high acclaim. And by then, I already knew that a French translation of it would be coming out in Paris the following year.
He really was my dearest, dearest friend; he stood by me in everything. And even though he was so far gone at that point, he had tears in his eyes when I was telling him all this about Neptune & Surf. I knew he understood what I had said. I was pushing him in his wheelchair out in the back garden, so that he could smoke a cigarette (he never forgot how to smoke, even though his muscles would often forget how to swallow and he was always in danger of choking to death whenever he ate or drank anything.) Anyway. He was so happy for me and I knew it and he died a couple months later.
So, you know, by now I have become completely accepting of the fact that for whatever reason, Eros chose me as one of its vehicles for getting itself into the world. And even though I write other stuff, too, I still work really hard at trying to be the best vehicle for Eros that I can be, in terms of the English language. I find so much of what gets into the world today to be really boring, crude, and unimaginative. I know it’s about money now, about making a huge profit, and that for serious erotic art (writing, painting, film) to make its way into the public consciousness today, it requires Herculean determination on the parts of whoever’s creating it.
So, I’m sort of used to living in a world where Eros is inside me and not outside of me anymore. So when it does come at me from somewhere outside of me and hits me between the eyes — wow. For me, it’s like getting hit head-on by the most wonderfully devastating car. It felt immobilizing, in the best possible way. For about 24 hours, I could not think straight.
But I guess I finally slept it off. Or something. I expect to have better luck with the play today.
I do want to mention, not to leave you on a down note, but these fires going on in the Amazon forests. Oh my god. It is just devastating to see. The poor animals, as well as everything and everyone else. It rips my heart to pieces. I don’t know what to do besides pray. I always want to rescue every singe animal from peril, and of course that is impossible.
Okay. Oh, and I want to say that my dear friend Kara, whom I’ve really only known for a very short while, told me yesterday out of the blue that she’d read Neptune & Surf and that it was wonderful. Gosh, that made me feel so happy. No one I personally know has any reason to buy the book anymore, it’s been out for 20 years now. It just made me so happy to hear that. That book was my first baby; it learned how to walk and how to go out into the world.
So, on that note, I’m gonna close and, as usual, get to work!! Thanks for visiting. I leave you with the wonderful song that was going through my head when I woke-up this morning and was so in love with my Muse!! Enjoy it. I love you guys. See ya.
“Good Vibrations”
I-I love the colorful clothes she wears
And the way the sunlight plays upon her hair
I hear the sound of a gentle word
On the wind that lifts her perfume through the air
I’m pickin’ up good vibrations
She’s giving me excitations (Oom bop bop)
I’m pickin’ up good vibrations (Good vibrations, oom bop bop)
She’s giving me excitations (Excitations, oom bop bop)
Good, good, good, good vibrations (Oom bop bop)
She’s giving me excitations (Excitations, oom bop bop)
Good, good, good, good vibrations (Oom bop bop)
She’s giving me excitations (Excitations)
Close my eyes, she’s somehow closer now
Softly smile, I know she must be kind
When I look in her eyes
She goes with me to a blossom world
I’m pickin’ up good vibrations
She’s giving me excitations (Oom bop bop)
I’m pickin’ up good vibrations (Good vibrations, oom bop bop)
She’s giving me excitations (Excitations, oom bop bop)
Good, good, good, good vibrations (Oom bop bop)
She’s giving me excitations (Excitations, oom bop bop)
Good, good, good, good vibrations (Oom bop bop)
She’s giving me excitations (Excitations)
(Ahh)
(Ah, my my, what elation)
I don’t know where but she sends me there
(Oh, my my, what a sensation)
(Oh, my my, what elation)
(Oh, my my, what)
Gotta keep those lovin’ good vibrations a-happenin’ with her
Gotta keep those lovin’ good vibrations a-happenin’ with her
Gotta keep those lovin’ good vibrations a-happenin’
(Ahh)
Good, good, good, good vibrations (Oom bop bop)
(I’m pickin’ up good vibrations) (Oom bop bop)
She’s giving me excitations (Excitations, oom bop bop)
Good, good, good, good vibrations
Na na na na na, na na na
Na na na na na, na na na (Bop bop-bop-bop-bop, bop)
Do do do do do, do do do (Bop bop-bop-bop-bop, bop)
Do do do do do, do do do (Bop bop-bop-bop-bop, bop)
My brain is really just wandering in the morass of this play. I am lost, gang, you know? Not sure even what I’m trying to say in this segment anymore.
I’m leading up to a critical point — where Helen’s grandson is crushed by a train. It is the worst moment of her life and she never really recovers from the loss. But we, as the audience, “re-live” the accident while Helen is still in the dream of being inside her painting, because that is where all her loved ones “come to life” while being in the sweet hereafter…
But I myself am just lost right now, trying to find my way through it.
I miss those days when I was still writing Blessed By Light. I really, really miss that novel. It felt like my dear and constant companion, you know?
Plus, I’m 2 weeks behind in writing new segments for In the Shadow of Narcissa. But I’m going to be in NYC in one month, and the initial rehearsals are supposed to start for this play that I have not finished revising. So I really can’t even think of doing anything else right now. And I am thoroughly exhausted.
And I still can’t decide if I’m going to drive to New York or take a plane. And I really ought to make that decision soon. I kind of hate being locked into a flight; if I drive, I have lots more control over when I come and go. But I think: if I’m this exhausted now, what will I be like in a few weeks? It’s a ten-hour drive each way.
I just don’t know. I wish someone would make all my decisions for me from now on and just say: “Here, this is what you’re gonna do.” I won’t have to think every gosh darn day, you know? From sun up to sun down.
Oh wait. I think they call that prison… Or high school.
But on another note.
You know what I discovered? The school tax is unbelievably high out here in Muskingum County. Back, many months ago, when I was doing my taxes, I thought my math was way off — no way could anybody’s school taxes be that high. So I decided not to pay it because I knew that the State would eventually get back to me with the bill and tell me the real amount.
Yeah, well. They did. And now it’s even higher because they tacked on late fees and interest. Boggles my mind. I’ve never lived anywhere where the school taxes were so high. For the amount I have to pay now for school taxes, I could have re-booked that suite at the Algonquin Hotel.
Doesn’t really seem fair, does it? I mean, I don’t have kids. No one I even remotely know is going to school around here. And yet every writer I’ve ever worshiped has stayed at the Algonquin Hotel.
Grumble, grumble. Wouldn’t want the children of Crazeysburg to be under-educated, would I?
Well, gang, I’m not even going to try to get back to work here tonight. I am going to collapse on my bed and stare at my maple tree as night falls outside my window and hope that something Muse-worthy comes to me before daybreak tomorrow because the days are really just zipping by.
I cannot adequately tell you how stressed I am.
Hope you all had a good day out there; wherever you were and whatever you did! Thanks for visiting. I love you guys! (Oh, I leave you with this — just because I thought it was so funny! I was googling images of “bad cats” — you know, mean cats — and I got “naughty pussies” instead!!) (I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how delighted that made me.)
Marilyn's Room 