It’s weird, isn’t it? How suddenly an undercurrent can come into your life.
First, the laptop starts to behave weirdly, so I bought a new one.
Now it’s the car!
Well, I’m not gonna buy a new one, because I lease the Honda Fit and it’s still practically a brand new car. But I discovered last night, that when I drove over 85 mph, the front end started vibrating noisily.
Rather than never speed again (why bother to drive at all if I can’t go 95 mph all over Muskingum County? I know the Sheriff sure doesn’t mind!!!), I have to go visit those guys at Honda this morning. As soon as they open. So I’m outta here.
If anything really cool happens to me today, I’ll blog again later.
Otherwise, I leave you with The Beach Boys!!! “Little Honda”!!
Have a terrific Monday, gang, wherever you are in the world! Thanks for visiting!!
“Little Honda”
GO!
I’m gonna wake you up early
Cause I’m gonna take a ride with you
We’re going down to the Honda shop
I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do
Put on a ragged sweatshirt
I’ll take you anywhere you want me to
First gear (Honda Honda) it’s alright (faster faster)
Second gear (little Honda Honda) I lean right (faster faster)
Third gear (Honda Honda) hang on tight (faster faster)
Faster it’s alright
It’s not a big motorcycle
Just a groovy little motorbike
It’s more fun that a barrel of monkeys
That two wheel bike
We’ll ride on out of the town
To any place I know you like
First gear (Honda Honda) it’s alright (faster faster)
Second gear (little Honda Honda) I lean right (faster faster)
Third gear (Honda Honda) hang on tight (faster faster)
Faster it’s alright
It climbs the hills like a matchless
Cause my Honda’s built really light
When I go into the turns
Lean [Tilt] with me and hang on tight
I better turn on the lights
So we can ride my Honda tonight
First gear (Honda Honda) it’s alright (faster faster)
Second gear (little Honda Honda) I lean right (faster faster)
Third gear (Honda Honda) hang on tight (faster faster)
Faster it’s alright
First gear (Honda Honda) it’s alright (faster faster)
Second gear (little Honda Honda) I lean right (faster faster)
Third gear (Honda Honda) hang on tight (faster faster)
Faster it’s alright
Lunch was exceedingly interesting (see post from this morning).
Yes, rehearsals begin in late July. Yes, Florida is probably going to get bypassed entirely and Tell My Bones will go straight from staged readings in NYC & Rhinebeck, to either Off-Broadway or Midtown Manhattan.
Yes, I need to finish revisions on the entire play before late July. Yes, I’m stressed. Yes, I want to finish Blessed By Light before that. Yes, I’m not sure how I’m gonna do that. But yes, I am going to try.
And most importantly – YES!! I have a new coffee mug!!
I wear the wedding gown really well. But the moment it goes into storage…
Wow. I just don’t know what it is.
I’m bringing this up because yesterday was the 18th anniversary of Tom Petty’s marriage to Dana York and she posted video footage of their wedding on Instagram and those two looked happier than you can possibly imagine. (Second marriages for both of them.)
I was happier on my first wedding day than I was on my second, but that’s still not saying a whole bunch. (I guess it says that I can be persuaded to do just about anything – twice.)
I awoke at 3:46am today – yes, awash in those wonderful waves of Eros, yet again. But then the first thing I thought of was that video of Tom & Dana’s wedding and of how happy they were. And I began wondering what (if anything) was the matter with me.
I have just never been the kind of gal who thought much about the idea of getting married. Partly because I was born in that part of the 20th Century where men still owned everything imaginable, and I thought of marriage as ownership. And I have never wanted to be owned. The thought of being an ornament on someone’s arm has always horrified me.
The other part was of course my sexuality. Even as a young teenager (when I started getting raped by guys from the outside world and then men from inside my loving home), I could already tell that my sexuality was more than most people could really deal with.
At least, in Ohio.
When I moved to NYC everything changed. It was so great, so liberating, in the truest sense of the word. Because NYC in the 1980s – well, my sexuality fit right in. Everyone was off the charts. I think Manhattan was not only the casual sex capital of the world at that point, but also the extreme casual sex capital of the world.
Then, of course, most of the people I knew got AIDS and died. I was certainly spared in that regard, but it was just really stupid of me to think that I could squeeze myself down into something that could fit into a marriage.
I always wanted to have kids. Even back as a very little girl, I just assumed I was going to have a lot of children. I really, really wanted children. But I never really wanted to get married.
Instead, I got married twice and had no children.
The only marriage that ever truly appealed to me was the marriage between E.B. White and his wife, Katharine Sergeant Angell White.
E.B. White is probably my favorite essayist of all time. He also wrote children’s classics like Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, but his essays are literary gems that struck chords really deep in me and have stayed with me forever. (“Once More to the Lake” is probably everybody’s heartbreaking favorite, but I also really love his essay “Goodbye to 48th Street,” among many others.)
His wife was a legendary fiction editor for The New Yorker when that magazine was in its literary golden age. They met, fell in love, she left her husband, they got married, moved to Maine and bought a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. And then seem to have done nothing but amazing things for each other’s literary lives.
He was, of course, neurotic, and she was often the rudder keeping him pointed in the right direction. But the part I always loved most about their marriage was that, in their house, they had offices across the hall from each other. They’d each go into their offices in the morning, write all day, and then both emerge at 5 o’clock, have one martini and a cigarette, talk about what they’d written (or angst-ed over) and then have dinner together and go to bed. (Sadly, I don’t know what they did in bed, besides sleep, otherwise I would of course regale you with all those details here.)
To me, that has stuck with me as the idea of the most perfect (as well as unattainable) marriage.
Another “relationship” that has always really appealed to me was Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett’s. But it seems to have involved tons more booze & cigarettes and a lot of shouting. I’m not big on the shouting stuff. And they did not get married, but stayed together for 30 years and wrote various masterpieces. And that appeals to me enormously.
I guess you can see that I am all about the writing.
It’s not that I am not all about love, or not into love, or a disbeliever in love. Love is everything to me. But love is woven in there inextricably with my writing. I don’t know why I can’t separate it. And I guess it does make me very self-involved, although I don’t feel like I am. I feel like my love is enormous and spills over into everything, benefiting everyone – and yet, more importantly, love helps me write better. And that means everything to me and so I guess it makes me self-involved.
But it’s still all about love.
Loyal readers of this lofty blog are no doubt painfully aware that I am totally, 100%, thoroughly in love with my muse. He has changed my life – and so quickly, so unexpectedly. Came into my life on all cylinders, blasted open my writing and turned it completely around.
It’s not that he is my reason for being – the kind of thing that maybe people feel when they are wearing those beautiful clothes and having weddings; but he gives me clarity on my reason for being, which has wound up being the most amazing gift I could have ever hoped to receive.
Clarity on my reason for being.
I don’t know that I would have ever realized just how much I needed that if it hadn’t happened of its own accord.
You know, I watched that short video footage of Tom & Dana’s wedding on Instagram yesterday, over & over & over. And I was simply astounded by how happy they were. (Yes, I pondered it!) And it wasn’t any kind of bullshit – those two were incredibly happy. You could just see it. And I felt a little bit like a failure because I can only seem to feel that happy when I’m alone, finding the most perfect word.
So I don’t understand myself and my “alone-ness” any better than I ever did, but I still feel happier than I’ve ever been and just so blessed to have the most amazing muse.
It’s probably best to just not think about it too much. Because I think it’s going to end up being something good for the whole world; I really do.
Okay. I’ve got lunch today with the director of Tell My Bones at 12:30. So I’m gonna scoot now and try to get some writing done before that. I think today is going to be just another stunning day out there. I’m so looking forward to it.
I hope your Tuesday is just as splendid, wherever you are in the world. I leave you with this, the song Tom Petty wrote for Dana, long before they were married, back when he was heading towards some real dark times, but (he has said repeatedly in interviews) he was already in love with her & waiting. Okay! Thanks for visiting! I love you guys, See ya.
I dreamed you
I saw your face
Cut my lifeline
Went floating through space
I saw an angel
I saw my fate
I can only thank God it was not too late
Over mountains
I floated away
‘Cross an ocean
I dreamed her name
I followed an angel
Down through the gates
I can only thank God it was not too late
Sing a little song of
Loneliness
Sing one to make me smile
Another round for everyone
I’m here for a little while
Now I’m walking
This street on my own
But she’s with me
Everywhere I go
Yeah, I found an angel
I found my place
I can only thank God it was not too late
I can only thank God it was not too late
I can only thank God it was not too late
Around 2am, the wind kicked up something fierce, so not only had it begun to rain again, but the wind was blowing rain in on my bed. Short of sleeping in some sort of adventurous, seafaring schooner, having rain blown in on me while I sleep is not my idea of a nice night.
So I got up and closed most of the windows again, and missed the morning bird songs and overslept again. Awoke at 6:30am to a bright, shiny bedroom.
And to two very intense texts on my phone.
Both texts had apparently been hanging there unanswered by the soundly-sleeping me for hours.
One was from Peitor. We had been texting before I went to sleep last night at around midnight, and I thought we were done texting and so I set down my phone and turned out the light. But it seems I was wrong. Because he texted something intense, unhappy and emotional (he’s in Italy right now, checking in on his elderly mother), and I left him hanging for over 6 hours! I felt terrible.
You know – lurch yourself from sleep, start typing: Oh god, I’m so sorry. I fell asleep!
And the other text was from a girlfriend that I am very close to and we had gotten into an intense conversation late last night, because (like Peitor) she is also going through some intense family stuff. And she looked so tired and so angry and so fed up last night, and I just wanted to fix that.
I try so hard not to tell people how to live or what to think or what to do. And I went through all that training in Divinity School on counseling people, and all of that, and I’ve counseled a lot of people. And I can be a remarkably effective counselor if I don’t actually know you and don’t have to get emotionally involved. I’m perfectly at ease with allowing you to find your own way in life and the “f” word does not come flying out of my mouth…
However. When it’s someone I actually know and care about, suddenly I can find myself saying things like: “You need to do such & such!!”, trying to tell her how to live her own life, in an escalating tone… because I am emotionally involved and I want my friends to be happy and I think that “being happy” means thinking the way I do.
Even though we ended it in a good place, I still felt bad about not giving her enough of her own space last night. And then her text was there from during the night, continuing some of her thoughts from the conversation and I had to force myself (not even out of bed yet) to not let my mind go to that place where I am trying to fix her life for her – even though I know full well she is not asking me to do that.
And even though I didn’t go as far as the “f” word last night, I still felt like I had. Because I truly prefer to allow people to be themselves, and to have their own thoughts and approaches to the world; and yet sometimes I don’t choose to actually do that. I jump in there and try to “re-script” them in a rather emphatic tone. And then I don’t feel very good about myself. I don’t want to simply paste my own perceptions of the world onto people, it dismisses the importance of how they feel about living their own lives.
And that was all, you know, before I even got out of bed this morning. I was still just lying there, under the cuddly blanket and my 1700-thread-count Italian cotton sheets, my head surrounded by all my soft expensive pillows – and I was staring at the phone, feeling like a terrible friend.
So I guess maybe it’s going to be an interesting day.
The Conversations with Nick Cave are on hiatus for a couple of weeks. Well, at least the Conversations that have an uppercase “C”. The conversations with a lowercase “c” that he will undoubtedly be having over the next couple of weeks are apparently private and his website is not revealing where he is planning to spend those evenings. This likely also means that no one will be posting photos of their lowercase “c” conversations with him to Instagram, so I will not be able to tell you what he is wearing. Or if any of those people he converses with in private call him God.
Yes, this means I will have to fixate on other things.
Like, for instance, my own life.
On Tuesday, I’m having lunch with the director of my play (Tell My Bones) so that I can discuss with him what Sandra said on the phone the other night. And move forward. Most likely at a pace I was not anticipating even a few weeks ago. We’ll see.
I still have some writing to do on that play. Revisions, I mean. But I’m waiting for rehearsals to start before I actually do that. And the pressure on me feels intense because the cart is officially before the horse now – meaning that a bunch of publicity about this play got “out there” in the world and on the Internet without me knowing it was going out there.
And now people all over the place are using my “award-winning script” as a way to try to drive up the value of Helen’s paintings.
When I first wrote the story about Helen, it was a TV movie script (and it is an award-wining script now and it did well in a lot of the top contests and at the Austin Film Festival). I was working for Gus Van Sant’s production company back then, working for his amazing dad, who was his business manager and who also managed Helen LaFrance’s career and that’s how I got exposed to her truly amazing paintings.
And I wanted to write about her specifically to expose more people to her incredible paintings. To her life. In my opinion, her paintings need to be hanging in everyone’s homes.
And so now, to find myself in this position where, you know, the play hasn’t even been mounted yet; you can’t actually go see it anywhere yet. And total strangers all over the world are taking it as a given that the play will be great and that it justifies their wanting to make more money off of Helen’s paintings right now…
It’s not a bad position to be in, but I am under a lot of pressure here.
Which is also why I want the novel finished and off my desk, because I need to focus on Tell My Bones, even though I love this novel and I’ve loved every moment I’ve spent writing it. I don’t really want to rush through it. But I also don’t want it being shoved to the back burner again. I had wanted it completed by Christmas and it is practically summer already.
So that’s that. My brain on a lovely Sunday morning. Still in my PJs and already way too stressed…
I hope that you’re having a super-duper Sunday, though, wherever you are in the world.
I leave you with this. I was actually listening to this song again yesterday, because I came across something I’d written several years ago – about how it had felt to be 12 and to love this song and to listen to it late in the night on a tinny transistor radio, after sneaking out of my house and just walking the dark suburban streets by myself, listening to the local AM hit radio station, thinking it really was going to be incredible – being a powerful woman in the world, living my dreams, making them happen… (I leave it to you to decide to what degree that has worked out for me.)
Anyway. Thanks for visiting. I love you guys. See ya!
“I Am Woman”
I am woman, hear me roar
In numbers too big to ignore
And I know too much to go back and pretend
‘Cause I’ve heard it all before
And I’ve been down there on the floor
No one’s ever going to keep me down again
Whoa, yes, I am wise
But it’s wisdom born of pain
Yes, I’ve paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to I can do anything
I am strong (strong)
I am invincible (invincible)
I am woman
You can bend but never break me
‘Cause it only serves to make me
More determined to achieve my final goal
And I’ll come back even stronger
Not a novice any longer
‘Cause you’ve deepened the conviction in my soul
Whoa, yes, I am wise
But it’s wisdom born of pain
Yes, I’ve paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to I can do anything
I am strong (strong)
I am invincible (invincible)
I am woman
I am woman, watch me grow
See me standing toe-to-toe
As I spread my loving arms across the land
But I’m still an embryo
With a long, long way to go
Until I make my brother understand
Whoa, yes, I am wise
But it’s wisdom born of pain
Yes, I’ve paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to I can face anything
I am strong (strong)
I am invincible (invincible)
I am woman
Oh, I am woman
I am invincible
I am strong
I am woman
I am invincible
I am strong
I am woman
I forgot to mention in my post last night that if you’re on your phone and you want to view the photo gallery of Villa Monte Malbe, where the writer’s retreat will be held, you have to turn your phone sideways. The photos are down below the song lyrics.
My life got a lot better as the evening wore on, btw. Or at least more interesting.
Sandra eventually called and we spoke for about an hour. I can’t really post to my blog the details of what she said, but I’m still not sure if rehearsals for the play are being moved up to July or not. It sounds like there is a very good chance that they are, though. I still have to hear from the director.
But this of course means that I have to finish Blessed By Light really soon. Like, posthaste. This also means that frustrating days like yesterday simply have to stop.
I wrote 2 fucking words yesterday.
But part of that is because I’m starting to stress a little about the play (as well as the other play I’m writing with Sandra), and up until yesterday, I was getting good at keeping each project sort of “compartmentalized” in my brain and not letting them bleed into each other.
However, now I feel like all my projects are starting to look like this in my brain (I’m the strong, capable gal in the middle, soon to be eaten alive by all her thoughts):
This sort of reminds me that, lately, I’ve been missing my furry little boy like crazy. He died 2 months ago, already. The time just flies. I can’t believe it.
This morning, when I awoke, I truly thought I felt him jump up onto the bed to visit me. I turned and said, “Hi!” but there wasn’t any cat there. It was so strange. I mean, it really felt like he was physically there.
It makes me want to cry, but, you know, that doesn’t solve anything. So on we go.
After the phone call from Sandra, I worked on the new music material for teaching that guy piano, and the material is starting to go into some very interesting places. They throw out anything you ever knew about Theory & Composition (yay!), and simply distill music down to 7 notes. (I’m paraphrasing, but not by much.)
I can readily see, from what I’m learning, that if this guy who wants to learn piano, really has music in his head, then he’s going to be playing piano really quickly. He’s not going to have to get bogged down in all the stuff that I got bogged down in straight out of the gate.
I’m not going to waste time regretting anything I learned, especially since I’m still alive and can still learn this new stuff and have a new approach to music myself, even after all these decades. But it sure does feel like I wasted a lot of time on that piano, when it could have been so much more productive for me. Because ALL I had was music and rhythm in my head. And ALL of it wanted to get out. I did not understand what any of what I felt inside had to do with Bach or any of those others.
By the time I was 14, I had maybe written 3 songs on the piano, but I had written about a hundred already on my guitar. Complete songs, too: Verse/chorus, verse/chorus, bridge/chorus/out. I had a 3-ring notebook full of completed songs. Because on guitar, I was not bogged down by Theory & Composition in any way. For me, guitar was all about the rhythm and that facilitated the melodies and then the lyrics sort of cascaded down and attached themselves to the notes, you know?
I once turned in a song as an English assignment in 7th grade, and my teacher really liked it. And he said, “Do you write a lot of songs?” And when I told him about my 3-ring notebook, he asked if he could see it and then was sort astounded by it. The size & scope of it. I could not stop writing songs if I tried.
He was a published poet, with a PhD., and after seeing that notebook, he would spend time after class with me, helping me learn how to write poems, which in turn helped me gain clarity in lyric writing overnight. I had access to truly wonderful teachers, so it wasn’t that people didn’t care about my talent.
My songs were my whole life, though, whereas the piano had become the sort of underlying nightmare of my life. I knew how to play what they wanted me to play. And I knew how to deliver to them what they wanted to hear- tone, nuance, syncopation, feeling; but it in no way spoke to the music that was going on inside me. And I couldn’t understand why it didn’t connect, because I loved the piano, but it became a very stressful, frightening thing to me. It truly did.
And I see now that this current approach to music that I’m learning in order to try to help this other guy learn — it would have saved me 45 years ago. My stress-load would have disappeared. (Well, with that, and if those boys at the high school would have stopped raping me for 5 minutes…)
However! If wishes were horses…. (Yes! Then this would’ve been me! Prairie Rose! Lady Champion Rider!!) All right!
Meanwhile, on Earth…
I better get started on the novel here, gang. It’s gonna be July in a heart beat! I’m hopeful that I’ll get more than 2 words written today.
Tonight Nick Cave is having another Conversation somewhere in Europe, but in a truly odd turn of events, I can’t recall where!! I guess I finally have too much on my fucking mind… I’m sure it’s gonna be great, though. (And I’ll be darned if yet another person from the Netherlands didn’t post another photo on Instagram yesterday, calling him God….) (Wouldn’t it be funny, though, if, you know, it turned out I was wrong?? And he was God?? I guess I’d have to eat my hat. ) (I’d have to find it first…)
c- Jon Klassen
Okay! More coffee is on my immediate horizon! I’m gonna go grab it and get to work here.
I hope you have a really good day out there, gang. Wherever you are in the world and with whatever it is that is currently occupying you!
I leave you with this! It was my pre-breakfast-listening music today. I listened to it while feeding the cats. But then realized that the musicians who live next door to me were either awake very early or hadn’t been to sleep yet (Methinks the latter!), and they were out on their porch, smoking at 5am. And I didn’t want to annoy them so early in the morning with my music wafting through the open windows… (Although they play death metal and practice out in their garage and are pretty much the champions at annoying people with their music.) (Although they don’t annoy me. I honestly love living next door to them and listening to them practice because they remind me of my fair & bonny girlhood as a musician in NYC and all those wonderful cigarette-smoking musician guys – and I mean that truly, in the nicest way.)
But I leave you with this. A different song about boys, and summer, and everything that they can’t deal with anymore! Thanks for visiting! I love you guys. See ya.
She grew up in an Indiana town
Had a good-lookin’ mama who never was around
But she grew up tall and she grew up right
With them Indiana boys on them Indiana nights
Well, she moved down here at the age of eighteen
She blew the boys away, was more than they’d seen
I was introduced and we both started groovin’
She said, “I dig you baby, but I got to keep movin’ on
Keep movin’ on”
Last dance with Mary Jane, one more time to kill the pain
I feel summer creepin’ in and I’m tired of this town again
Well, I don’t know, but I’ve been told
You never slow down, you never grow old
I’m tired of screwin’ up, tired of going down
Tired of myself, tired of this town
Oh, my my, oh, hell yes
Honey, put on that party dress
Buy me a drink, sing me a song
Take me as I come ’cause I can’t stay long
Last dance with Mary Jane, one more time to kill the pain
I feel summer creepin’ in and I’m tired of this town again
There’s pigeons down on Market Square
She’s standin’ in her underwear
Lookin’ down from a hotel room
Nightfall will be comin’ soon
Oh, my my, oh, hell yes.
You got to put on that party dress
It was too cold to cry when I woke up alone
I hit my last number and walked to the road
Last dance with Mary Jane, one more time to kill the pain
I feel summer creepin’ in and I’m tired of this town again
I finally finished Chapter 21 in Blessed By Light and also saw the breakdown for Chapter 22 in my head. It’s going to be another one of those chapters that gets broken down into a/b/c/d. And the titles will be:
Sinners
Infidels
Compadres
Diamonds in the Fire
And I think there’s going to be a great big bunch of sex, with his daughters coming to visit unannounced in the middle of that. And, as usual, it won’t go well! Nothing having to do with his daughters seems to ever go well in this book, even though it’s so clear that he loves them. Or he’s trying to.
Anyway, I always get excited when a chapter is completed and I can also see the next one so clearly.
Also! Sandra called yesterday! Yes, when I had finally given up on ever hearing from her again… (not really)
We actually chatted for awhile. And it took a lot of that icky stress off my mind that was starting to accumulate there – you know, stress gathering in the corners. So I have her pinned down for rehearsals with the director here in August for Tell My Bones, and then a whole week back in New York, with Nick Cave at Town Hall right in the middle of that. And she even thinks that those can be tech rehearsals with the musicians and singers, too. (I’m of course hoping the director will agree.)
Which also means that my next trip to New York after that will be for the actual performances of the staged reading, and from there it goes to Florida. So my life just got a whole lot easier, in terms of endlessly driving back & forth to New York.
Except that she also said she’s planning on doing a few staged musical pieces from The Guide to Being Fabulous in NYC (our other play), which I’m going to have to do some script re-writes for. But it’s at a really high-profile Off-Broadway venue so I’m super excited about that, too. (The Guide to Being Fabulous is the same play we’ll be doing a first-run of in Toronto.)
I’m guessing that all this stuff will happen in early spring, at the same moment that I need to be in Italy, overseeing a writer’s retreat. In Italian.
(I’ll just say here that the folks in Dusseldorf posted a whole lot of photos on Instagram last night of Nick Cave at their Town Hall. Wow, what a beautiful venue. Just a gorgeous theater. He wore the same suit, though. Or perhaps he has 17 hundred that only look the same. But it was the same non-color thing. But the lighting on the stages is always so beautiful, so maybe it’s all just part of the overall lighting/color thing. Or maybe it’s just his new favorite suit and he can’t imagine not wearing it right now. I actually have no clue.) (I know, I’m obsessing about the suit. Honestly, his suit was the very first thing I thought of when I woke up this morning at 4:40am. I don’t know what’s going on with me and that suit.) (As always, though, the people in Dusseldorf were in heaven.) (Actually, I don’t know if the people in Dusseldorf are always in heaven. What I meant to say is that, like Nick Cave fans everywhere, their response on Instagram to the show last night was off the charts.)
Okay! Enough of the parenthetical intensity.
Monday, I start giving piano lessons! I’m really, really looking forward to that. although he swears up one wall and down the other that he doesn’t want to learn how to read music, just learn how to play the piano. I’ll tell you, though; when you’re just starting out on the piano, it is the easiest time to learn how to read music. It truly is. But whatever he wants, is cool. I certainly don’t want to be one of those Nazi-ish piano teachers.
I’ll say here, though, that most of my piano teachers were wonderful. It was only that one at the Conservatory who was so mean. I actually had a couple of piano teachers who really helped me stay sane, for awhile, anyway. The two teachers knew each other, actually. One of the teachers quit and so the other one took over.
We had a soundproof music room in our house back then, which is where, of course, I had my lessons. And the first teacher, a man, told me, in that soundproof room, that he wasn’t going to be teaching me anymore. And he told me it was because of my mother (adoptive). My mother was an abusive terror. And he actually told me that he was worried about me being in that kind of household, but that he couldn’t take it anymore and was sorry to be abandoning me, because he thought I was really talented.
That was a very hard thing to hear, and, obviously, it stuck with me. I was 12 at the time.
And then his friend, a woman, took over teaching me. She came into it knowing ahead of time the problems with my mother and so I guess she was able to handle it better. But still, you know, in that soundproof room, she would sometimes say, “Are you okay? You know, if you ever need anyone to talk to, I’m always here for you.”
I was still young, though, and had no clue I was in such an abusive home. I just assumed that all mothers were like that behind closed doors, wanting to smash you down and make you disappear.
However, both of my parents were really supportive of my music. Well, of me playing the piano. They were not thrilled at all when I went to New York with my guitar to be a singer-songwriter.
Anyway. I digress. A little.
I’m looking forward to giving piano lessons. In a small way, it will help me undo everything that ended up being so awful.
Okay, have a great Friday, gang! Wherever you are in the world. I’m gonna get crackin’ here on Blessed By Light – maybe even go so far as to wash my hair today!! You just never know. Thanks for visiting. I love you guys. See ya.
First of all. Some of you may know that Doris Day died yesterday.
She was 97. She was an incredibly effective animal rights activist. I loved her movies when I was growing up. And as an adult, I supported her animal rights organization for decades. It was awesome to watch her make truly meaningful changes to the welfare and legal rights of animals in this country. (And in her private life, she was a Christian Scientist, who fully believed in Jesus’ power to heal, and she stood by that, even though a lot of people ridiculed her for it. In my estimate, she really was just an incredible human being. Plus, she was from Ohio!)
Doris Day R.I.P.
I named one of my little feral kittens after her. Here’s Doris (now 6 years old) at my kitchen sink, back in early March. (Lovely to look at, but, alas, you can’t touch her or she will scratch you silly because she’s feral.)
Doris at the kitchen sink.
Which reminds me that, after Daddycakes died (he was her father), I couldn’t bring myself to wash the bathroom floor. He had left little footprints there and I couldn’t stand the thought of removing all traces of him, you know? He’s been dead a month now and I noticed this morning that the little paw prints have pretty much faded away.
Anyway.
My ticket arrived yesterday to see Nick Cave at Town Hall in September. Now all I have to do is remember to bring the darn thing to New York. Only 4 months away. Shouldn’t be too tricky. I’ll just staple it to my forehead and wear it until September. Perhaps seeing it in the mirror everyday will remind me to take the darn thing with me.
I realize that had I chosen the digital option, I wouldn’t have this potential memory problem, but I really wanted to have the ticket stub after it was over. (Of course, it cost 17 hundred million dollars more to get an actual ticket and have it mailed to me, but oh well.)
(Plus they have this “ticket insurance” thing. Where, you’re online and you’ve just purchased your ticket after an 8-minute barrage of truly unpleasant sensory perceptions. The screen is telling you that you’re almost ready to thoroughly finalize the purchase you’ve just made; American Express has already pinged! you on your phone to alert you that someone has already used your card number to purchase some sort of ticket online, “do you recognize this purchase?”; and yet TicketMaster still highly suggests that you purchase ticket insurance to insure that the ticket you’re in the process of really, finally, thoroughly purchasing really actually happens and then belongs to you. Unbelievable. They highly recommend you do this because chances are high that something will go horribly wrong with your purchase and the only way to guard against their fucking up is by spending a few dollars more, even though the sole reason they even exist is to simply sell tickets to people…So I bought that, too.)
So, I highly recommend to myself that I bring the darn thing with me to New York.
Okay!
Today is a lovely day!! Sunny and mild. All I’m doing today is laundry and working on Blessed By Light. Maybe do a little yoga if I can tear myself away from the laptop. I don’t have to run any errands because I already did all that yesterday. In fact, I don’t even have to leave the house until maybe Thursday, and only then if a friend of mine from in town needs a ride to the airport.
Loyal readers of this lofty blog no doubt recall that last year, I let this same friend keep his vintage 1965 VW camper van in my barn for the summer while he went off to Montana. (This is not his van but it looks exactly like this. It’s so cool.)
Well, he’s doing the same thing again this summer and so this past Sunday, he came by to put his van in my barn. And then I had to drive him back into town.
I can’t emphasize enough, gang, how much time I spend at my desk writing. I write, then write, then write again, and then write a little more. Now that the Mormon missionaries have stopped dropping by, I interact with basically no one.
I might say hi or just exchange meaningless bullshit with people I barely know, but other than that, now that I’ve moved out to the Hinterlands, I rarely meaningfully interact with anybody in person. I talk to plenty of people on the phone in LA or NYC, but that’s it; nothing too meaningful in person. So it was actually really interesting on Sunday, driving my friend into town. I don’t really “know” him at all. Last year, I overheard him saying that he needed a safe, dry, free place to store his van for 5 months so I offered him my barn, and so now we’re “friends.” But I don’t actually know him.
On Sunday, we sat on my porch for a few minutes so that he could smoke half a cigarette, and in those few minutes he told me about a trip he took to Denver to attend a Grateful Dead concert several years ago, and what he told me about that trip (not the concert, just the trip) revealed so much about him.
And then in the car ride into town, he was talking about some roses he had gotten for his mom since it was Mother’s Day, and, again, he revealed so much about himself – simply by the words he was choosing, the things he was choosing to say. And it also magnified what he was choosing not to say. I found it just so interesting.
Of course, we all do this all the time – communicate in this way, choosing words over other words, facts over other facts – but since I rarely interact with anyone meaningfully anymore, I guess it’s just really noticeable to me now. It came into such tight focus, this process of communicating with spoken language.
Yesterday while I was out, without really wanting to, I was listening to this ridiculous conversation between this guy and this girl, they were about 30 years younger than me. It only mildly got on my nerves, but when the young woman said, “If a guy wants to fuck a girl in the butt that much then he should just fuck a guy,” I actually said, “Oh, I totally disagree with that.”
I actually said this, out loud. They looked at me, stunned, The girl said, “Really?” Like she honestly couldn’t believe that girls might like anal sex, for one thing, or that I had just spoken. And they both looked at me, like they really genuinely wanted to know what I thought about anal sex, and I thought to myself, Jesus Christ, the one time you decide to say something meaningful out in the Hinterlands, THIS is what you choose to say??!!
So I didn’t say anything else. I just sort of smiled. I knew my desk was calling, needing me to come back home and to stop talking to people all unsupervised and stuff.
I’m hopeful that today will yield all kinds of wonderful things for the novel. I’m also hopeful that maybe Sandra might even call me – I’ve been trying to get her to call me for over a week now because I need to talk to her about some important stuff re: rehearsals for Tell My Bones. On Friday, she suddenly texted me from NYC and said, “It’s really noisy where I am right now but as soon as I get somewhere quiet, I’ll call” and that was the last I heard…. Perhaps today she will at long last be someplace quiet. We’ll see!
Meanwhile, enjoy your Tuesday, wherever you are in the world!! I did indeed go back to listening to The Big Jangle during breakfast this morning just because it makes me happy and I thought, so what? It’s better than wanting to cry first thing in the morning, you know? So I leave you with this! One of the jangliest of the big jangles. Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys! See ya!!
She threw down her golden band
Crushed it with her feet into the sand
Took her silent partner by the hand
Yeah yeah oh yeah yeah
Somewhere near the edge of town
She said she was torn and turned around
“Can you help me cast this evil down?”
Yeah yeah oh yeah yeah
We’ll drive for the line now
There’s nothing to be lost
You and I will cross over
With no second thoughts
Dreams fade hope dies hard
She cups her eyes and stares out at the stars
Says “I feel we’ve traveled very far”
Yeah yeah oh yeah yeah
Yeah yeah oh yeah yeah
Yeah yeah oh yeah yeah
It actually offends me less and makes about as much sense as most of the book covers I’ve been given over the last 30 years.
It’s a losing battle, though, one which I gave up fighting a long time ago. And except for Richard Kasak (a publisher who died quite a few years ago), I only got the covers I wanted when I designed the books myself.
And I only bring this up today because yesterday I was rudely awakened to something that really bothered me. (Yesterday was a big day for that kind of thing.) I was trying to investigate further this Neptune & Surf French audio book link I had seen because I wanted to write to my publisher in Paris.
I soon discovered it’s not really an “audio book.” Meaning, it’s not the entire book. It’s excerpts. Still, I’m pretty sure the amount of content included violates my contract. But I was soon overwhelmed by too many things that sort of “assaulted” me that I got depressed, gave up and said, I’m not dealing with this. Just let it go, Marilyn.
This particular French edition has been out for 8 years already and I had completely forgotten that the publisher changed the title of the book from Neptune & Surf to Sex in America. That had bothered me when it happened, even though, technically, I understood what the publisher was getting at, I still thought that it both: a.) only vaguely summed up what the book was about; as well as, b.) hugely overstated what the book was about.
Then they gave it this horrible cover, even though I had asked them not to give me a cover picturing a girl in her underwear. Technically, she’s in sparkly stockings and a necklace, so I guess she’s not really in her “underwear”. However, when I finally saw the cover back at my desk in America (where I was probably having Sex), it quietly enraged me, since I had specifically asked them, en francais!, not to do this.
Then, I remembered that they had deleted the novella, The Mercy Cure, from this edition because they thought that it was “too complicated.” This meant that this edition only contains 2 novellas, Gianni’s Girl (one of my most popular stories ever, about Italian bootleggers and a gang-rape in Chicago in 1927 – that’s so American, right? – but I was glad they didn’t tinker with that), and the novella Neptune & Surf – which they changed to Neptune Avenue. (And, yes, technically, that title is easier to grasp and perhaps makes more sense, but I gave it the title of Neptune & Surf for very specific reasons, mostly because the story was written for and dedicated to Holly and all of our wonderful years of hardcore debauchery together on Coney Island. The title means a lot to me and to her.)
But all of that taken together means that no one on earth would possibly connect Sex In Americawith Neptune & Surf unless they were psychic in some sort of seriously scary way.
Plus the price of the book – a mass market paperback (in French) containing two novellas – is almost 17 dollars! That seems crazy to me.
So that depressed me. I don’t like broken links in the chain of commerce and product identity.
(And it also bothers me that Little, Brown, in London, somehow managed to put out into the international search engines that “Marilyn Lewis” is the author of their digital edition of Neptune & Surf, even though, all over their website, I’m “Marilyn Jaye Lewis”, which makes a huge difference because there are about 500 billion women in the world named “Marilyn Lewis.” Yet another annoying broken link in the chain of commerce and product identity!)
Anyway, at the beginning of the digital reading, the French woman who reads the excerpts of Neptune & Surf (aka Sex In America) says very complimentary things about the book and about the caliber of my writing. Extremely kind things. Which was nice. Still, the whole thing is prefaced by the concept of: Good writing in bad books and about how this is sort of a dirty secret of publishing houses – this good writing in these bad books that are hidden in dark corners of bookstores. (All of this was said in French, by the way, which only made it sound more authoritative.)
I probably don’t have to tell you that this really upset me. Even though most of my books have sold well and have not been relegated to dark corners in bookstores. I of course understood the point she was trying to make and it’s a public conception that I’ve been up against throughout my entire career.
It’s upsetting to think that all these decades later, I’m still up against this. Yesterday was just not a good day for me. First, the entire universe seemed to want me to come to terms with the reality that Tom Petty is dead, and then come to terms with the reality that people will only find out that I’m a good writer if they happen to find themselves furtively lurking in the dark corner of a bookstore…
Plus that whole feeding frenzy over buying the Nick Cave ticket yesterday morning was also very disturbing to my equilibrium. (At Town Hall, it’s called Nick Cave Words + Music, btw, not Conversations with Nick Cave.) (I don’t think this means that he’s just going to say a bunch of words, and that he only saves actual “conversations” for people who aren’t American…)
Anyway, normally, I refuse to participate in stuff like that. I just can’t stand that feeding frenzy set up. And I’m sure this morning’s sale will be so much worse, since it’s the regular tickets.
Obviously, I want all of Nick Cave’s endeavors all over America to sell out. [UPDATE: Town Hall indeed sold out in under half an hour – Ed.] Loyal readers of this lofty blog are probably really tired of me bemoaning the fact that most non-big city Americans do not even know who he is. Still, I was so seriously tempted to just abort the whole thing yesterday, it was making me so insane:
CLICK, Oops! Sorry, that ticket’s gone! Try again! CLICK, Oops! Sorry, that ticket’s gone! Try again! CLICK, Oops! Sorry, that ticket’s gone! Try again!
Over and over and over. And it happens at warp speed. You’re watching all the little blue dots on the seating map disappear in nanoseconds. Jesus fucking Christ, you know? What is that? It’s one of the things I hate about doing stuff online.
I would not even do something like that for myself, if for some convoluted reason I had to buy a ticket to hear myself speak. I’m definitely someone who moves quickly to: Fuck this shit, and then goes back to whatever it was I’d been doing. But, alas. Not for Nick Cave having a conversation. (And in that movie, 20,000 Days on Earth, when we go with him to his “therapist’s” office? Oh my god! That was the most ingenious thing I ever saw in my life. I’d probably sell my house to afford a ticket to go to therapy with Nick Cave.)
I digress. I’m just saying, I don’t like that kind of thing – buying tickets in that fiercely competitive way. I feel like I’m being spiritually eviscerated by the Internet. And I don’t even have a question I want to ask him. Well, actually, I have an unending list of questions I want to ask him. Daily, I’m asking him questions in my head, from the moment I wake-up in the morning until I go to sleep at night, but these are not questions that would interest anyone else on earth. And a lot of the questions people do ask him are actually really, really cool questions. I’m actually very eager to hear what other people want to know.
So I stuck with it and got my ticket… And I’m happy, but the process sucked the life out of me for awhile.
So yesterday was a challenge. But I’m going to try to make today a lot better. This morning, at breakfast, I was once again listening to The Big Jangle (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, from the Playback collection) and just loving every moment of it, but also thinking, Man, these songs are over 40 years old. He died. Shouldn’t I be putting it to rest now? But the tears started to come again and I just can’t go there. I can’t. I have to shift gears and tell myself, He’s alive and well and only 30 years old and living inside my little tabletop jukebox.
And life, as it were, goes on….
Thanks for visiting, gang. Hope you have a perfect Friday wherever you are in the world! I love you guys. Seriously. I mean that. See ya.
Well It didn’t feel like Sunday
Didn’t feel like June
When he met his silent partner in that lonely corner room
That over looked the marquee
Of the Plaza All-Adult
And he was not lookin’ for romance
Just someone he could trust
[Chorus:]
And it wasn’t no way to carry on
It wasn’t no way to live
But he could put up with it for a little while
He was workin’ on something big
Speedball rang the night clerk
Said, “Send me up a drink”
The night clerk said “It’s Sunday man, …wait a minute
Let me think
There’s a little place outside of town that might
Still have some wine”
Speedball said, “Forget it, can I have an outside line?
[Chorus]
It was Monday when the day maids
Found the still made bed
All except the pillows that lay stacked
Up at the head
And one said, “I know I’ve seen his face
I wonder who he is?
And the other said, “He’s probably just another clown
Workin’ on something big”
I don’t know about you guys, but now that the full effect of that full moon is over, I feel 100% calmer around here. The intensity as well as the giddiness have subsided. Yay.
Good thing, because I have a lot of work to do around here, and I need to focus.
Sandra, the actress I write for in NY, texted yesterday that she’s doing the Shakespeare Festival in NYC for 1 month, then another one-week gig back in Florida, and then she will be arriving here. Yes, HERE! In the Hinterlands! To begin rehearsing the one-woman play I wrote for her, Tell My Bones.
(The director of Tell My Bones, while also based in NYC, is the Artistic Director of a professional theater company in a town 20 miles from here and will also be here in the Hinterlands all summer. Except that he lives in a staggeringly lovely, palatial home with something like 7 bathrooms, privately tucked away at the end of a 3-mile driveway, hidden behind many, many tall trees; whereas I live in sort of the pioneer era; I do have indoor plumbing, heat and electricity but that’s about it as far as modern conveniences go in this 118-year-old house. And I have a wonderful little raccoon living in my 108-year-old barn. Anyway, the director has an incredible theater-rehearsal space right there in his home, naturally, which is where we will rehearse.)
So that means one less 11-hour drive (each way) to NY for me this year. I have to say I’m relieved about that.
However, this little reprieve brought on by Sandra’s Shakespeare Festival run means that I have this sudden chunk of time to complete Blessed By Light, and even have it off to potential publishers before Tell My Bones gets underway. (With The Guide to Being Fabulous on the heels of that.)
Hence the need for focusing around here.
The editor in NYC finished her final edits on the first 19 chapters of the novel last evening and sent them to me. So I will begin writing Chapter 20 today. I don’t envision more than 10 more chapters before the book is done. So completing it reasonably soon is doable.
The editor made my day again yesterday with her concluding comments. She said, “This pulses with passion, love, sorrow — damn! Congrats to you. Nobody writes like you.”
And I have to say that this made me feel intensely relieved because, as loyal readers of this lofty blog no doubt recall, Blessed By Light, while it has lots of erotic stuff in it, is unlike any of the other novels, or even short stories, that I’ve written thus far. And “thus far” now entails 30 years. It’s sort of an unusual point in my career to begin writing so differently. And I had no control over this sudden change; the novel simply began coming out back in late August and all I did was try to keep up with it, you know?
Oh, something really cool happened to me yesterday afternoon.
I will preface this by saying that my dream car is the Dodge Challenger Hellcat. I really want one of those cars (in fact I write briefly about the Hellcat in Blessed By Light), but readers who know me even only slightly, know that I already have a problem with speeding when I’m on the highway. And I’ve never once gotten a speeding ticket, or even a parking ticket for that matter. And owning a Hellcat would probably just be too much of a temptation, you know? (It goes up to 210 MPH.) The Sheriff and the Highway Patrol would probably be all over me then. You know, they do target certain cars and a Honda Fit (what I currently own) is not one of them.
Well, yesterday I discovered that a young guy I know casually out here in the Hinterlands, has a brand new HEMI Challenger! Holy Shit! His is black and I really like the purple ones, but still. I couldn’t believe it. After asking him a little bit about the legendary speed of the car (he barely touches the gas pedal and he’s going 145 MPH), he told me that if I wanted to, he would let me drive it out on the highway. Of course I said yes. OMG! I’m so excited.
Hellcat. My dream car.
Well, all righty, gang! I best get going around here. You know, today is the final day to stream Distant Sky Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Live in Copenhagen for free. I am so tempted to watch it again, but Jesus. I really gotta work. But don’t let me stop you if you haven’t seen it yet! God, it was good.
Have a great Monday, wherever you are in the world. I leave you with this: The most depressing although truly beautiful song about a fast car ever written!! Thanks for visiting! I love you, gang. See ya.
I awoke at 2 a.m. and could not fall back to sleep until 3:30. Primarily thinking about Daddycakes and feeling like I didn’t do enough to save him and wondering if he was somewhere in the afterlife, angry at me for letting him die when he should have been in the prime of his kitty life.
It’s just so different when you’re dealing with rescued feral cats. They make the rules, because they are wild animals, and then you — or me actually; I am the one who has to try to figure out if I step aside and let them have their own connection to God’s world, or do I try to intervene somehow and make a decision about life and death?
Playing God, basically. It got to the point where the cat was simply suffering too much and my heart couldn’t handle it so I had him put to sleep.
Then of course, by feeling guilty for the decisions I made regarding him, it means I think I am God: I should have known better, or I should have known more about that cat’s life or death and the quality of it or lack of it, and just done all sorts of different things that I can’t even imagine at this point.
Honestly, how can we possibly know those things? We make those kinds of decisions through whatever filters we have in our brains that tell us we have answers to these sorts of questions and that’s not really saying very much at all. Because we don’t know how to create life; we know how to do away with it. We simply make a decision. And that’s not saying anything at all, in the scope of what is nonphysical, I mean.
Well, I finally made myself stop thinking about Daddycakes, and instead decided to worry about the novel.
I went to the grocery store late yesterday afternoon – always an investment of time because I live in the middle of the country and the grocery store is about 4 towns away.
It was a glorious spring day. It really was. The countryside was turning that tiny spring green. Birds everywhere. Daffodils blooming in the most unlikely places. (And you know that a person had to plant those; daffodils don’t just spring up in the middle of nowhere along the highway. And that makes me love people, because I know I’m one of the passing strangers for which those daffodils were joyfully planted.) And all along the way, the farms had all their little baby calves out now, finding their footing in the green pastures.
It was just so beautiful. A testament to the renewal of life.
I’m guessing I was listening to something by Nick Cave, but I don’t recall what. It’s always either Nick Cave or Tom Petty. My little Honda fit is overflowing with CDs by either Nick Cave or Tom Petty and one single CD of Anne Murray’s Greatest Hits. (Inside my house is another story. In there, the world overflows with music of every possible stripe and persuasion. But for some reason, none of that makes it out to the car.)
(And to see me getting into the car is ridiculous: “Oh my god, what I am going to listen to?” If I’m going to the Dollar Store, it’s a 3-minute trip and the music is not so crucial. But everywhere else I go to from here in the middle of nowhere, is a journey. It requires a soundtrack. If I’m going far, far away, like to NY, then it’s hands down Tom Petty’s LIVE Anthology, because traveling on Interstate 80 is intensely American and so you need that American rock & roll; 3-minute awesome songs about falling in love or falling out of love, or chasing a dream and that’s basically it. It could not be better or more clear cut.
(But other journeys require Nick Cave, but he can be so dicey because you never know when he’s going to throw you under the fucking bus. Which is what I love about his writing, but it can get harrowing. You can be driving along at 95 MPH, which is what I tend to do out here on these highways, listening to “Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere?” and at first you’re thinking, man what a song. Then the next minute, you have to pull over, grab your revolver from out of the glove compartment and shoot yourself because it’s just too fucking horribly SAD.
(Or, I guess, you can just turn the music off. But that’s the dilemma: you’re on a journey that requires a soundtrack; you’re not supposed to turn it off. So I’ll sit there in the driver’s seat, engine on, looking at all the CDs and trying to figure out which one will not cause me to want to shoot myself while going 95 mph? Sometimes I sit there for several minutes, not going anywhere and driving myself insane.)
Anyway, I get to the grocery store, and in the parking lot, I get a message on my phone from the editor in NYC who is editing my novel, Blessed By Light.
She sends me updates, chapter by chapter, because it’s much easier to manage that way. And while all her comments thus far have been very positive, this particular message says: “This chapter kicks ass. Kudos.” Followed by comments on the next chapter: “Excellent chapter. He seems distraught, guilty, tired. Beautifully written.”
And while this made me feel good in the grocery store parking lot, at 3 a.m., alone in my bed in the guilt-ridden dark, all it did was make me wonder about the previous chapters, which were only “good”. Shouldn’t they all kick ass? Shouldn’t they all be beautifully written? Should I start all over from scratch? Am I a total failure now? I used to be a good writer.
You know, I start to doubt my sense of pacing, my sense of building a story arc, my sense of anything at all because I’ve suddenly forgotten what reality is even for. If I ever even knew, I mean.
Death does that to you. Even tiny little furry deaths.
Well, it’s another glorious spring day here in the Hinterlands. I’m going to give it all another shot and see how this day turns out. As usual, no guarantees but I am tying so hard to be happy. I have a wonderful novel in progress, that is sometimes good and sometimes it kicks ass. I need to count my blessings today.
Have a good Wednesday, wherever you are in the world. Thanks for visiting. I love you, gang. And I leave you with this! See ya.
Marilyn's Room 