Tag Archives: The Guitar Hero Goes Home Marilyn Jaye Lewis

I knew this chick was a liar, but come on….

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Yes, I’m sorry!!

I said I would be back here to post again yesterday but I lied.

But I’m here now, so let’s just move on! All righty??!!

Well, the sad news first: Today is that dreaded day that comes once every 3 months, when I have to go down into my super scary, 119-year-old unfinished basement and change the filter in my furnace.

I can’t tell you how much I don’t look forward to doing that. Even though, once I’m down there, it’s never as bad in reality as it is in my imagination. It’s just that forcing myself to go down those stairs at all is the really hard part.

Well, okay. Just had to stop and have a phone chat with the director of Tell My Bones. I was going to post here today about how happy I am with how the plans for the Zoom staged reading of the play are progressing!! So I will just go ahead and say that right now:

I’m really happy with how the plans for the Zoom staged reading of the play are progressing!!

I really am, gang. I am getting so excited. Even though it’s not the whole play, and all the music is being taken out to simplify the reading, you will still be able to get a good feel for the overall play.  Plus, I personally can’t wait to start hearing actual people reciting the dialogue, you know??

Between the four years it’s taken me to adapt this play from the film script version, and then the few years that I was focused just on the film script version — that’s a long time to have this story in my head and never hear a single other soul speaking a single one of these lines of dialogue. So I am getting really excited.

The other good news, of course, is that they finished putting the new roof on my barn yesterday. And I am so happy, gang!! Unfortunately, the back alley and one segment of Basin Street are now littered with the bodies of neighbors who died from heart attacks yesterday afternoon  because they didn’t think I was ever gonna fix that roof, but oh well. That’s the trade-off, I guess.

Of course, I jest! No one died. But I did indeed notice people noticing it, that’s for sure.  So it is a huge relief for me to finally have that barn looking more presentable. It still needs re-painting, but the worst part of it is now over.

And not only am I starting to make some interesting progress on the new novel, Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town, that is making me feel really happy, but I am also coming into a new relationship with Blessed By Light, which is now indeed going to be officially titled The Guitar Hero Goes Home. (So, as of today, I will no longer be calling that novel by its old title, okay? Hopefully, it will not be too confusing.)

It’s really interesting how, having the virus completely gone now, is making my brain work again.

Valerie in Brooklyn sent me a link during the night to an article in a NYC newspaper, where they interviewed people who had recovered from the virus to find out what the virus had felt like. It is the darnedest thing — how differently it affected different people. But there were two people interviewed who had the exact same experiences that I had: mainly, the weight of an anvil on the lungs, inability to breathe, overwhelming fatigue, and inability to think straight. (I also had the loss of the senses of taste & smell.)

Anyway. It just feels so great to be back to normal. And also to be able to work out again. Yoga especially feels so good now.

All right, well, the day before yesterday, Nick Cave sent out another Red Hand Files letter. It was one of the sadder ones, where he replies to people who are struggling with the deaths of their own children and he talks about how he and his wife continue to manage their grief over the death of one of their sons. You can read what he says at the link there. It’s enlightening.

Well, it’s another beautiful day here, but a little chilly. I did make a quick trip into town yesterday to buy more groceries and — YES — to buy yard waste bags in order to start raking up all those dead leaves outside my backdoor.  Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll do it today or not, only because it’s cold out. Not because I’m (still !!!) being incredibly lazy.

I did notice, on the trip to town and back, that traffic is back to normal now around here. A lot of Ohio is coming out of lockdown, though not all of it. (And you still have to wear a mask pretty much anywhere you go.) But there was plenty of traffic. It’s no longer a ghost town anymore. And the gas prices are inching upwards. It felt good to see that. Although in the county where my dad lives, they are getting new confirmed cases of the virus every day. So the more populated urban areas of the State are still having issues. But it was good to see that for a lot of us, we are now entering that light at the end of the tunnel. For now.

Okay, I’m gonna close this because I want to get started on some writing and editing here today.  I leave you with three options. My music-listening from last evening — an old song by Shaggy from 20 years ago (!!) that they play on TikTok constantly and the chorus always just cracks me up. Talk about infidelity, right? “It Wasn’t Me” (2000, from his album Hot Shot): “But she caught me on the counter (It wasn’t me)/ Saw me bangin’ on the sofa (It wasn’t me)/ I even had her in the shower (It wasn’t me)/ She even caught me on camera (It wasn’t me)…” 😂

And then this morning, my breakfast-listening music was from an upcoming new album by Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, and Brian Blade: Round Again. The song is “Right Back Round Again.”

And then this one will give you sort of an idea of what some of the music to Tell My Bones will eventually sound like!! This is a vintage recording from Smithsonian Folkways Records of Ella Jenkins and the Goodwill Spiritual Choir of the Monumental Baptist Church!

All righty. Thanks for visiting, gang. Have a great Thursday, wherever you are in the world. Enjoy that Super Flower Moon in Scorpio tonight!! Assuming you live with someone you don’t have to stay 6 feet away from, this is supposed to be a very, very sexy full moon, so enjoy those vibes! (Since I live alone and dearly love myself, perhaps tonight I will, I don’t know, take up smoking cigarettes again!! Yay!) (Remember that old joke about cigarettes and sex? HE: “Do you smoke after you do it? “ SHE: “I don’t know, I never looked.”)

Okay, on that happy note. I’m outta here. I love you guys. See ya!

Oui, c’est moi!!

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Yes! That’s me, at age 13. In 1973.

And — oddly enough — that’s me sitting at my desk in 1973! Some things absolutely never change, apparently. (And I still have a tiny desk — even 47 years later.)  (And, gosh, I wish I still smoked.) (I loved smoking, even though I only ever smoked occasionally, even as an adult. However, as all things go with those occasional loves — it stopped loving me first.)

I bring up me at age 13 because last night I watched that documentary, The Sacred Triangle: Bowie, Iggy & Lou 1971-1973.

Wow, was it interesting. And it focused primarily on the years 1971-1973. Although, they went into a lot of earlier background on Bowie that I only vaguely sort of knew.

I’m guessing that since Bowie always had this reputation of being really controlling about how his public image was portrayed, this is the kind of documentary that only could have been made about him posthumously. Not that it said anything bad about him, really. But it showed a different side to him. And Angie Bowie was in it a lot. And she came off really great. It was kind of amazing, really. The PR machine has sort of religiously tried to discredit anything she’s ever said publicly — ever — since she and Bowie split, a million years ago.

Back in the early 70s, I didn’t really understand the connection between those three men: Bowie, Iggy and Lou Reed. I knew they knew each other, but only because it seemed like all the rockstars I loved back then knew each other.  They were always photographed together, doing stuff in London or NYC that was nowhere near a concert stage.  And then there was also a Berlin connection a few years later. So I never really gave it any thought at all — the actual connection they had within their careers.

And it’s kind of ironic that just a couple of days ago, I started playing Lou Reed’s Transformer record again. (The record was produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson in 1972 — and that’s the record that had Lou’s hit “Walk On The Wild Side” on it, which I heard on the AM radio when I was 12 and absolutely could not believe. I’d never heard any song like it in my life. ) (And then in my mid-20s, during the AIDS epidemic in NYC, I was a volunteer with the Visiting Nurses of NY and one of the patients I was assigned was the photographer Peter Hujar, who had taken so many of the iconic photographs of all those people Lou sang about in that song.)

Anyway. I felt such an unexpected connection to that documentary. I was kind of stunned. I was only peripherally aware of it — I’d seen some things mentioned about “The Sacred Triangle” on Instagram, but I thought it was in connection to one specific famous photo of the three men that Mick Rock had taken back then.

And there the movie suddenly was, available to stream for free on Amazon last evening. And it seemed like a nice moment to pause Bad Seeds TeeVee for 90 minutes… (man, that is an addicting channel. It’s just awesome. I went to sleep last night, still staring at Bad Seeds TeeVee on my phone in the dark.)

Okay. So.

I’ve started some initial discussions with Valerie about the small press I want to start up here (to self-publish all 749 million of my books, past & present). She helps me design covers for some of my eBooks, so I’m hoping she can also help me design covers for the actual books.

I’m wanting to have one basic sort of design “feel” — if that’s the way to describe it. Sort of how New Directions Publishing was in the old days, where all of their book covers had a similar look to them. Not a lot of color, almost black & white. The same font all the time.

I’m kind of wanting to go with something like that. My goal is to have erotic books that don’t have girls in their underwear on the covers, so that people can read the darn books anywhere they want to. Women especially. (I had female friends in the past who had to make book covers out of paper bags, in order to cover up the photos of practically naked women on the covers of my books, so that they could read my books on the subway without feeling harassed. I also had a friend here in Ohio who did that with a cut-up paper bag so that her husband wouldn’t know she was reading my book Stirring Up A Storm — which was nominated for 3 Pushcart Prizes for fiction, for godsakes, you know? Take the fucking naked women off the covers and more people will read the darn books.)

Anyway.

I’ve also come to the understanding that Blessed By Light is probably not a good title for that novel. Too many people have thought it was a Christian novel of some kind. So I’m thinking maybe I should call the whole book The Guitar Hero Goes Home (which is currently the title of Chapter 18 in the novel).

Plus, I want to go with a different cover. Valerie already designed one last year that had a guitar on it and a Hellcat (car) and a guy smoking a cigarette. I want to change that all up now.

So she and I are working on that.

Peitor and I texted a lot yesterday, but we never actually hooked up over the phone. We are hoping to do that today, so we’ll see.

And even though it sounds like maybe I’m working a lot, or whatever, sadly, yesterday was one of those days where I ended up back in bed for awhile by mid-afternoon. I am hoping that today will be better. I am certainly feeling better today, at least. So we’ll see. I’m hopeful.

On that note, I guess I will close this and see what the day brings. It’s a gorgeous day here today and the temperatures are going to be mild enough that I will be able to open some windows later. So I’m excited! (And I can’t tell you how excited I am about that barn, gang!! I can’t wait!! My neighbors are gonna fall over and die when I finally fix that darn barn!)

All right. Thanks for visiting, gang. I leave you with something truly awesome I just now listened to on Bad Seeds TeeVee, “Give Us A Kiss” from 2014. The lyrics are in the video. Enjoy your Saturday, in the best way you know how.  I love you guys. See ya!