Tag Archives: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

Wake Up! Smell Coffee! Pay Overdue Internet Bill!!

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Nothing quite like that gentle reminder from your Internet provider that your bill might be a little bit overdue… (i.e., they interrupt your service at 8 a.m. on the dot…)

You know, it isn’t actually my fault.

For years — literally — my bill was always due on the first of the month. And then, like, 2 months ago, I noticed that the due date had been randomly changed to the 23rd of the month — and they never officially told me this!! Or explained why!!

Of course, they might have told me this and explained why. I never actually read the bill. I just pay it on the first and throw the bill away.

When they changed my due date, I decided to ignore it and keep paying it on the first. This morning, they decided to stop ignoring the fact that I was ignoring them, and they introduced me to this concept of: pay your bill or we’re cutting you off.

So, anyway.  They sort of put a crimp in the joy of my first cup of coffee of the morning while I skim over email — noticing there was a new Red Hand Files newsletter from Nick Cave in there!! Yay! And when I went to click on it and read it — Ooops! Right at that precise moment it became 8 a.m. and then no Internet connection.

Aaaaaach. Fuck you fuck you fuck you.

Of course, their “fuck you” to me carried more weight.

So I called them and conversed with the robot and paid my fucking bill.

And here I now am. Doing laundry. Drinking coffee. Once again, beginning my day.

My cough seemed to get worse during the night, not better. So I didn’t sleep too great. When I finally did get some decent sleep, I overslept and then slept in until 6:30 am. But here’s hoping I will finally kick this stupid cold today.

Okay.

Yesterday was very interesting indeed!

I went to a gas station about 15 miles from here because they had a really great price on gas yesterday. (No, I didn’t drive 15 miles out of my way and use all that gas just to save on gas; it was on the way into town where I buy my groceries.)

It was evening already — dark out. That time that I actually find a little magical at a gas station in the middle of nowhere — all those lights and very few people anywhere around. Well, this lady who’s putting gas in her own car, looks over at me. And then looks at me again. And finally calls out to me: “Do you live in Crazeysburg?”

Me, astounded that anyone on Earth is actually speaking to me, gets very excited and says, “Yes, I do!”

It turns out that she’s my neighbor — she lives one house away from me. And she loves my new car! So she didn’t really recognize me at all, she recognized the car. And so we talked at length about “the car.”

And actually, an elderly couple was coming out of the dollar store, back before I went to NY, and they stopped in the parking lot and stared sort of spellbound at my grown-up, molten lava-colored Honda Civic, and said, “That’s a beautiful car.”

And in Rhinebeck, Sandra’s husband also really loved my new car. In fact, so did my mom — that fateful day when I took that trip to the cornfields of Hell and back and then finally hooked up with her. In a gas station in a tiny town called Clarksburg, where the first words out of her mouth were, “You have a new car!! You didn’t tell me! I’ve been driving all over for a fucking hour, looking for a white Honda Fit!”

Yeah, well. Anyway.

It is so weird to me, that I could own a car that anyone would look at twice, let alone fall in love with at first sight. And to have it be a car that I don’t actually emotionally connect to. I’m gracious, and say “thank you”, and all that. But somewhere deep inside, I’m usually thinking: you should see the car I really wanna buy…

But onward! It was kind of cool speaking to an actual neighbor (whose name was Angie). And now I know that everyone is noticing my new car (all 14 of the people who live around here). (And they’re probably wondering: How come she has that spiffy new car and the roof of her barn is still a complete wreck?! Where is her sense of home-owning priorities?)

Well, you know what Shakespeare said. Some are born with great cars, some achieve great cars, and others have great cars thrust upon them by the Honda dealership even though they were happy with their little Honda Fits and the roofs of their barns are still a complete wreck.

Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files newsletter today was really beautiful. About saying goodbye. And oddly enough, while I was meditating this morning, the man I wrote about recently  — the older married guy with cancer that I fell in love with who changed my life and then died — his essence came to me while I was meditating and he was saying something about me needing to let him go.

Naturally, I immediately blocked that. That’s my fallback position whenever anyone anywhere, living or dead, suggests something to me that would be in my best interests but that I have no desire whatsoever to accept, to acknowledge, or to even listen to.  (I’m making a joke of it but it actually isn’t funny.)

Then I did that Inner Being journaling thing right after the meditation, and there he was again — it was all about me needing to let that guy go. But it supposedly wasn’t about “saying goodbye,” it was about me evolving and expanding past where I am now and who I am now and to be really joyful about it, because spirits are eternal and that guy’s spirit isn’t actually going anywhere; you know, he’ll be there forever, but that I need to sort of redefine myself now and move into my future, and not think so much about someone who has moved on to the next realm.

So I said: okay, I will — think about it really seriously.

And then I put on my less churlish, grown-up self and reluctantly said, “Okay, I will.” And that twinge, you know — of goodbye. That I actually really have to do this and how much it sucks, even though my future is evolving into something really wonderful. And then that Red Hand Files letter being all about goodbyes. It was really bittersweet. Very beautiful.

All right. Speaking of Instagram! Which I was! I was inwardly saying that while there are remarkably fewer photos getting posted to Instagram re: the Nick Cave Conversations now (and I mean from, like, 20 down to like maybe three), Chicago looked like another great show. And tonight is Minneapolis! A town I don’t think I’ve ever been to. I’m not 100% positive about that. I might have passed through it at some point in my distant past. But what matters is that I won’t be there tonight! (I don’t mean that to sound like I’m excited to not be seeing Nick Cave tonight. I mean that it doesn’t matter whether or not I’ve ever been to Minneapolis before. Being there tonight would be the important thing, you know. Anyway.)

There is also a brand new Instagram account for my play Tell My Bones. I’m not a huge social media person. So I’m not really sure how you find it. I think maybe you just go to Instagram and look for tellmybones . And then, of course, follow it.

The website has still not launched but it will soon. (I’m guessing that you can guess what the URL will be…) I don’t handle any of that side of the marketing or publicity, etc., and it is so cool to just get alerts that all this stuff is happening! That all I’m in charge of is writing the play.

Okay, on that note — I gotta go write the play! (Well, that and finish doing the laundry.)

Thanks for visiting, guys. Have a terrific Tuesday, wherever you are in the world. All other things in my heart considered, I’m doing okay with tomorrow being the anniversary of Tom Petty’s death. I’m just moving on in all kinds of ways here, aren’t I? But I do leave you with this, “In the Dark of the Sun,” from their 1991 album Into the Great Wide Open. Okay. I love you guys. See ya.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXekIfSPOH4

“In the Dark of the Sun”

In the dark of the sun will you save me a place?
Give me hope, give me comfort, get me to
A better place?
I saw you sail across a river
Underneath Orion’s sword
In your eyes there was a freedom
I had never known before

Hey, yeah, yeah, in the dark of the sun
We will stand together
Yeah we will stand as one in the dark of the sun

Past my days of great confusion
Past my days of wondering why
Will I sail into the heavens
Constellations in my eyes?

Hey, yeah, yeah, in the dark of the sun
We will stand together
Yeah we will stand as one in the dark of the sun

c – 1991 Tom Petty

Rebels Regardless, With or Without A Cause

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Still trying to kick this cold so I slept in a whole hour today.  Doesn’t seem to have done much. I’m still coughing a little and really just tired.

I woke up with the song “Rebels” in my head, which is a really unheard of sort of thing. I never find myself singing that song. And now I can’t think of anything else. (It was a hit off of Tom Petty’s 1985 album, Southern Accents.)

So I wondered why I would be singing that song this morning — I really believe that when we wake up singing certain songs, our Inner Being is trying to communicate something to us — symbolically. Almost like how dreams communicate with us. Privately giving us information, I mean, even though half the time, we don’t understand it.

I played “Rebels” on the CD player during breakfast and thought about it.  And for the first time, really, I realized that most of my ancestors are Southern — they’re from Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Virginia.  (But shortly before coming from the South, they came from Ireland and Germany.)

I don’t know much about my birth mom’s ancestors, beyond her great-grandfather, who was a Baptist preacher. Although I know that they were farmers who settled into southern Ohio after coming up through West Virginia.

On my birth dad’s side, though, the written records go back to 1530, in Germany. And they seem to have been true rebels — you know, rebelling against the Church. They seem to have been on Martin Luther’s side from way, way back.

There is a church in Alsenz, Germany, that still has baptismal records from one set of my ancestors in the mid-1600s — from the branch that wound up going to America and becoming indescribably fertile pioneers in what became Kentucky. Here is a photo of that church in Germany as it looks today. It is still a practicing church:

Evangelische Kirche in Alsenz–  some of my family’s baptismal records are still there from the mid-1600s.

I have always loved Kentucky, even before I knew that my ancestors not only came from there, but also helped settle the State — my grandfather (with about 5 “greats” hyphenated to it) worked alongside Daniel Boone, and then he wound up staying in Kentucky and settling a little area that came to be called Robinson Creek. It is still there — just a tiny area of Pike County, near — astonishingly enough — Robinson’s actual creek.

Anyway, those Mays were absolute rebels, you know. In terms of the “North” against the “South.” And also just in the way they rebelled against society pretty much at every turn. Just one particular strand of it, I mean — the one I came from, as luck would have it.

I have never considered myself a rebel — I just have always been an unshakeable believer in doing what I believe is right (even though “right” is 100% subjective), and not towing some party line because it’s expected of me.

I don’t wake up in the morning wondering what I can do to irk people or piss them off or disappoint them. I never do or say or believe something simply to be contrary or “rebellious”. Yet most people who have had to live with me treat me like I’m doing it all on purpose.

I’ve written here before about my great-great-great-grandfather — the one who was a Kentucky State Senator, and was kicked out of the Senate for being a staunch supporter of the Confederacy. Kentucky was a split State — half Union, half Confederate. And even within his own family there was a split — my grandfather’s brother fought on the side of the Union. My grandfather was killed in the Civil War — drowned during the Battle of Cynthiana.

My great-great-great-grandmother was either pregnant at the time of his death or had just given birth to another baby; I can’t remember now which. They had 7 children. In the family Bible that she kept, she wrote a detailed account about how my grandfather would break away from his regiment when he could, and he and my grandmother would meet secretly under a specific tree somewhere and make love! (They were in their 30s at the time. Married, of course.) She actually wrote about this in the Bible because she didn’t want any of us who came afterward to forget about him. She loved him so much. At least two of those secret rendez-vous’ led to pregnancies — children that my grandfather never got to meet because he was still fighting in the war and then was killed.

So my great-great-great-grandmother was left alone to raise all those children by herself. Luckily she had a lot of sons who took care of her and she lived to be pretty old.

While I love the ancestral women in my family, I really only relate to the men. Meaning that I identify with them, their spirits. And there at the breakfast table, for the first time ever — oddly enough, since all I ever do is think about stuff; you’d think this would have occurred to me before age 59 — I realized that my family were all rebels.

Actually, even my grandmother (my birth dad’s mom) was a rebel in her way. Although she wasn’t proud of it. I got to meet her before she died. She was 89 and we spent several days together at my uncle’s house after my dad had died. And for one afternoon, she and I were there in the house alone and she told me the story of her life. It was very sad but really just incredible.  She’d been engaged to be married to this “nice boy” (this was in Kentucky) and then my grandfather got a job working for her father — and the moment the two met, they fell into lust. She disappeared with my grandfather for a whole weekend even though she was engaged to someone else, and by the time the weekend was over, they had to get married.

Her first 2 babies died as infants, and my grandfather turned out to be just an incurable alcoholic, and so my grandmother always believed that it was God’s way of punishing her for betraying the “nice boy” that she’d been engaged to.

There was other, really sad stuff that happened to her, too, but that sadness aside, this morning I realized that I was quite interconnected to all those rebels — even the ones in Germany who rebelled against the Church. All of it is just in my blood. My other grandmother, my birth mom’s mom, always used to tell me that “the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree ” in regards to me and the things I said and did — and she never meant that in a flattering way.

Oh well.

I don’t know. I’m just the way I am. I do what my heart calls me to do — even when it seems completely inappropriate, even to me, sometimes.

Okay. So Nick Cave’s Conversations resume Stateside — he’s in Chicago tonight! The Instagram photos have been awesome! I hope that’s a trend that will continue. (I never mentioned that he began wearing this really nice black suit.)

And I did discover what time that Youtube thing is on Thursday, when they are going to play Ghosteen for the first time. And, yes, as luck would have it, I already know I will be nowhere near Youtube when that fucking happens!! Damn it. But the following day, it will be in my Spotify thingie so all I will have to do is figure out how to make that thing work. I mean, it works, but it so seldom plays what I’m wanting it to play.

I did pre-oder the CD but it won’t be out until November and even then, it has to ship to me from the UK. They assured me it would arrive in a timely manner, but we’ll see.

Okay. You already know what I’m leaving you with, I’m sure. Thanks for visiting, gang. Have a really, really good Monday, wherever you are in the world. I love you. XXX See ya.

Tom Petty 1978

“Rebels”

Honey don’t walk out I’m too drunk to follow
You know you won’t feel this way tomorrow
Well – maybe I’m a little rough around the edges
Inside a little hollow
I get faced with some things sometimes
That are so hard to swallow – Hey!

Hey, hey, hey
I was born a rebel
Down in Dixie on a Sunday morning
Yeah – with one foot in the grave
And one foot on the pedal
I was born a rebel

Well she picked me up in the morning
And she paid all my tickets
Yeah she screamed in the car
And left me out in the thicket
Well – I never would’ve dreamed
That her heart was so wicked
Oh – but I keep coming back
‘Cause it’s so hard to kick it
Hey, hey, hey

 

[Chorus]

Even before my father’s fathers
They called us all rebels
Burned our cornfields
And left our cities leveled
I can still feel the eyes
Of those blue bellied devils
When I’m walking round tonight
Through the concrete and metal
Hey, hey, hey

c – 1985 Tom Petty

Yeah, Well. Now It’s All About Work…

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I feel like I need a vacation just from having been away for 8 days… plus catching that darn cold. But, alas. It’s not to be.

I know I’ve said this before, but I honestly can’t even imagine what a vacation would feel like, or where I would even go.

It, of course, has come to my attention that the first full-length staged reading of Tell My Bones will be happening in NYC directly before I’m supposed to oversee my first Writers Retreat at Villa Monte Malbe, so that’s interesting, right?

Not that it can’t be done. It certainly can. I’m mostly just concerned about what will likely be my intensely frazzled frame of mind. Going back to NYC, dealing with the rehearsals, then the actual reading and all that that will entail, then fly off to Italy, go deep into Perugia, all by myself, where I don’t speak the language (even though I study it every single darn day– the only way I will be any good at Italian is if everyone there just gives me written quizzes and doesn’t attempt to actually converse with me), then attempt to communicate with the staff at the retreat– the kitchen staff, housekeeping , none of whom, I’ve been assured, speak English; and then try to help about 15-20 writers that I won’t have met before have some sort of magical relaxing creative ethereal sort of experience.

You know, it’s always really important to me that when other writers work with me — either in a collaborative way, or they hire me to be their editor, or they come to me as a writing student — I always want the other person to find something truly expansive in that experience. Help people approach their writing in an empowering way, or maybe in a way that helps them understand themselves better as someone gifted and born to write. That type of thing. It matters a lot to me.  I would rather not be out of my fucking mind while I’m trying to do that.

I guess we’ll see.

More wonderful photos out of Canada last night! This time, Toronto. Although I don’t think anything is going to compare with that theater in Montreal. (I’m speaking about the Conversations with Nick Cave, in case you’re new here and wondering what the fuck I’m suddenly talking about.)

Next he will be in Chicago — a mere 45 minutes from Crazeysburg!! (By plane, that is. ) I really like Chicago. I have some wonderful memories from the old historic Palmer House Hotel there!! And their Art Institute. I wish I were going…

Anyway. I’m gonna scoot here and get to work.  I’m kinda hoping the Universe has something figured out for me because, left to my own devices, all I manage to do is work too much. Oh, and a web site for Tell My Bones will be forthcoming in the very near future, gang! Meanwhile, please follow the new facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/tellmybones/

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Okay. Thanks for visiting, gang!! Have a super Sunday, wherever you are in the world!! I leave you with this true gem from Tom Petty’s Highway Companion solo album, “Square One.” I think he wrote it about himself & Dana, but then I think he wrote everything about Dana… She was his angel. Okay. I love you guys. See ya.

“Square One”

Had to find some higher ground.
Had some fear to get around.
You can’t say what you don’t know.
Later on won’t work no more.

Last time through I hid my tracks.
So well I could not get back.
Yeah my way was hard to find.
Can’t sell your soul for peace of mind.

[Chorus:]
Square one, my slate is clear.
Rest your head on me my dear.
It took a world of trouble, took a world of tears.
It took a long time to get back here.

Tried so hard to stand alone.
Struggled to see past my nose.
Always had more dogs than bones.
I could never wear those clothes.

It’s a dark victory.
You won and you are so lost.
Told us you were satisfied, but it never came across

Square one, my slate is clear.
Rest your head on me my dear.
It took a world of trouble, took a world of tears.
It took a long time to get back here.
c – 2006 Tom Petty

Just This & That As I Get Back to Work Here!

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The chest cold lingers but I slept really great, all things considered. I only did that “lurch awake and suddenly hack my brains out” once during the night! Otherwise, I slept like a wee bonny babe.

I try not to take OTC cold remedies because I use Flonase due to allergies– that’s a steroid and has some indescribably horrific bad reactions when combined with most OTC cold remedies. I found that out the hard way — twice, because I didn’t know what had caused it the first time.

If you’ve never accidentally combined Flonase with OTC cold remedies, it feels like you’re heart is going to explode and like your lungs are collapsing and your whole chest starts heaving, as you try to get air. And that only goes on for about several hours.

So now, I do the apple cider vinegar stuff, the ginger-honey tea thing, the endless glasses of water, and good old-fashioned, delightfully-scented Vick’s VapoRub!! (It works, too, because, of course, Flonase is doing all the somewhat dicey chemical stuff…) (And by “dicey,” I mean that Flonase has a potential side effect of glaucoma.)

Anyway. So I’m better and I slept great. And I felt suitably armored to call my (adoptive) dad on the phone and tell him how my trip to NYC went.

If you’re not a regular reader of this lofty blog, my adoptive dad and I have a tumultuous relationship. That is putting it super mildly. I am always either in or out of the Will — depending on things like my politics any given year, and whether or not I use the ‘F’-word constantly. And a whole lot of other, way more serious stuff that I don’t want to go into here because it will just depress me beyond your abilities to comprehend.

Anyway. I try to be nice. And sometimes, he does, too. But I can never just pick up a phone and call him without suiting up in every conceivable type of armor there is — emotional, spiritual, psychological. Protective Voodoo chants and empowering aroma therapies. (I would put on the actual armor of the knights of yore, but it would make it ridiculously hard to use my iPhone, plus I don’t own any.)

But, seriously. I really have to do that kind of protective mental stuff before even picking up the phone. And when I told him how great the meeting went with the director, and what the plans were for the next 9 months, and how the meeting was just a great success, he said, “Can you imagine how devastating it would have been if everything had gone wrong?”

ME: “God. Dad, why would I want to think about something like that?!!”

I always have to erect this huge mental blockade against everything he says. He is so negative and sort of mean. (When I was almost 15, and really just at the nadir of my existence; Greg was dead, the boys at school  would not stop assaulting me, I was taking 15 sleeping pills a day, etc., my dad was dropping me off after his monthly “taking me to dinner” and I was afraid to go back into the house and be alone with my mother, who was on this weird ‘punishment’ rampage, where I had to stay locked up in my room, 24/7, and I could only come out to eat my meals — and only when everyone else was done and had left the table; I couldn’t play records or watch TV or listen to the radio or talk on the phone or see anyone at all. Not even my brother. She allowed me to have my guitar in my room, but that was it. For a couple of weeks this went on, and my room was a hot little airless box that got up to about 100 degrees because it was the height of summer.  Anyway. I was afraid to go back in there. And cut to the chase: my dad said, “You’re on your own here. There’s nothing I can do for you anymore. If you’re going to kill yourself, just kill yourself.” So, you know, I went in there, went up to my room and tried to do as he advised, then wound up in the sunny wilds of the mental hospital…)

Yeah, so. Me and my adoptive dad… a unending perilous journey in the making. Until one of us dies.

But I got through that phone call by just not giving an inch of ground. And he attempted to point out every negative possibility for my life that he could imagine, and I kept my arsenal of handy vocabulary words as close by me as I could. And then the call was over and I could sigh and say: Okay. I called my dad. What’s next on the list of death-defying feats today?

You can see why you might not want to make that kind of phone call, though, if you’re not feeling well…

But I am feeling better!

And my cats are so frisky! Darting all over. Playing. They really love this chilly fall weather, and I think they’re actually happy that I’m home. Even Francis seems happy to see me, in her tiny mean way! She hunkers down and stares at me, growls a little, thumps her angry tail — but the fact that she does this and doesn’t run away and hide, means that she’s willing to allow me to occupy the same space as her for the time being!! A small act of love. Which I cherish.

My cats. Thank God for my birth mom, right? I’m going to have to travel so much next year. It gives me so much peace of mind knowing that she got along so well with my crazy cats.

Okay, today I am going to try to map out some of those rewrites to the play — which are actually pretty substantial. Not what has to be taken out, but what needs to be added to what’s already there. Without weighing the play down or making it go on for too long. And one of the ways to handle that is to  weave additional character development throughout the entire play. So that it doesn’t just come at you in one big chunk, you know?  Sort of like re-weaving a tapestry or something, right? Introduce the storylines sooner, without changing what’s already written there. “Expanding” what’s there, I guess is the word for it.

Then I’ll do some more notes on this new “Litany” development for Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse. That really came out of left field, gang, but it feels really exciting. I am really curious to see how that’s going to ultimately land on the page.

The Conversations with Nick Cave move into Canadian territory today — Montreal, then Toronto. Golly, I really wish I could be there! It’s so hard for me to believe that I won’t be able to see one of those things again, because it was so cool. But I’m guessing next in line is a tour for Ghosteen.

And next week, there is the listening event on Youtube for the record, but I cannot figure out what time zone that thing is in! Honestly. It’s some time zone I’ve never heard of before.  I’m guessing that google will attempt to help me figure that out. And I do have it set to stream on Spotify when it drops, however, me and Spotify are just not real cozy. I’ve been on there since the company launched and I still cannot really figure out how to use it. I always have to flag down some random  27 year-old guy and shriek, “Can you help me figure this fucking thing out??!!”

RANDOM 27 Year-Old Guy: “Just click this and then that.”

ME: “But I tried that and it keeps taking me back to Tropical Fuck Storm!!”

Honestly. Old as it makes me sound, I really miss the days when I just went into Woolworth’s and bought the record and took it home.

Okay! Gonna get started here. I hope you have a great Friday, wherever you are in the world and whatever it finds you doing!! The 2nd anniversary of Tom Petty’s death is rapidly approaching, but I am doing really okay about that. I really am. I was listening to An American Treasure at breakfast this morning (I was listening to it while driving across Pennsylvania — that and Let Love In and Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus for 500 miles…) and when I played the song below — a really, really great rockabilly song that they never released until after he died — instead of thinking how sad it is that Tom Petty is gone, I thought about how fun it was to listen to him in the wilds of sunny Pennsylvania, trees turning to autumn everywhere I looked.

It felt bittersweet but, overall, I was happy.

So. Thanks for visiting. I love you guys. See ya!

 

“Lonesome Dave”

Well, whatever happened to Lonesome Dave?
Used to play in a rock ‘n’ roll band
He’d be up and on the stage
All the kids would raise their hands
But oh, then disco came
Nothing lasts for long
Oh, it’s such a shame
Lonesome Dave is goneWell, he’d be up there rockin’ out
Three-hundred-sixty-five days a year
Lightnin’ Boogie and Amy’s Blues
Play it so loud that it hurt my ears
And oh, somethin’ went wrong
Yeah, the times have changed
Now it’s a different song
Lonesome Dave is gone

All right, Dave!
Yeah!

Well, three P.M. at the Holiday Inn
The room service coming on a tray
Tuna melt and an orange juice
It was heaven there for Lonesome Dave
But, oh, that disco came
Oh, the times have changed
Now it’s a different song
Lonesome Dave is gone

Well, I wish I was Lonesome Dave
I’d lay up with the girls all night
I’d run round in the parking lot
I’d drink some beer and get into fights
But oh, it’s only me
Now it’s a different song
What will be, will be
Lonesome Dave is gone

All right, Dave
Hang on, Dave, yeah!

Well, whatever happened to Lonesome Dave?
He used to play in a guitar band
Three-hundred-sixty-five days a year
God, I know, we all love him, man
Yeah, and he’d go wild
Yeah, the crowd would yell
Time is moving on
Lonesome Dave is gone

Bye bye, Dave!
Yeah
Bye bye, Dave!

c – 1993 Tom Petty

Me, A Grown Up!

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All right, well. I got the new car.

No CD player. It’s all about streaming.

What the fuck? Do they not know how many CDs I still own? And even though I do stream a ton of music, there are hundreds of  CDs that I don’t have in any sort of streaming version, including some Nick Cave stuff and several early Tom Petty CDs. I’m not sure how they think I’m going to be able to pull out of my driveway without certain songs on certain days.

I don’t actually have a driveway, but still. The thought of ripping CDs onto my laptop then transferring them to my phone– I am not a Geek. I am a crazed, lunatic writer. I do not have time to do stuff like that anymore.

That pissed me off so much that I almost got right back out of the car and said, “Take this back, please, and give me the old Honda Fit.” This grown-up business really sucks.

But here is the car I got. This is not the actual car. I don’t have a showroom to park it in. But I am too lazy to go downstairs right now and photograph the actual car. But it looks just like this, so don’t worry.

2019 Molten Lava Pearl Honda Civic LX 4 Door Automatic (CVT) 2.0L I4 DOHC 16V i-VTEC Engine FWD

It does weird things like drives for you automatically for 10 seconds. It has a radar up front that automatically applies your brakes if someone ahead of you puts on their brakes. It keeps pace with the car in front you: if that car speeds up or slows down, you do, too. It has automatic lights so that you can blind people with your brights at night without meaning to — or you can drive in complete darkness, if you prefer to not blind people. (That seems to be my option: blind others or drive in total darkness.)

The other thing it does, which totally cracks me up because I love language: if you inch outside of your lane at either side, an orange warning comes on in front of you that reads: Lane Departure.

That word “departure” is what cracks me up. Who thought of that? They probably thought “watch what you’re doing, asshole” was too offensive to the driver, or that “put your fucking phone down & pay attention, you’re driving!” was too long to cram into that little orange space.

But the thing that disappoints me the most about the Civic is that it does indeed go really fast, but it is a more solid vehicle than the Fit so you do not feel like you’re going really fast. There is no soaring sort of thrill. So what is the point of going really fast? I might as well just go the fucking speed limit, you know? And save on gas and stuff like that.

They are forcing me to grow up. And I do not appreciate it. However, it is mine for the next 3 years.

As I was leaving the Honda dealership in the new car yesterday, across the street was a used car lot and right out there in front was a used Hellcat. It was in a bright metallic lime green color, not my favorite. But still. I looked at that car as I drove away and my heart sank… (Those Hellcats go from 0 to 210 mph in about 3 seconds. I realize there’s no earthly reason to do that if you’re not drag racing, but still. It just made me feel so sad.)

Anyway. So now I look like a grown up when I’m in my perfectly grown up car. (I’m not one, but no one will know that.)

Okay, well. Sandra and I actually spoke on the phone for 4 seconds yesterday. I was in the Honda dealership when she finally called me and I couldn’t talk. So now we are playing phone tag. A step up from texting…

The play rewrites are, of course, not finished. I’m getting stressed and depressed and all that stuff that I do so well. But I decided late last night  to do some radical segment-intending, 24/7, for the next several days and pull myself past this. I usually only do segment-intending when I’m getting ready to get into the car. I have two profound needs whenever I’m driving. The main one is to not kill any animals out here in the middle of nowhere where there are so many scurrying about, and the other is to not wreck the car, since I am only borrowing it for 3 years and then giving it back.

For me, my segment-intending always includes giving appreciation to St. Francis (animals) and St. Christopher (the car). And then of course to Christ because he’s that thing in my life that tries to keep me from generally going insane.  But segment-intending doesn’t really involve saints unless you’re me and your mind chooses to do weird shit like that.

But segment-intending works extremely well. So I decided to break the day/night into 5-hour segments, so every 5 hours, I visualize the next 5 hours going really smoothly and me not stressing out — staying calm, happy, even.

So far, it is working great. It really is. I’m in my second segment right now and not freaking out about anything at all, and only thinking of death as a viable solution in the most meager, fleeting sort of way. (Just kidding about that.)

And I slept like a rock for 5 hours last night, woke up and wasn’t worried about anything at all. I feel like I have this sort of mental protective force-field all around me, keeping out the garbage thoughts, and helping me just stay calm. It really is interesting, how my mind can actually feel it — feel protected, I mean. From my own thoughts.

However, on that note, my mind will feel even better when I finish the rewrites on the play so I better get started here. (Oh, I’ll mention here that it looks like all those additional Conversations with Nick Cave for January 2020 that went on sale yesterday sold out in, like, 4 minutes. I think this means that he is never going to stop conversing. This is not a judgement at all, but an observation.)

Okay!! I leave you with this song I used to really just love. It was breakfast-listening music today and I hadn’t heard it in years. I still loved it.  It is such a soaring song. “The Whole of the Moon,” from The Waterboys album, This is the Sea (1985). Enjoy. Have a super Saturday, wherever you are in the world, gang. Thanks for visiting. I love you guys. See ya!

“The Whole Of The Moon”

I pictured a rainbow
You held it in your hands
I had flashes
But you saw the plan
I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moonYou were there at the turnstiles
With the wind at your heels
You stretched for the stars
And you know how it feels
To reach too high
Too far
Too soon
You saw the whole of the moon

I was grounded
While you filled the skies
I was dumbfounded by truths
You cut through lies
I saw the rain-dirty valley
You saw Brigadoon
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon

I spoke about wings
You just flew
I wondered, I guessed and I tried
You just knew
I sighed
But you swooned
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon

With a torch in your pocket
And the wind at your heels
You climbed on the ladder
And you know how it feels
To get too high
Too far
Too soon
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon

Unicorns and cannonballs
Palaces and piers
Trumpets, towers, and tenements
Wide oceans full of tears
Flags, rags, ferry boats
Scimitars and scarves
Every precious dream and vision
Underneath the stars

Yes, you climbed on the ladder
With the wind in your sails
You came like a comet
Blazing your trail
Too high
Too far
Too soon
You saw the whole of the moon

c – 1985 Mike Scott

The Price You Pay

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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

c – 1980 Bruce Springsteen

Man. Time is Really Just Killin’ Me, Gang!!!

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I don’t know if it’s like this all over the world, but in the Eastern region of America, the full moon in August is always pretty spectacular. It’s just huge and sort of rose-tinted.

Last evening, the full moon here in Muskingum County was also surrounded by puffs of clouds, so it was really incredible to look at.  And here in my own backyard, my neighbors (the drummer) have enormous old pine trees and for awhile, the full moon was shining through the tops of the pines down into my huge kitchen window.

It really was just so pretty. But bittersweet, too, since mid-August means that the summer is sort of galloping to a close.

I have spent the entire summer at my desk. I didn’t even get to the movies to see “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood,” which I really wanted to see. But the movie theater is 45 minutes away from me. So that’s an hour and a half of driving, plus a 2-hour movie… I just never managed to make time.

The director texted me yesterday that he’s extended his stay here in the Hinterlands of Ohio until the end of August so that he can be here to  meet with me pretty constantly until I get this play finished.  So I really, really, really gotta get this play finished. (Not that I was doing anything else other than that at all.)

And I still haven’t told Sandra about the extent of these revisions. I’ve only told her that I’m bringing back some of the earlier elements and that this time it’s working out really well.  Which is such an indescribable understatement of what is really happening, that now I don’t even know how to explain it to her. Plus, I have no idea when we’re supposed to go to Toronto regarding the other play; all I know is that the meeting will yield an enormous amount of rewrites for the other play.

I just want to be ready. So I’m just sort of in this weird world of constantly working so that I can be “ready.” Whatever the heck that really means.

Yesterday, I passed by my couch in the family room on my way to the stairs — I have an extremely comfortable couch in the family room. The kind you could easily sleep on all night and not wake up feeling like you’d slept on a couch all night. I passed by this same couch yesterday afternoon and realized that I had not so much as sat down on it in probably a year. So I sat down on it for about 60 seconds and remembered fondly all the many fantastic British crime dramas I used to watch while hanging out on the comfy couch! Not working! Sometimes even snacking! Sometimes even ordering in a pizza!!!!

That seems like somebody else’s life!

And also yesterday, I wanted some apple cider vinegar because my sinuses were bothering me because of allergies, and the cupboard that it was in was stuck shut because of the humidity. I hadn’t opened that particular cupboard in ages. I really had to yank it to get it to open. And once I did, it really was like the cupboard from yesteryear! In that one cupboard, at least, time had stopped!

All those herbs and spices and grains and different types of oils and vinegars and organic this and organic that. I was spellbound, just staring at it all. My god. I used to cook!!! All the time!!!

Now, all I do is work and I barely eat and the months disappear.

And I so much want to go with Kara to that cabin in the caves with the hot tub, but I can’t see it happening until the summer is basically over. That’s so disappointing.

But we will eventually get there.

It just is what it is for now.  I’m really just so thrilled with how the play is finally going that all I really want to do is just let it come out.

Still, it’s scary how time is flying. And I know that my whole body is intensely stressed, even though I’m doing my yoga 4-5 times a week. I never relax anymore unless I’m collapsing into bed. The thought of collapsing on the couch instead, with a pizza (??!!) and bingeing on episodes of DCI Somebody or Other??!! My god how fun!!

Well, someday.

Meanwhile.  Yes. I have to get to work on the play here. I would leave you with what I was listening to but you can’t actually get it on YouTube, so I’ll just say I was playing a lot of phenomenal Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers live bootleg stuff from the early 1980s, really, really loud. It was fun, but you’ll just have to take my word for it.  (And, btw, the new Tropical Fuck Storm CD, Braindrops, will be released next week. I am really eager to hear that. What I’ve heard from it so far, I have really just loved. Especially that song, “Paradise.”)

All right, well. Thanks for visiting, gang. I hope you have a really fun Friday! Go take a vacation for me or something, okay?? Okay! I love you guys! See ya.

Enjoy that full moon, all you owls & pussycats!

I Smell A Pulitzer!! You Bet’cha!!

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Another gorgeous day here in Crazeysburg! You would not believe it had been so unbearable only a couple of days ago.

And because it’s so beautiful, I think I’ll spend the next  8 hours, yes, sitting at my desk!

Even while I am actually excited about making the drastic revisions to Tell My Bones — because I believe in the director and I believe that whatever he feels so strongly about is the path to follow here — I do sort of lament that I spent my entire birthday (Monday) at my desk, working on the (old & now useless) revisions of the play.

I was at my desk for over 12 hours on my birthday.  And it really was a struggle, because I wasn’t sure the revisions were working, either.  I wish the director had read the screenplay earlier (I sent him the screenplay at his request 6 weeks ago) and had discovered earlier that we needed to stop and go back down the previous path.

But it’s futile to wish that too hard, right? For whatever reason, we’re on the path right now. So I try to let go of it and focus on what’s in front of me. And next year, maybe I will spend my birthday doing something wonderful.

Yesterday, I added a new segment to In the Shadow of Narcissa. It’s a work in progress, for sure. It’s not what I would call an actual struggle to write it, but it’s a challenge to find balance there, and to tell the story through the eyes of my actual childhood and not tell the story as my grown self, who knows all the awful stuff that came later.

I’m not exactly sure what years the memoir will encompass. I want it to remain in the realm of my childhood in Cleveland. My happiest childhood memories are of Cleveland, but that’s because my paternal (adoptive) grandmother lived there and she was the very best part of my life.

But I do also  have some happy memories about my adoptive mother from the years in Cleveland, even though I was already terrified of her by age 2, when she first lost control and mercilessly abused me. She tried really hard to regain her footing with me after that — and sadly, I believe it was to the detriment of my older brother.  This is my own opinion about what happened. But I think that she was so afraid of herself, and of losing her control again with me and then having my dad find out that it had happened again, that she wound up redirecting all her rage toward my entirely defenseless brother.

As if her rage only counted if it was aimed at me, and that my brother didn’t matter. It was horrible, the stuff she did to my brother and I don’t even really know what happened, because she was always dragging him off to his room and I was always told to sit in a chair and shut up and not move.

Once, she tied his hands together and dragged him off to his room, and a lot of screaming, from him, ensued. He was 5 years old. It had started because he wouldn’t stop biting his nails. I was overwhelmed with anxiety, having to sit there and shut up and hearing him scream and not be able to help him.

I do remember one time being unable to control myself and pleading with her to leave my brother alone. “Mommy, stop!” you know, just inconsolable screaming, wanting to help him. And she actually told me to calm down because he was a boy and boys had to learn how to handle it. (As a footnote,  my older brother stopped any contact with our adoptive mother back in 1982 and I haven’t seen my older brother since 1995.)

She said this. I remember it so clearly. I had a hard time processing that, for sure.  Even at age 4, I could not believe that anyone who was suffering for any reason whatsoever, was meant to learn how to handle it.

Anyway, I’m trying to find balance as I tell In the Shadow of Narcissa. Because I do remember her trying very hard to be kind to me when I was very little, while she was in her early 30s. As the years went on, she became pretty much uncontrollable, 24/7. But I don’t think this memoir is going to be about that. This memoir is going to be about her seeming battle early on to be kind and yet to be filled with rage — a truly unhappy young 1960s American housewife who was also a narcissist.  And how disruptive it was to me psychologically, and how, because I knew I’d been adopted, I began very early on, wishing that my “real” mother would come back and get me.

And then that very real fear of realizing that my “real” mother did not know where I was and that I was on my own.

Regarding the play, though. I decided to take last evening off. It was such a lovely night. I played my guitar up in my room for awhile and I even got out this Tom Petty songbook that someone gave me as a gift, recently.

I have never played a single Tom Petty song on my guitar in all these decades. I am strictly an acoustic rhythm player and so electric guitar stuff has never really called out to me, you know? Even though I know that Tom Petty felt very strongly about his songs staying as simple as possible, so that everyone could play it on an acoustic guitar around a camp fire, right? He believed this. I think it worked for him, too, because he was worth something like $95 million when he died. Keep it simple.

(As an aside, I saw a video on Youtube recently, by way of the AThousandMistakes blog in Australia. It was Warren Ellis and the Dirty 3 playing a recent concert in Sydney, I think. And he was introducing a specific song as their version of a camp fire song that people were supposed to be able to play on their acoustic guitars. It was so funny, because no way on earth could anyone else have been able to even attempt to play that thing.)

Anyway, I was looking at some of those Tom Petty songs in the songbook and I was actually astounded to see that some of my favorites from his early days always had about 3 chords. They were so simple to play.  Even Free Fallin‘ — I had no idea it had 2 chords in the whole song. In fact, the melody itself is comprised of 3 notes, sometimes sang an octave higher, but 3 notes!! In the whole song.

That tells you a lot about how to become a wealthy songwriter in America, doesn’t it? Where we prefer things to be emotionally simple. We really do. I’m not knocking it, either, because I love that song Free Fallin.’ But we want our songs simple. We’re either happy, sad, or angry. That’s about it.

(As another aside, I remember coming out of Mel’s Diner on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. It was late at night. I was with Peitor and I was talking about a song Nick Cave had written, “We Call upon the Author to Explain.” I just love that song, you know. And I said something to Peitor, like, “I just don’t understand why Americans don’t love Nick Cave.” And Peitor looked at me like I was from Jupiter and he said, “Nick Cave is too smart. Americans like things to be stupid.”)

I don’t want that to sound like an indirect way of saying Tom Petty was stupid, because he wasn’t. He just saw the value in keeping it really simple. And yesterday, as I marveled at the 2-chord, 3-note structure of Free Fallin‘ and, you know, considered the state of my own bank account, and I wondered if simplicity wasn’t in fact the way to go…

Okay, gang! I gotta get started here!! As you know, I have a lot of work to do on Tell My Bones in the next 2 weeks. To put it mildly.

Thanks for visiting, though. I love you guys! And I leave you with your right to choose!! Simple, or not so simple. Okay. I love you guys. See ya!

Let’s Make it Through this Morning Alive, Shall We??!!

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It’s one of those mornings around here. I seem to be resisting myself at every turn.

When I awoke, I erroneously thought it was 3 in the morning.  So I was just lying there, wondering why I felt so curiously awake.

Then I noticed the sky was getting light and I looked at my phone and saw that it was actually 5:25.  Which is usually when I’m already downstairs in the kitchen, feeding the cats, and getting breakfast. WTF? Why did I think it was 3 am?

I always know I’m in some sort of weird emotional alignment when stuff like that happens first thing.

I went downstairs just as a train was passing through. An indescribably loud thing; the train whistle shrieks, the rumbling on the tracks shakes the whole house. In the summertime, it gets extremely personal because all the windows are open and the train literally seems to be right in my house. The cats go crazy.  Scurrying around, trying to hide from it.

I love the train, but it can be a lot to deal with when you’re only halfway down the stairs, none of the lights are on yet, the world outside is mostly dark. And all the cats are upset and darting everywhere.

I had awoken with the song “Jefferson Jericho Blues” in my head, and Mojo was already in the CD player in the kitchen, so I turned it on, not feeling completely confident that it was in fact a “Jefferson Jericho Blues” kind of morning. But the train had already thrown me into weirdness, so why not have music to be weird by, too?

I did okay until the coffee was ready and I was pouring it into my loving, F. Scott Fitzgerald coffee cup, and I started thinking about him (F. Scott Fitzgerald, the man) and some of the mistakes he had made and how, after he died, the whole world decided he was a 20th Century literary master regardless, so what did it matter – those mistakes?

His own mistake, really, was just alcoholism. The larger mistake was of course the Great Depression and the world’s insistence on blaming the immorality of the Jazz Age for its newfound financial woes, and since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books were considered the ushers of that immorality of the Jazz Age into the world – well, you know, the world didn’t want any reminders of their personal infidelities, or greed, or immoral behaviors of all stripes.  So he was the brunt of their wrath and his book sales plummeted.

If you’re interested in 1920s Western literature and haven’t read his masterpiece short story, “Babylon Revisited,” it is a real sobering heartbreaker. It is not presented as a “memoir” but it might as well have been.  His return to Paris, where everything has become bitter, disillusioned, old colleagues are now broke, and he is treated as a social pariah by his own family — his in-laws refusing to allow him to be alone with his own daughter for fear that just his (now notorious) presence in the room will corrupt her at age 6 or whatever she is. And he loves his daughter more than anything else in the world.

Anyway, it’s just heartbreaking – what it illustrates about the hypocritical puritanism of humanity. But so good. (I named my Muse collection  – The Muse Revisited – after that short story.)

As I was thinking about all that, and pouring my coffee into that loving coffee cup, “The Trip to Pirate’s Cove” came onto the CD player.

If you don’t know the song (linked above), it’s terrifically moody and atmospheric and suggestive of unsavory impulses and a sort of irresponsible acquiescence to living along the underbelly of life.

Normally, I love this song. When Cherie, my birth mother, was here visiting in November, I played the song for her for a specific personal reason that I won’t go into here, but she loved the song, too. She and I are two peas in a pod in so many ways, and especially in this need we both have to rebel against the understood Order of things, and to sort of acquiesce to that immoral undertow as a rebellion against everything imaginable.

People used to think there was something scandalous about me being so insistent about getting rid of my virginity when I was only 13 — you know, making that decision for myself, with my eyes wide open, and finding someone who would take care of that for me.

But considering that my mother was 13 when she gave birth to me. I don’t know. Seems like some sort of significant evolutionary leap occurred there.  So I’m not ashamed of anything. And it’s interesting to note that she isn’t, either.  She’s just still sort of angry that her dad took me away from her, and gave me away to some other people who didn’t suspect, or fully appreciate, the immoral underbelly of life that I was bringing along with me!

Ah well.

Anyway, the song now has even more loving and significant attachments for me because of my birth mother, but this morning, Tom Petty’s voice was doing that thing it sometimes does now that he’s dead: It sounded more alive than if he had still been alive.  There’s a quality that creeps into it, that’s beyond life and beyond death, and it sounds like it’s right there with me, beating inside my heart.

Usually this pierces me and that whole crying thing springs out of me. But you know. It was still so early in the morning and I was determined not to train-wreck this whole day. So I turned the CD player off.

And I sat at the kitchen table in silence — except for the wonderful birds outside –and ate my boringly organic, non-gmo, vegetarian breakfast, drank my coffee and watched my many feral cats happily devour little-ceramic-bowlfuls of fish-smelly gunk that I wouldn’t eat if you paid me. And I mean, any amount of money in the world. Uck.

But they’re happy. And I’m determined to be happy, too, and to stay happy.

So then I meditated and tried to sort of mentally feel my way into a better emotional alignment.  But I am, indeed, in some sort of mood today.  That’s for certain.

I have been making a little progress on the new memoir site, In the Shadow of Narcissa. Although, I lost the featured photo and cannot figure out how to get it back! The only way it “comes back” now is as an enormous background banner kind of thing. Which so incredibly irritates me.  So I just got rid of the photo entirely. So, one less bell, one less whistle… It’s just maddening how a simple, single blog page can become so fucking complicated.

But it is up, and I am working on it. I am trying to make it an extremely streamlined thing; using details sparingly without rendering it totally meaningless. I think it will always be in a state of being “in progress.” And I’m not sure how it will translate to the Edge of Humanity magazine, but we’ll see.

Okay, for no reason at all, I give you this. I found it yesterday while I was looking for that photo of my younger brother that I posted yesterday on yesterday’s post. It’s a picture of my first husband, a few months before we met. He’s in London here, where he lived & studied for awhile before moving to NYC. (He’s a native of Singapore, originally.) I have always loved this photo of him. I kept it taped to the bedroom wall for years & years, pretty much right up until I got married to someone else.

Foun Kee, London, 1979

Right after he and I split up (in 1983), he was so angry at me for leaving him that he didn’t really want to have much to do with me for a few months. When it was time for him to move to Honolulu, though, he called me on the phone and wanted to take me to dinner. “Let’s just be nice,” he said.

And so we met in Chinatown (in NYC). I was excited, you know, and I was trying very hard not to have all those constant “things” in my personality that made him insane. And I was totally, totally, totally sober and had been for a couple months. No booze. No drugs.

He’s a Buddhist, so he took me to a Buddhist temple with him to pray as husband & wife (for the last time, it turned out) and to get our fortunes. (These tiny scrolls of paper that had sayings on them that were supposed to give you something to contemplate and make you a better person or something. I still have mine somewhere, but I’m not sure where.)

Then we went into a shop and he bought me a pair of these really lovely, deep red silk pajamas that resembled a cheongsam and had golden dragons embroidered on them. They were really beautiful. I still have them stored away, but they haven’t fit me in a long time.

After dinner, when we were getting ready to part (forever, it turned out), he said, “I want you to have this.” And he slid one of those cassette-singles that used to be popular, across the table to me. It was wrapped up, like a gift.  And he said, “I’m sorry, okay? Please take care of yourself.”

And then he was gone. And the cassette was Willie Nelson’s version of the song, “Always on My Mind.”

It broke my heart.  Just broke it to pieces. He was not one to ever apologize for anything, and neither was I, which was why we were tearing asunder our own marriage. But we needed to be different people. Life just moved us on.

And that said! I need to get started here today, gang! I’m gonna work a little more on In the Shadow of Narcissa, and then try to make heads or tails of all my notes on revisions for Tell My Bones.  Thanks for visiting! I leave you with this! You know. Stay married if you want to, my friend; if it matters that much in the long run. Get a divorce if that seems to make more sense to you. Don’t look to me for any answers or guidance on that, because there is a broken heart in each decision. But I have found that moving onward regardless is easier to sleep with at night than constant unhappiness. And the broken heart passes. It does.

I love you guys. See ya.

“Always On My Mind”

Maybe I didn’t love you
Quite as often as I could have
And maybe I didn’t treat you
Quite as good as I should have
If I made you feel second best
Girl I’m sorry I was blind

You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind

And maybe I didn’t hold you
All those lonely, lonely times
I guess I never told you
I’m so happy that you’re mine
Little things I should have said and done
I just never took the time

But you were always on my mind
You were always on my mind

Tell me
Tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died
And give me
Give me one more chance
To keep you satisfied
I’ll keep you satisfied

Little things I should have said and done
I just never took the time

But you were always on my mind
You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind
You were always on my mind

c-  1970 CHRISTOPHER JOHN LEE JR, JAMES MARK, CARSON WAYNE