Tag Archives: writing

We’ve Got 15 Feet of Pure White Snow Out There, Gang!

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Oops! Meant to say 1/15th of half an inch of pure white snow…

Meaning, we got a really lovely little dusting of snow last night. It’s basically all gone now, but it was really just so pretty last evening.

I was on the phone with my father and all the blinds in my room were already closed, so I had no clue it was snowing. In his advanced age, my father seems to have become one of those people who is constantly checking my weather forecast. You know, he always knows what kind of weather we’re expecting out here in Crazeysburg, whereas I almost never do. I’m not much of a weather-checker, beyond sort of glancing out the window and looking at what it’s doing out there and then making a sort of mental assessment. If things are wet, it’s raining. If things are dry, it’s not. If huge gusts of billowing dead leaves are blowing all over the place, it’s windy and all my neighbors are wishing that I’d fucking raked before the wind set in.

And if things are white, it snowed.

So last evening, when the phone conversation had wound down and my dad said, “Okay, well be careful in that weather,” I just assumed he was being weirdly strange and so I ignored it and said, “okay, well; bye-bye” and then I hung up.

A few hours later, when I went into the cats’ room to turn off their nightlight (not that I think cats need a nightlight, I just like the ambiance of it), I noticed that the streetlights outside their window were sort of blurry looking, and it reminded me of some of those Brassai photos of Paris in the 1930s. And I told Huckleberry, who was curled up on the bed, “It looks like Paris out there!” and when I went to get a closer look, I saw that it had snowed! It looked so lovely.

And then I realized that that’s what my dad had meant — Crazeysburg was receiving snow.

I think it’s sort of strange, how my dad has the most minor interest in me that you can possibly imagine, but he always knows what kind of weather I’m having.

My stepmom takes up 99.9% of his attention. She’s extremely ill and in a long-term care facility directly across from where he now lives. He moved into an independent-living facility on the same grounds as my stepmom’s nursing home because he basically spends every single day visiting her. This has been going on for about 7 years already. She’s a wonderful woman, she really is. I love her and it’s heartbreaking to see her deteriorate (she has MS), but even before she got sick, she had 99.9% of his attention and the remaining 1/10th of a percent of his attention went to her children. So I’ve gotten used to him barely noticing that I’m alive, unless of course  he’s in the mood to dash all my hopes about something.

It was like that with my first stepmom, too. But the situation with her had started out really differently. And I was thinking about that last night — when I saw that it had snowed and my dad, who lives 3 hours away, had known it was snowing outside my very windows before I did. But that he could barely care less about anything else going on in my world.

I was remembering what it was like when he used to be interested in me. It was when I was 12.  He became really interested in the things I thought about, what I was doing, what I wanted to do with my life. At that point, he was really supportive of my wanting to be a songwriter. (That changed when I actually moved to NYC and became one, but anyway.) When I was 12, he was having an affair with a 25-year-old girl. At the time, I didn’t know how old she was (or wasn’t), but I did know he was having an affair. I had figured it out and I was the only one who knew. I didn’t say anything because I was cool with it. I was happy for him, actually. I knew that my mother made him insane.

In hindsight, last night, I suddenly realized that he had become interested in me when I was 12 because I was practically as old as his girlfriend. He was probably trying to figure her out because he was in his 40s by then — and back in those days, that was a much older generation from a 25-year-old.

Even though she and I ended up getting along really, really well after he married her, he eventually just found me really distracting. I mean, to be fair, some really, really horrible stuff was going on in my world at that point and I wasn’t able to speak about any of it, so he didn’t know. He just found me really distracting and he wanted to focus on his new wife and so everything between him and me changed. That is a long time ago. It never changed back. Mostly, it got a lot worse. Now we’re just at that point where we acknowledge that the other one still exists and that’s about it.

So I find it really perplexing that he’s so interested in what kind of weather I’m having. And what’s also disheartening is that, in so many key ways, I’m exactly like my current stepmom. I actually am. She and I are very similar and my dad has no clue. He’s aware that I have a play that I have to keep revising and he’s aware of what kind of weather I’m having. And that’s about it.

But rather than get too bogged down in all my various stepmothers last evening, I decided to just look at how pretty the snow was and try to move on from there. It was a little disappointing to wake up and discover it had mostly all melted already. But last evening was really just lovely around here.

Okay. Well, I’m gonna get going here and get down to work. I’ve already spent a good chunk of time this morning trying to figure out if I want a new template for the In the Shadow of Narcissa website. I find the current template just so impossible to use. So unbelievably not user-friendly. But I eventually gave up because all the other templates seem too image-oriented. It’s a little frustrating. But onward.

I have an intense phone call with the director coming up later today, but beyond that, I think the day will be all about Thug Luckless. So I’m excited.

Thanks for visiting, gang. I leave you with my breakfast-listening music from this morning, “15 Feet of Pure White Snow”!! (And even though I’m not a huge fan of videos, I love this video!) From the Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds  2001 album, No More Shall We Part (which pretty much has nothing but incredibly great songs on it). And I was also thinking this morning about how much I love the word “mittens.” I really do. Okay! Have a  super Wednesday, wherever you are in the world. I love you guys. See ya!

“Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow”

Where is Mona?
She’s long gone
Where is Mary?
She’s taken her along
But they haven’t put their mittens on
And there’s fifteen feet of pure white snow

Where is Michael?
Where is Mark?
Where is Mathew
Now it’s getting dark
Where is John? They are all out back
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow
Would you please put down that telephone
We’re under fifteen feet of pure white snow

I waved to my neighbour
My neighbour waved to me
But my neighbour
Is my enemy
I kept waving my arms
Till I could not see
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow

Is anybody
Out there please?
It’s too quiet in here
And I’m beginning to freeze
I’ve got icicles hanging
From my knees
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow

Is there anybody here who feels this low?
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow

Raise your hands up to the sky
Raise your hands up to the sky
Raise your hands up to the sky
Is it any wonder?
Oh my Lord Oh my Lord
Oh my Lord Oh my Lord

Doctor, Doctor
I’m going mad
This is the worst day
I’ve ever had
I can’t remember
Ever feeling this bad
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow
Where’s my nurse
I need some healing
I’ve been paralysed
By a lack of feeling
I can’t even find
Anything worth stealing
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow

Is there anyone else here who doesn’t know?
We’re under fifteen feet of pure white snow

Raise your hands up to the sky
Raise your hands up to the sky
Raise your hands up to the sky
Is it any wonder?
Oh my Lord Oh my Lord
Oh my Lord Oh my Lord
Save Yourself! Help Yourself!
Save Yourself! Help Yourself!
Save Yourself! Help Yourself!
Save Yourself! Help Yourself!

c – 2001 Nick Cave

And So The Voyage Begins!!

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I’ve started all the housecleaning stuff here that I wanted to get to before my mom arrives.  After all, when she left here back in late September, she was leaving a really clean house. I came home from New York to the tidiest house imaginable. It made me so happy.

I wouldn’t want her to arrive next Monday and think, you know: Jesus, doesn’t this gal ever clean anything?

Because, truthfully, when I’m not working on a project (or seven) I’m a bit of a cleaning freak. To the point where I can sort of be annoying. I’m one of those people — I might not actually say it to you, but I’ll be privately thinking it: Wow, did you just move something a fraction of an inch from where I had it?

You’d think I wouldn’t be so — well, I guess anal-retentive is the phrase for it but it sure is unattractive — but you’d think I wouldn’t be like that, since I have 7 cats who usually decide that everything pretty much goes wherever they want it. Still. I do notice when things aren’t exactly where I last placed them.

However… Cleaning is not the voyage I’m speaking of, up there in the title of today’s post!

I’m speaking once again about Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town, the new novel that is fully underway in my brain.

It’s exciting. That whole process of writing a new novel — how the ideas begin to just sort of tumble down into my mind. Sort of like clothes falling down a laundry chute or something. Ideas just tumble in and I have to keep running to my notebook and jot down notes. That’s when I know for sure that a full-blown novel is actually in there, preparing to come out. It just really excites me.

It’s such a different process from, like, Girl in the Night, where I have no clue what I’m going to write, or when I’m going to write it. I only know that I want the book to be under 200 pages, so that means about 18 “Letters” total, depending on the length of each one.

Beyond that, I don’t have any clue what the “Letters” will focus on. The book is just a great big blank in my mind, extending before me. Then, suddenly the next title for a “Letter” will emerge, and maybe a color or a tone will accompany the title. But I won’t really know what it’s going to be about until the piece completely arrives, sort of like a mist rolling in at the edges of my awareness. And then, suddenly, the whole piece will sort of “download.” It could be weeks between title and download, though.

In the Shadow of Narcissa is a similar feeling, but it’s a lot simpler, since each of those pieces is only about 600 words. The only difficult part of that book is to try to retain the perspective I had as a toddler, when the inside of our house was pretty much my whole world, and everything about being alive was brand new and I didn’t understand anything.

I still don’t understand anything, but nothing is brand new anymore.

Well, I shouldn’t say that; I still have feelings about things that I’ve never felt before. So that’s cool.

Anyway, it’s a wonderful feeling — to have all these ideas rushing at me about Thug. It feels like it’s going to be a really complex, dark, amusing, intense sort of filthy book.

You know, in the old days, I used to have to write with the voices of my publishers in my head and their financial agendas looking over my shoulder — which also meant that my agent was looking over my shoulder, too. And that meant I had to seriously rein-in some of the things I wanted to write. Even though I seriously miss having publishers, it really does sort of free up my mind. My imagination. Since the small press market has shrunk so drastically, and each press is just glutted with writers trying to get a deal, I just write what I want to write now and then worry about who there might be to publish it after it’s done.

It just feels so good. Really liberating.

All righty. It’s Tuesday yet again, which means I have no food in the house!! So I gotta drive into town and do something about that. For some reason, the main road out of here is closed. So I have to sort of go the back way — the road that winds along where the old Erie Canal used to be about 200 years ago. And it’s a lovely, narrow old road. However, it takes long enough to get to town and back on the regular road.

Meanwhile…Nick Cave sent out a Red Hand Files letter thing this morning. He actually touched on some things I think about a lot. You can read it here. Today it’s about grieving — having to grieve publicly, I guess is how you’d describe it.

Okay, I gotta scoot! Have a terrific Tuesday, wherever you are in the world! Thanks for visiting, gang! I leave you with nothing today because I didn’t listen to any music at breakfast. I just sat there quietly and looked at the cats eating while I ate and I wondered how I got here (to Earth) and how they got into my life and where we’re all going to after this… I love you guys. See ya!

The cats eating breakfast in their corner of the kitchen, 2 summers ago, before Daddycakes died.

Now That I’ve Fallen in Love…

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Yes, somewhere during the night, while the back of my brain gestated on what to do about the Thug Luckless novel, he seems to have moved into my heart — lock, stock & teardops, as it were!

I, of course, mean Thug. I am now totally in love with this character, and every single thing I’m thinking about this morning has been stuff that I feel is meant for the novel.

For some inexplicable reason, I took the book Funeral Rites, by Jean Genet, out of the bookcase and started reading it again first thing this morning. It’s been about 35 years since I last read it and it overwhelmed me that first time — in the best way.

Although that word “best” has to be seen through the prism of my own fractured mind because it’s about the Nazi occupation of Paris in the mid-1940s, and homoeroticizing it, as well as eroticizing rape & execution as a way of processing grief. It’s about a young guy Genet had been in love with who was killed by a sniper’s bullet — by a French Nazi-sympathizer sniper. And the young man, as described by Genet, was physically the exact image of Greg, my boyfriend who was killed when he was fifteen.

The book, overall, is about the young man’s death and his funeral and how it colored everything in Genet’s world in Nazi-occupied Paris. And if anyone has read any of Genet’s work, you know that homoeroticism is usually a huge theme, along with emotional alienation .

At that point in my own life, pretty much everything I had lived through to that point had been colored by Greg’s death. Plus, I always had an intense sort of fixation on Nazis, on Nazi Germany, and on Nazi-occupied Paris. I had been adopted and raised by  Eastern-European immigrant Jews, who instilled in me all the horror stories of the Nazis, and about family members who’d been sent to concentration camps, etc.

When I was born, the reality of the Nazis was less than a generation away, really. It had this terrifying undercurrent within my adoptive family –even well into my teens, I would wake up in a full-blown anxiety attack, convinced that a Nazi was hiding in my closet.

Still, by as early as 1974, that intense, erotic Italian film — The Night Porter — which eroticized sadomasochistic Nazis, was extremely popular. As well as the lurid depictions of pre-Nazi Germany in the film version of Cabaret. So there were a lot of mixed cultural ideas going on in my world when I was growing up.

For me, Funeral Rites was just an amazing book. Just an amazing achievement in literature.

And the photo on the cover (I have a hard cover 2nd edition from Grove Press, 1969, translated by Bernard Frechtman) is this wonderful photo of Genet by Brassai — a photographer that I have always just loved:

The writer Jean Genet photographed in Paris by Brassai

And I realized, while looking at the cover photo, that something in Genet’s eyes reminded me of Thug Luckless. And then my mind was off and running.

And I took out that wonderful photo book of Brassai’s from 1976, The Secret Paris of the 30s. And was just getting inspiration upon inspiration for Thug all morning.

And I could see the fictional P-Town (no, not Provincetown…) becoming more like the seedier underbelly of Paris in black & white photos from the 1930s, even while it remains a post-apocalyptic town in the novel.

(You can see I’m calling it “a novel” now, too.)

And even while Thug Luckless remains an AI sex robot, I’m feeling like his inner world is going to be really awesome, and the eras and cultures and time periods are going to coalesce constantly. (I don’t know — can you “coalesce” constantly, or do you simply “coalesce”?)

Anyway. Man, Thug is off and running in my mind and I just love him. I’m guessing it will take me a couple of years to write it since I have to fit it in between 2 plays, the Girl in the Night erotic love letter collection, and the In the Shadow of Narcissa memoir, too. But the whole story, and his character, have really opened up for me, in this really compelling way, and it all seems to have happened while I was sleeping.

I don’t see it as being a novel that anyone on Earth will be willing to publish, though, since it will be literary but extremely sexually graphic, so I’m guessing I will have to publish it myself. I guess we’ll see.

While I was leafing through the Brassai photo book, there was a brief essay he wrote about the photos he took inside an upscale opium den in Paris in the 1930s, and I was really surprised by how similar it was — in its little details — to how I described the opium den in Coney Island in the 1950s in my novella, Neptune & Surf. Although my description was based on what I thought a Hollywood movie version of an opium den might have seemed like in the 1920s  — if this isn’t too convoluted for you to follow!

Anyway, in my opinion, there were some pronounced similarities in the details between the two. But it also made me decide that P-Town has to have an opium den district — perhaps on the wrong side of town: Hookah World, or something like that. You know, Disney World but with opium, and in the post-apocalypse.

Okay. So far, that’s been my day! And I’m gonna do some yoga now and then get back to it.

I leave you with the Thug Luckless theme song. It really just suits him to a ‘T’ —  “Lock, Stock and Teardrops,” as sung by KD Lang. From her 1988 album Shadowland.

Thanks for visiting, gang. I hope Monday has been a wonderful journey for you, so far; wherever you are in the world and with whatever you’re mind is getting up to!! I love you guys. See ya.

“Lock Stock And Teardrops”

Someday I won’t come runnin’
When you call
The way you hurt me
It’s a wonder I’m still here at all

Someday you’ll wake up
And you’ll find yourself alone
Lock, stock and teardrops
I’ll be gone

I can’t go on
The way you make me feel
You make me cry
And every time expect me to forgive

Someday you’ll wake up
To a cold and lonely dawn
Lock, stock and teardrops
I’ll be gone

Oh someday I’ll wake up
And find the strength to carry on
And lock, stock and teardrops
I’ll be gone
Lock, stock and teardrops
Lock, stock and teardrops
Lock, stock and teardrops
I’ll be gone

c –  1963 Roger Miller

One More for the Road…

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Of course, I was trying to make up my mind about what my Top 5 favorite Tom Petty songs would really be and they just kept shifting around. There were simply too many of them over a 40-year period.

So then I tried to figure out what my Top 5 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds songs would be and that was sort of impossible, too. Although I know that my #1 favorite song of theirs is “Hallelujah” from 2001. For some reason, that’s just my favorite. I guess because that’s the one that feels most like me, inside.

But then the next 4 sort of are in a tie. I can’t really decide what number they would get, but I think they would be:

Brompton Oratory, 1997
Up Jumped the Devil, 1988
Do you Love Me? (Part 2), 1994
Jesus of the Moon, 2008

But then right after that, it becomes just a massively huge amount of songs that I really love by them, so it becomes pointless to try to list them.

You can see that I’ve had a really productive day, all the way around…

I’m a little bit mad at myself over this Thug Luckless development. I really thought that one would be off my plate reasonably quickly. But now I’m not sure I can see that happening, but I guess you never know.

Okay. I guess I’m actually going to go to bed now and think about stuff, and then see what life looks like in the morning. Sweet dreams, gang! See ya!

She Could Benefit From A Brain Monitor, Don’t You think?

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Jesus, you know?

Not only do I need a keeper (and a handyman) but now I think I could use someone who limits the number of ideas my brain is allowed to have in any given year. Or day. Or perhaps every hour.

I’ve been working on Thug Luckless today and feeling like I don’t want him to just be a porn novel. Because I love this character. (He’s an AI sex robot in a post-apocalyptic town full of jaded, sex-starved broads.) And I’m really unsatisfied with everything I’ve written so far, because I want to rewrite it now with an actual story arc and a character arc, even though I want to keep the overall plot the same.

I simply cannot continue with it without making it a better book.

And then, of course, once I realized that, I wanted to bang my head on my keyboard because that means a whole lot more work — meaning brain work — is going to be involved. So, like, what the fuck?? Right? I have so many fucking projects.

But now that I’ve come to this understanding about Thug nothing less is going to satisfy me. So it’s just frustrating, you know? Especially since I live in a drug-free world and have to rely strictly on the adrenaline I was born with — except for caffeine…

Which reminds me that there is this Nick Cave thing on Instagram and I can’t really figure out what it is. (BTW, this sudden segue has nothing to do with drugs, it has to do with ideas.) Every Saturday, it posts a brief audio clip from one of his In Conversations. And even while I like listening to it (today he was answering a question that had something to do with his ideas), but it makes me ponder where this audio recording comes from. (The last several have been from his Conversations in NYC. With one from Helsinki.)

I’m not sure why I have to ponder absolutely everything. I can’t just, you know, accept a thing at face value and move on with my life. I have to bring everything to a grinding halt and look at it and examine it and wonder: Who’s doing this? Where’d they get this from? How come they’re allowed to upload it? How come I’m following this  — how did I find it in the first place? I have no clue; I only know I’ve been following it for a while. And its tag line is “The Secret Red Hand Files” — so what does that mean?

Anyway. It posts every Saturday. And I thought today was interesting in that I, personally, am getting a little overwhelmed with ideas, here, that could easily take me to the end of my life.

So, as I completely re-think Thug and try now to sort of outline it as actual fiction and not simply regard it as “porn,” I find my mind just wandering like crazy. You know, I start just staring at the wall and suddenly wondering if I could name my Top 5 favorite Tom Petty songs. I’ve never tried to do that before and it turns out that it’s really hard. I would need to have room for at least 10. Because, you know, my Top 4 would probably be “Runaway Trains,” “How Many More Days,” “Rhino Skin,” “You & Me,” and then suddenly I need to cram about 6 more songs in the number 5 slot. And then I’d have to cram the entirety of his album Hard Promises in there, too.

And meanwhile, Thug Luckless is not getting re-written, and the director is texting to schedule a chat with me for Monday so that we can get a plan in place for the first workshop in NYC re: Tell My Bones, and Sandra is texting about the Christmas promotion and my brain starts wondering when I’m going to do those final needed revisions on the play?

So this is where I decide that I’m gonna go take a shower…

Okay. Hope Saturday’s been good for you! And if you’re one of those hardcore football fans (which I am not), I hope your team’s winning. See ya.

Can you say 1979?

Yep, I Gotta Be Me!

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Yep, that’s me at the hootenanny last night!

Do people still even use the word ‘hootenanny’? Don’t answer that, because I really don’t need to know exactly how old I am…

Things here are just sort of ridiculous, regarding me and more of my bills. It’s almost like two parallel planets are happening here. This morning, I awoke thinking about it and was beginning to consider that perhaps I have some sort of split-personality thing going on — you know, the part of me that takes care of paying the bills  has completely dissociated from the other me that I generally think of as “me.” (I’m just kidding — although I did, for a moment, consider this morning that it could be true.)

But I’m still trying to take care of the glaringly insane thing I did the other day (involving me losing track of about two weeks worth of November and so I screwed up a couple of huge things). And then in yesterday’s mail, the 4th letter from my healthcare providers arrived, indicating that I am still 2 months behind and I am still under the impression that this is completely impossible, because they are supposed to auto-deduct every month and it seems as though they are doing that, based on my statements. But every time I call them I get the voicemail thing, and since it was still the holiday weekend yesterday, no one would answer the phone at all.

I hate all this weird kind of stuff. I seriously do. Bills going awry, and all that weird cancer stuff coming into my world by mistake.

I’m the kind of person who needs the foundation of my world to be completely in order, because  you know, the rest of my world is sort of in the realm of the highly imaginative and intangible. So I need the basic things to be on track and to make sense and to not throw me in any way. Because it is so easy for me to start to doubt my sanity.

Another reason why having a keeper (and a handyman) would be just a really great idea!

And yet, weirdly…

I was talking to this young woman two days ago — I don’t actually really know her, but she wanted my advice about how I manage to be a woman and live on my own and stuff. (She still lives at home and is, basically, afraid to go out into the world.) I won’t go into all of it because it’s private to her, but I wound up telling her that she simply has to leave home, go out into the world and find out what she is capable of. That’s the only way.

And privately I wondered what all these total strangers here are thinking about me when they consider me here alone in this town, alone in this sort of big house (by the standards of the town, that is) — and we have already well established here on the blog that I have a very grown-up car now, too.  It just struck me as so weird, because I really do honestly feel about 12 years old. So I have no clue how to answer questions like that. You know: “Just go out and fucking do it. Try — see what happens.”

That kind of describes my entire life right there. I just go out and do it; I try. I see what happens. I end up needing a keeper and a handyman, neither of which I will be getting anytime soon, but I just keep trying.

It gets tiring sometimes — to be honest. I see my female friends unhappy in their marriages or long-term relationships, yet staying in them because they can’t imagine surviving in the world on one income, with no one to help manage things for them. Seriously. To me, that’s like the Dark Ages type of thinking. And I don’t know that it’s very fair to the man, either– that you’re privately only staying with him for his income and because you need help. But perhaps the guy is staying for similar reasons. Obviously, I don’t know. And I don’t really want to judge, so I don’t say anything.

But inwardly, I just marvel at that kind of thinking. It’s your life you’re talking about, and it flies by so fast. Don’t you want to spend as much of it as you can feeling happy?

I left 2 husbands (and I didn’t do it cavalierly; the decisions were really difficult and heart-wrenching) and I went back out into the world and started with nothing again. And both of my ex-husbands were extremely unhappy with my decision but now they each are in really loving, happy relationships, and having good lives, and I’m really happy with my autonomy. I get lonely, but overall, I’m happy, too. And I’m still friends with both of them.

So I just don’t know.  My god, it really just flies right by.  Why wouldn’t you want to at least get out there and try?

Okay, well. Today I’m going to TRY to not worry about the insanity of my bill-paying techniques, and just sally forth into this wonderful (gray, rainy, cold) Saturday! I’m so excited about Christmas this year. About decorating the house and being with Cherie (my birth mom)! I just can’t wait.

I did get a stern talking-to from Kara yesterday, though. She told me to stop putting any of my new writing online (meaning here on the blog, or over at the Shadow of Narcissa site) and just focus on finishing stuff and getting it published the regular way so that I can get paid… I see her point, but still. My blog is my little world! Well, anyway.

The main point is that I have to complete some of these projects and get them off my desk and out into the world. So I’m gonna scoot and get going with that!

Have a super Saturday, wherever you are!! Thanks for visiting. I leave you with a song I haven’t thought of in a long time, but I used to love this song as a wee bonny lass and I would sometimes lie in my bed at night and sing it at the top of my voice and it made my brother absolutely insane. (I didn’t do it to make him insane, I sang it because I loved the song!) (Lyrics are in the video.) Okay, gang! I love you guys. See ya.

 

Almost Done Being Thankful!!!

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Now it is time to be Merry!

I am of course going to wait to decorate the house & the tree until my birth mom gets here (in 2 weeks). (Her name is Cherie, btw, so I guess I can just call her Cherie here, but then I’ll worry that it’s your first time reading the blog and won’t know who Cherie is, and I’ll end up calling her “Cherie, my birth mom”.) Anyway. I do want to at least switch out the autumnal wreaths on the door for the Christmas ones. And put the Christmas bedding on both of the beds.

At least get started on some stuff. Because I’m feeling a little merry this year!

Just so much better than last year — it’s like I’m not even on the same planet. Which is just a really, really good thing, gang.

I’m going to mention here, that my grandfather (Cherie’s dad), named her Cherie after a girl he fell in love with in Paris, when he was stationed there during WWII.  (She used to call him, “chéri“.)

Mind you, he was already betrothed to my grandmother back in the States. So, naming their daughter after the girl he’d fallen in love with in Paris was a big secret for, like, decades. My grandparents did get divorced early on in my mom’s life. But how unfortunate, right? To have a child with a man and have him secretly name your child after a woman he loved more…

When I was adopted, my adoptive parents changed my name to Marilyn. My adoptive mother wanted to name me “Molly,” but my dad won out; he really wanted to name me Marilyn. When I was 11, he confided in me, one Saturday afternoon while I was in the family room watching an old Marilyn Monroe movie on TV — she had been dead for almost 10 years by then, and I had no real understanding yet of who she’d been. Anyway, my dad passed through the family room, saw what I was watching on TV, smiled sort of wistfully and told me, confidentially, “I named you after that woman — but don’t tell your mother.”

So perhaps this is common? Maybe I should take a poll: Did you name your daughter after a woman you loved more than the child’s mother? (There’s an “Add Poll” thingy here on my blog but I don’t know how to use it…) So I guess just think about your answers quietly amongst yourselves.

Loyal readers of this lofty blog are likely aware that my birth mom named me Dory. I don’t know why, or if there was a specific reason. She was 13 when I was born so there was likely some sort of romantic thing in her head. I don’t know. I’m afraid to ask her because I still worry that if I draw too much attention to myself, she’ll remember that she gave me up and ask me to leave her alone. Much like why I’m still afraid to call her on the telephone and only do it if I absolutely have to. (I’m actually really serious about this. Even though she’s been back in my life now for 34 years, I still worry that she will give me up again and that I will lose her.)

But Dory is the name I actually identify with privately in my head — you know, like, spiritually or something. I don’t go by that name at all in real life. However, I don’t relate to the name Marilyn at all. I just don’t and never have. I think it’s a complicated name, and then, once I understood who Marilyn Monroe actually was, culturally, well, that’s just too much to have to identify with — even though I love Marilyn Monroe, plus it wasn’t even her real name. Still. Just way too much going on there.

Image result for marilyn monroe
Do I actually have to say who this is?

So. I’m guessing I digressed…

Mostly, I’m just kind of feeling a little untethered here; not sure what I want to work on today. I’m feeling like I need to make some progress with Thug Luckless — even though I love that character so much, I can’t emphasize enough just what a commitment it is to write about him. It requires 110% of my concentration, and I’m kind of feeling a little Christmas-y here, today. Not sure I can commit to writing several hours’ worth of porn. I guess we’ll see!

I do want to mention here that the horrible wind storm we had here all day Wednesday– even into the wee hours of yesterday morning– the winds were up to 60 mph. Anyway, it was God’s way of ensuring that the super enormous pile of dead leaves that were in my front yard were more evenly distributed among every single solitary house all up & down First Street. And for this dispensation from Heaven, I am profoundly grateful. Even while the high winds also got me some loose siding on my house, it is a small price to pay for not having to rake any of my fucking leaves! They are, essentially, all gone now! Yay.

Okay, gang, I’m gonna scoot. Put up a wreath or two, change the sheets, think about the day before me and what I might want to do with it!

The breakfast-listening music today was once again “Night Raid” from Ghosteen, which I posted here just the other day. (And I gave up trying to figure out what the song means; all I know is that it’s a beautiful song and I love it, and whatever I might decide it means– well, I will be hopelessly wrong. So I’m just listening to it now without trying to figure out what it means.)

So, since I posted the song here the other day,  instead, I’ll leave you with what I was listening to yesterday while eating my dinner! Alone!

“Scare Easy,” by Tom Petty, from the Mudcrutch album in 2008. (It was also in a movie, but I can’t recall now which one.) Anyway, so I leave you with that.  (The video is a live concert of him reunited with Mudcrutch in 2016 — this is not the Heartbreakers, even though it includes Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench. Mudcrutch was their first band together back in Florida in the late 60s-early 70s.)(In fact, Tom Petty’s final studio album was a Mudcrutch album and not a Heartbreakers album, oddly enough. Coming full circle, as it were. My favorite song of his on the final album is “Beautiful Blue,” which, for me, means that this is the final beautiful song he ever wrote. So I’ll post that, here, too.)

Okay! Have a terrific Black Friday wherever you are in America, and have a nice little regular Friday wherever else you are in the world!! Thanks for visiting. I love you guys. See ya!

“Scare Easy”

My love’s an ocean, you better not cross it
Yeah, I’ve been the distance and I need some rest
I had somebody once and damn if I lost her
I’ve been running like a man possessed

[Chorus]
I don’t scare easy
Don’t fall apart when I’m under the gun
You can break my heart and I ain’t gonna run
I don’t scare easy for no one

[Verse 2]
Yeah, I’m a loser at the top of my game
I should’ve known to keep an eye on you
Now I got a sky that ain’t never the same
Yeah, I got a dream that don’t ever come true

[Chorus]
I don’t scare easy
Don’t fall apart when I’m under the gun
You can break my heart and I ain’t gonna run
I don’t scare easy for no one

[Verse 3]
Sun going down on a canyon wall
I got a soul that ain’t never been blessed
Yeah, and I’m a shadow at the back of the hall
Yeah, I got a sin I ain’t never confessed

[Chorus]
I don’t scare easy
Don’t fall apart when I’m under the gun
You can break my heart and I ain’t gonna run
I don’t scare easy for no one
I don’t scare easy
Don’t fall apart when I’m under the gun
You can break my heart and I ain’t gonna run
I don’t scare easy for no one

c – 2008 Tom Petty

Lots Less Gloomy Now!

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Before I forget, I believe I have finished tweaking “Hymn to the Dark,” which is Letter #5 in Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse.

I wanted to make it more like Novalis’ Hymns to the Night, and I think I did that. Without bringing Jesus into it, of course.

I re-posted it at its original link, which is here, if you feel like reading it again.

In an oddly creepy twist, I got a call on my cell phone earlier — a number I didn’t recognize so I didn’t pick up. But they left a phone message. It was a  cancer center in the town I used to live in, saying that they had all the information they needed from me.

Too fucking creepy. First my friend calls to tell me he has a horrible stage 3 cancer. Then UPS leaves a colon cancer kit on my kitchen porch, for a man I don’t know whose only known address is here at my house. Now a cancer center in the town where my old house was, calls to tell me they received all the information from me that they need.

All within under a week.

I’m super done with this whole cancer idea…

Okay. Well. Several friends from the NYC area called today to wish me a happy Thanksgiving and so that felt really good. It cheered me up to know that people are at least remembering how much I loved this holiday, even though I am alone, for now, and not celebrating it — for the 3rd year in a row.

But Valerie in Brooklyn was one of those friends who called and she said, “Don’t worry, Emmy; this will be the last one like this. Next year, everything is gonna be different for you.”

And I know she’s right. I will most likely be in Toronto this time next year, finally becoming a produced playwright with Sandra, in The Guide to Being Fabulous, at the Soulpepper Theater Company there.

So we’ll see.

And I washed all the lace curtains today so that they’re really white again, and the table runner in the dining room — slowly but surely getting ready to get this house decorated for Christmas once my birth mom gets here.

Trying to just let myself get excited but what I am really is kind of exhausted — just from life being so endlessly perturbing to me.

And I nearly fucked up on a couple of my bills again, this time in a really huge way — I might not be out of the woods yet, but fingers-crossed. I have got to stop all this dreamy, weird-ass brain shit that I keep doing — losing track of what day it is, what week. Sometimes even what month it is. I seriously need a keeper. I really do.

And the weather here today has been intense — the worst wind imaginable. It’s pulling some of the siding off one section of my house and I now need a really tall ladder to get it back in place. (And it blew down 3 huge sections of my neighbor’s fence, but they’re out of town for the holiday. They will have an interesting surprise when they get home and look out their kitchen window.)

But I really need that live-in handyman now. A keeper and a handyman, and then I’ll be just fine.

All right, well. I think I’ll go down and see what there is to eat around here. Then wash my hair!! And then I think I’m going to just hang out and read. And wait for tomorrow to just disappear and think, instead, of how cool next year will be.

Have a great rest of your Wednesday, wherever you are in the world!! I leave you with my breakfast-listening music from this morning. Still in The Lyre of Orpheus mode around here. The song is “Babe, You Turn Me On” (2004), which I’ve posted here before, I’m pretty sure. (I love the line about the deer and the flowers, and the image of the atom bomb.) Okay. Thanks for visiting. I love you guys! See ya.

I’m A Bit of A Gloomy Gus Today

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Here in America, tomorrow is a big national holiday — Thanksgiving.

It used to be my favorite holiday — I am actually a really good cook and used to be a  really good baker, too, but haven’t done that in a long time.

But for several years in a row now, I’m choosing not to celebrate. It’s making me a little gloomy today. But, you know, you make choices for specific reasons, and in the long run, I know this life I’m living now is going to be better for me. And I know it isn’t always going to be like this — so isolated.

I think I have finally signed off on Letter #5, “Hymn to the Dark,” for Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse. I’m going to read it over again after I post this, and then see how I feel. Maybe I’ll tweak it some more; maybe move on to something else. Thug Luckless, maybe? Not sure. I might be a little too gloomy for Thug today.

However. Before I decide about all that, I thought I’d regale you with all my many dishes. You know, just give you an idea of a mere fraction of my dish-addiction insanity– of what is left of it. But also, you’ll get an idea of just how much I used to love to entertain.

I left a ton of dishes behind with Wayne when I left him. And then when I sold the old house here, I got rid of a lot more dishes because everything went into storage for over a year.  But what remains will still be of interest! I have chosen not to include a photo of Gus Van Sant Sr.’s wedding china — complete service for 8 of Lenox Imperial — that he gave to me, which is on the floor of my bedroom closet since I have no room for it anywhere else… It would only confirm for you that I am completely out of my mind when it comes to dishes.

The Johnson Brothers dishes are for Thanksgiving. The Wedgewood set is for Easter. There’s a Japanese tea set in the middle there. And on top, is a Christmas punch bowl set — sterling silver and cobalt blue glass, made in Bavaria around 1916. There are also a few pieces of other fine china (the white & gold) that didn’t fit in the kitchen so I stuck them in here.
Service for 12, for Christmas. Vintage Franciscan from my grandmother. Some crystal candy dishes, and some vintage shot glasses. On the top shelf in the back right corner are 2 really cool oversized Limoges basket weave coffee cups that I bought new in 1985, thinking that one day I was going to be just totally in love with someone and want to use these cups at breakfast. To date, I have NEVER used these cups. Ever. Not once. They were so expensive and I was never in love enough — I never had the heart to use them.
Random porcelain tea cups from my other grandmother; sterling candy dishes and candlesticks, Limoges appetizer plates, etc. The crystal wine glasses on the bottom in the back were a wedding gift to my great-grandparents (adoptive). It was one of the few things they brought with them to America when they fled the pogroms in Russia.
Random vintage barware — most of it is crystal. This is in the cupboard above my refrigerator and hasn’t been touched once since I moved here. But I love this stuff! Especially the 18 kt. gold bowling motif hi-ball glasses! They have matching shot glasses too, but you can’t see them here. The publisher and owner of Black Books in San Francisco, Bill Brent, gave them to me before he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. He was tired of living with AIDS.
More crystal barware at the top there, in back. In the blue boxes are the old-fashioned style champagne glasses — crystal, etched in gold. I used to use them to serve sorbet. The bowls there in front are my many popcorn bowls — for every season! If you see the word “Swamp Thing” there — that’s the Halloween popcorn bowl. You can also see that I have one of those Moroccan clay Tagine things. You can guess that I just use that all the time now.
My “everyday” dishes. Most of this is porcelain, almost all of it is vintage. I now use one plate and one bowl from out of all of this. I haven’t touched most of this stuff in forever.
This cupboard really cracks me up! I use ONE drinking glass each day — the same one — and this cupboard is so full that I can’t even fit it in there. I keep it in the sink. I do switch coffee cups with the seasons, but otherwise, you would absolutely never guess that only one person lives in this house!

Okay, gang. Break’s over. I’m gonna get back to work here!

Ah,Tuesday! It Rears Its Lovely Head Once More!!

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Yes, Tuesday is laundry day around here! So that’s already underway.

And it’s also the day I have to drive into town and get groceries. All I have left around here are arugula and tomatoes. Healthy as I am, even I need a little more excitement than that. (Well, a lot more excitement than that, but we’re talking about food right now.)

Sometimes that part of living in the middle of nowhere gets a wee bit old — having to drive 25 miles & back to get the food. Because I spend maybe 20 minutes in the actual market. Then an hour driving. And then about 20 more minutes putting all the groceries away.

And I’ve already spent a chunk of the morning going over stuff with the director again for Tell My Bones and our Christmas promotion. And so I’m just now sitting down to blog at an hour when the blog is usually already posted.

So my day’s gone.

I’m going to spend what’s left of it (after the shopping trek) doing some more tweaking on Letter #5 from Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse. And then, if I have the right headspace after that, I’m going to work some more on Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town. I just woke up in that kind of a mood.

Working with Thug takes a lot out of me, though, and if I’m not in the right headspace then it’s just useless. Writing that kind of porn (meaning the kind people wish to actually read) is like neurosurgery with words. Even though 99.9% of the words are filthy dirty & disgusting, they still have to be incredibly precise and in the exact specific place in the sentence; and then each sentence has to be precisely right. And then you can’t have too many words or it ruins everything.

So it’s a lot of work. However, it’s a task I’m willing to undertake for the sake of mankind (and good porn).

William at the A1000Mistakes blog in Australia (my favorite blog for learning about cool music I’ve never heard of before!), commented here yesterday about the unfortunate situation on the Internet and artists getting ripped off, etc.

What’s happening to me now is just sort of getting out of control. It’s never been this bad — where so much of my stuff is illegally being offered for free or for sale, all over the world.  I have enough of an enormous ego to feel flattered, you know — if you want it that bad, then, great. However, it truly erodes my income. But at the same time, these are really old stories and novels and novellas, and so it sort of just makes me feel like I have to focus my energy on the new work and let go of these things I can’t control.

The truth is that without the Internet I never could have gotten as popular as I did, as quickly as I did — all over the world. I loved the World Wide Web. I thought it was the most awesome thing back in the late 1990s. And back then, it went hand in hand with driving sales of actual books in bookstores.

And, because of the kinds of books I primarily wrote, Amazon was also a godsend to me. Most people did not want to go out to a public bookstore and openly buy the kind of books I wrote (because publishers usually put such horrifically tacky covers on them!!). So the privacy factor of Amazon really helped put me on the map, 20 years ago.

Still, as much as I personally love the ease of Amazon, they were also the beginning of the erosion of my earnings, way back when, because they were the ones who started to make it so fucking easy for people to buy cheap used copies of my stuff, that I got no royalties on whatsoever. Eventually, the Internet and eBooks helped put all of my publishers out of business (small presses, primarily). So this disruption of my career has been going on for quite a while now and, for the most part, I’m used to it.

This sudden onslaught of so much of it at once is a little hard to take, though. However.

I made the decision a long time ago that I was going to be a writer, no matter what. I’m used to the winds of fortune constantly changing. I would not recommend being a professional writer to anyone on the planet, though, unless you can stomach that.

A few years ago, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, a national newspaper of the Philippines, interviewed me in the late Spring, as students were graduating school, and among the questions they asked me was what I would advise these students who might want to make a career out of writing literary erotica.

I was dumbfounded, you know? Why on Earth would they ever want to do that? You’ve got to be out of your fucking mind to, you know, willingly choose this if you had even the remotest option of doing something else. And if, for whatever reason, like me, you know you don’t really have an option: you either write what’s in your head, or you blow your head completely off. Well, if that’s the case, then nothing I say is going to persuade or deter you.

But anyway. I’m used to things being less than perfect. My main goal is to write something good enough that somebody somewhere likes it so much that they want to keep it. Because it only takes one copy of something to be buried away for safe keeping — like a scroll in a clay jug in a cave in the cliffs over Qumran — to help it be part of the physical world for a really, really long time.

That’s the goal, anyway, when I put a word on some sort of page. And the Internet and everything that comes along with it, is part of that; be it good or less than good.

Okay. Nick Cave sent out a Red Hand Files thingy today! It was all about:

Ghosteen Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds

Had I known he was actually going to eventually tell us what Ghosteen was about, I’m thinking I might not have spent all those hours pondering it while listening to it in my bed, or at my desk, or in my kitchen, or while I was doing yoga, or driving all over Muskingum County, or while I was taking a shower….

However, that’s all water under the bridge, as it were. What matters more is that I still look really young for my age so not too much time was lost there.

I’m just kidding, of course. Mostly. Anyway. You can read it here if you so choose! As always, he’s eloquent and thought-provoking. And the album is just breathtaking, however you interpret it (or try to).

FYI: “Spinning Song” is a song I really love. I have no clue what it’s about. It is not one of the songs that breaks my heart or anything; I just really like the imagery, even though I don’t understand it. At all. But it seems to be a little bit about Elvis. And “the Queen” whose hair was a stairway, makes me think of Priscilla — not just on their wedding day, but more specifically, in the official photo from when the baby was first born: Priscilla’s hair is not to be believed. I never could understand her hair in those days. As a young girl, her hair actually kind of frightened me. (But then it turned out, in the 1980s, that she just had regular hair like everyone else.) (And that she was also incredibly funny and cute.)

Okay.  I’m gonna scoot. The day is practically over already!!! Have a perfect Tuesday, wherever you are in the world, and whatever it finds you doing. Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya.