Okay, for reasons related to publishers, my short story “After Hours” has been removed from the above linked drop-down menu, From the Vault.
I replaced it with two other short stories, of a similar temperament (meaning erotic but not as hardcore as some of the stories in the vault).
The stories added are:
The Epicures : a previously published short story that eroticizes food and wine and that includes sexually graphic depictions of sex with food and eroticized simulations of childbirth, so squeamish readers should be forewarned.
August on the Lake: an erotic short story about fellatio and divorce. It originally appeared in French. I don’t think it appears in English anywhere, except here and in my collection The Muse Revisited, Volume 3.
I also decided, after a zillion months, to update the excerpt in the section above titled, Excerpt: The Muse Revisited. If you are the sole person left in the English-speaking world who has never read my short story, Anal, from 1994, here’s your chance to unburden yourself of that uncomfortable moniker!
But please be forewarned: The story contains sexually graphic depictions of anal sex that, even after all these years of being in print, will still not be suitable for all readers.
Okay! Back to your regularly-scheduled Tuesday programming!! And I’ll get back to mine!! See ya!
Letter #5 for Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse began its transmigration from the ether to the page!! I was not really expecting it, so I was really excited.
It’s titled “Hymn to the Dark” and it begins with the idea that angels can be pretty dark, that they aren’t always about “hallelujah,” but that my Muse has shown me that the dark can sometimes be glorious.
So it goes to some beautiful (& erotic) places.
The title came as a sort of play on Novalis’ famous Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night; Germany, 1800).
Novalis’ real name was Georg Friedrich Philipp, Freiherr von Hardenberg. He lived only from 1772-1801. And Hymns of the Night is an often heart-rending poem of grief that he wrote after his beloved Sophie died (very young) and then he died shortly after her, at age 29. They both had consumption.
The poem was a sensation when it was published in Germany in a literary magazine, Athenaeum 3 (in 1800), and the poem heralded the birth of German Romanticism.
The book (it’s a long poem mixed with prose), is a staple of Divinity studies and so I’d read it when I was studying for the ministry. But I think that Christian theologians only look at one specific segment of the poem and don’t really consider the entirety of what Novalis wrote. Even while he does do an uncanny job of capturing what the idea of Christ brought to masses of people who moved out of paganism and into monotheism and then needed to re-frame their idea of Death.
I’m making the poem sound scholarly, but it’s not; it’s really fluid and deep and beautiful. Still, Novalis has a really succinct grasp on how three different eras of Western humanity dealt with the loss & grief of death, and since it was still only 1800 A.D., he ends with the Christian era, nailing it precisely:
“No longer was the Light the seat of the gods or their heavenly sign — over themselves they drew the veil of Night. Night became the mighty womb of revelations — the gods drew back into it — and fell asleep, only to go out in new and more splendid forms over the changed world.”
But in the beginning of the poem, where he’s talking only about his own deep grief and deep loss, he is surprisingly modern and doesn’t represent traditional Christian thinking at all, so why Christians sort of seem to ignore that part is a bit of a question mark for me. But it’s that early, non-Christian, part of the poem that moves me most. Lines about how the secret heart remains true to the Night, where creative Love comes alive, and how we owe everything to that Love (and you can easily read several passages of it as implications of erotic love):
“Won’t Love’s secret offering ever burn forever? …Only fools misrecognize you… They don’t feel you in the grapes’ golden flood — in almond trees’ wonder oil — in poppies’ brown juice. They don’t know that it’s you hovering around a tender girl’s breasts making her womb heaven — and don’t suspect that, out of old stories, you, opening heaven up, come and carry the key to the Dwellings of the Blessed, quiet messenger of infinite mysteries.”
“Doesn’t all that inspires us bear the color of the Night? It bears you mother-like, and you owe all your magnificence to her. You’d evaporate inside yourself — you’d crumble away in endless space if she didn’t hold you, tie you, so that you became warm and, flaming, sired the world.”
His beginning premise seems to be that the Night saved him from his grief and returned his passion, as well as his lover, to him; that in the Night, he engages in some sort of erotic coupling with her soul once more. And at the very end of the poem, he seems to be plainly speaking about it:
You come, beloved —
The Night is here —
My soul’s enraptured —
The earthly day’s past
And you’re mine again.
I look into your deep dark eyes,
See nothing but love and bliss
We sink onto the altar of night
Onto the soft bed —
The veil is gone
And, lit by the warm pressure,
There glow the pure embers
Of the sweet offering.
None of those sentiments are encouraged in true Christian theological mindsets. Unless, of course, you’re subversively dressing it up in the guise of how you feel about Christ. But Novalis isn’t talking there about Christ at all; he is plainly talking about Sophie’s soul coming to him at Night after her death.
Well. All right. I have truly digressed there. I only meant to say that Letter #5 of Girl in the Night is underway… And won’t it be fun!
Anyway, yesterday was wonderful and I’m thinking today might hold more of the same wonder. I will indeed make time to drive into town and buy groceries!! Yay! That’s always fun — having food in the house.
(And I did go to the gas station yesterday and I begrudgingly bought the smallest bottle of milk available. And then, while making my way to the counter to pay for it, I passed through the candy aisle. I am not a big candy-eating person, at all. However. What to my wondering eyes should appear but a Kit-Kat bar in dark chocolate!! I did not know they made such a thing! I do love dark chocolate. So I bought the darn thing, and four-hundred-and-ten calories later!!!!!! I had eaten it in its entirety and it was incredibly good.)
Okay-doke, gang. Oh — Nick Cave sent out a Red Hand Files newsletter today. (Linked there.) But only read it when you truly have the time to contemplate his always-eloquent reply. If you hurry through it, you will only do yourself a disservice.
I am, of course, joking, This time, his reply was only 2 words long. (If you’d like to know which words, they are linked above.)
Okay. I’m gonna scoot!! Thanks for visiting, gang. I’ll leave you with something somewhat appropriate, somewhat not, for today’s ramblings.
This is the song I personally played (over & over) when I graduated from Divinity School (Magna Cum Laude, but on my heady way to nowhere because I just see Christ so darn differently than everyone else does.) It was in December, so it was around Christmas and this song was appropriate to the season. While I do not believe in transubstantiation, I do believe this is a truly beautiful (and beautifully sung) hymn. (It’s actually about Easter, but we sing it at Christmas…) Okay, I love you guys. Have a splendid day!! See ya!
Panis angelicus
fit panis hominum;
Dat panis caelicus
figuris terminum:
O res mirabilis!
manducat Dominum
Pauper, servus, et humilis.
Te trina Deitas
unaque poscimus:
Sic nos tu visita,
sicut te colimus;
Per tuas semitas
duc nos quo tendimus,
Ad lucem quam inhabitas.
Amen.
Yes, that is currently me, in the happy intersection of life.
I have three projects, front and center on my plate. All of which call out for my attention; all of which engage and delight me: Tell My Bones rewrites; Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse (erotic memoir letters); and In the Shadow of Narcissa (memoir of childhood).
Then I added Thug Luckless to the stack of projects — a porn thing I’m writing that I really, really love but I’m basically writing it just to sell it.
Then, of course, Peitor and I got back on our writing schedule for Abstract Absurdity Productions.
And then I heard from Sandra last night that our other theatrical project, The Guide to Being Fabulous, is once again moving to the forefront in Toronto. (Translation: TONS of rewrites needed there, plus a trip to Toronto for an initial roundtable with the director and the producers at the theater.)
It’s like standing in an intersection and having 6 projects coming right at you, all of which make you really happy, and all of which require 100% focus, attention, concentration. But if you don’t make a decision immediately about which one to focus on, they are all going to run you over.
I think this is why I’ve been staying in bed a little later every morning, even though I’m still awake every day at 5:30 am. Still going down to feed the cats, eat breakfast, listen to music at the kitchen table — in short, enjoying my peaceful little early morning solitude time. I then go back upstairs to meditate and then center myself by writing in my Inner Being journal thingie. And THEN — I go right back to bed and stare out the window.
Because, by then, it’s still only about 6:30 in the morning; it’s still dark out. There’s no imperative reason to get dressed while it’s still dark out and sit down at the desk and try to tackle that now daily question: which project am I going to focus on first? That daily question that is starting to make me insane. (In a good way, but nevertheless, insane.)
And undeniable proof that I’m staying in bed too long in the mornings is that this morning, I ran out of milk for my coffee!!!! I cannot drink black coffee, and so I never run out of milk. To me, that ranks as a terrible (albeit, First World) catastrophe: Snuggly fall morning in October, still in my PJs, still in my quiet pre-dawn place and suddenly out of milk for my coffee.
Fuck.
I only drive into town once a week to buy groceries. It’s 25 miles each way, so that’s an hour of driving. I drink organic milk, too, so that’s why I buy my milk in town. There is of course milk readily available at the gas station. Two minutes from here. And even though it’s actual milk, you know; it works. It makes my coffee not-black. But still. Come on. I’m surrounded by farms here for miles and miles and miles. I want my organic milk. But the gas station is not going to carry that and yet only the gas station is open at that lowly hour of the morning… (Which reminds me, yesterday, I was out on the main road that heads out of town, where all the farms begin, and I actually saw a bull trying really hard to mount a cow who kept sort of scurrying away from him — if cows can be referred to as “scurrying.” It was funny.)
But I digress. My point is that I did indeed run out of milk, which never happens, which tells me that I’ve been hanging out in bed too long, drinking way too much coffee…
But how do you prioritize projects when every single project you’re working on is something that makes you really inspired? Or feel fulfilled, or what have you. My brain gets sort of jumbled. And when that happens, stress sets in.
(I think I will blame my Muse, for being too intensely and wonderfully muse-like. But I’m not gonna shut off that valve, no matter what.)
So, here I sit. At my desk. Dressed. Black coffee in my enormous autumnal coffee mug. I have no clue what I’m going to work on first today. And the morning is already half-gone. (And I need to get my ass to the gas station and buy some fucking milk. Because black coffee sucks!!)
But I’m happy! So that’s cool.
And while I try to figure out what the heck I’m doing today, I leave you with my breakfast-listening music from this morning! I just love this song: “Crow Jane” from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, from something like a million years ago (or 1996 — something like that).
Thanks for visiting, gang. I hope Monday is just a really great day for you, wherever you are in the world!! I love you guys. See ya!!
“Crow Jane”
Crow Jane Crow Jane
Crow Jane
Horrors in her head
That her tongue dare not name
She lives alone by the river
The rolling rivers of pain
Crow Jane Crow Jane
Crow Jane Ah hah huh
There is one shining eye on a hard-hat
The company closed down the mine
Winking on waters they came
Twenty hard-hats, twenty eyes
In her clapboard shack
Only six foot by five
They killed all her whiskey
And poured their pistols dry
Crow Jane Crow Jane
Crow Jane Ah hah huh
Seems you’ve remembered
How to sleep, how to sleep
The house dogs are in your turnips
And your yard dogs are running all over the street
Crow Jane Crow Jane
Crow Jane Ah hah huh
“O Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson
Why you close up shop so late?”
“Just fitted out a girl who looked like a bird
Measured .32, .44, .38
I asked that girl which road she was taking
Said she was walking the road of hate
But she stopped on a coal-trolley up to New Haven
Population: 48”
Crow Jane Crow Jane
Crow Jane Ah hah huh
Your guns are drunk and smoking
They’ve followed you right back to your gate
Laughing all the way back from the new town
Population, now, 28
Crow Jane Crow Jane
Crow Jane Ah hah huh
Yes, I confess!! I am blogging from bed again. My cup of coffee on the night table beside me once more.
A different cup, though. Still autumnal, but this one is really huge. Requires fewer trips downstairs:
Enormous autumnal coffee cup requires that I leave the bed less!
I’m also blogging in the dark (I only turned on the lamp to better regale you with the photo), plus I’m blogging without my glasses on and hoping for the best!
As much as I love summer and truly hate to see it end (grieve when it ends, is more accurate), I sure do get used to the quiet coziness of fall mornings in a hurry. I cannot emphasize enough how cozy my bed is in the dark, when there’s a little chill in the air.
Kevin is supposed to come by sometime today with his dad to come get his VW camper van from out of my barn. It’s always so great to see him, if only for a few minutes! He is definitely a wonderfully quirky guy. Just a delight to know. About 20 years younger than me. Born and raised out here in the Hinterlands.
The first thing he said to me yesterday was, “Are you still giving that guy piano lessons?”
Funny how, when someone is gone for a few months, their perceptions of you remain back in time. Alas, no; I’m not still giving that guy piano lessons. He did finally move to the new house and took his piano out of storage, but he also got a new girlfriend and she moved in with him and he wasn’t making any dedicated time to practice. So sadly, it was really just wasting my time.
Regardless, though, it was enough time to help me reconnect with myself musically, so that was perhaps the hidden blessing within that whole experience.
But between all the writing projects and trying to learn Italian every day, my intellectual plate is kind of full. If I still had my own piano in the house and could teach here, without having to do all that driving, I would probably be able to be a little more tolerant of people not practicing enough between lessons. Otherwise, to me, it just feels like a hobby for them, not something serious, and I end up thinking, “Jesus Christ, do you have any clue how busy I am?”
That said… this morning, as I was lying here, doing absolutely nothing besides drinking my coffee, I was reflecting on how incredibly great it feels to do absolutely nothing. Just lie here. Even while I’m getting excited about Letter #5 of GirlintheNight: EroticLoveLetterstotheMuse forming on my inner horizon. I’m not sure yet what it’s going to be about; I can only feel a darkness to it and a depth. No words are forming yet. So I’m excited about all these things I’m writing, but it sure feels good to lie in bed for an extra hour or two in the dark and do nothing!!!
There has also been some interesting stuff going on regarding both of my adoptive parents. It has given me food for thought. I don’t actually know if my adoptive mother is still alive; I’m guessing she is. But I’m also guessing that if she is dying, no one is going to rush to alert me because they wouldn’t want me to pop up and contest her Will. (Yes, I think that highly of all of them…)
Anyway, my adoptive dad has nothing to do with any of them, But I was lamenting this morning that my relationship with him has really begun to deteriorate again. Part of it is me just becoming this total emotional minefield now. It doesn’t matter if he tries to be nice (in his own nearly unidentifiable way of being “nice”), I make sure to keep moving all the active mines so that he’s gonna step on one of them, no matter what.
I’m just awful. Like I’m not going to give an inch anymore. I’m just one big minefield, loaded with active mines that are constantly shifting around so that he can’t possibly make any headway with me at all right now. Pretty much everything he tries to say to me is WRONG. I don’t know if I’ll stay like this forever, but it’s definitely who I am with him right now.
Okay, well. On that cheery note!!! Have a great Sunday, wherever you are in the world. It is of course Tom Petty‘s birthday today. Have some cake or something, okay?
(From before he even moved to LA — a really long time ago!)
It is a really glorious October day here today. I’m feeling a little more centered than I’ve felt in well over a week. Balanced, I guess.
Yesterday’s work with Peitor, over the phone, was really just great. Not only productive, but also it was really so much fun going over the script and all our notes for the script and both of us being kind of amazed by it. Some of it is intense, but on varying levels, all of it is funny. We hadn’t worked on the script since July, so it was just fun to realize just how much work we had already gotten done on it before life went off in various intense directions.
It was also just great to be working with Peitor again and not feeling so isolated. I love writing, and I usually don’t mind that I have to be alone while doing that. But sometimes I really do feel intensely isolated. So it was great to be creative but have someone to laugh with, too.
And the movie is going to be so fucking cool even though it will only be about 8 minutes long.
Okay.
Well, tomorrow would have been Tom Petty’s 69th birthday so there are memorial concerts all over the country for him this weekend and the proceeds go to his 2 favorite charities in LA — mission charities that help the homeless and homeless children, and maybe homeless addicts, or something like that. I don’t really remember the exact charities. But a lot is going on.
I am doing incredibly good about all this. Only an occasional twinge of sorrow and then only when I think of him from the late 70s & early 80s — sometimes that whole Tom Petty era really still gets to me. The loss of that. His incredibly intense and wonderful youth. But overall, I’m good.
Both of his daughters are in my Instagram feed but I don’t usually pay too much attention to either of their feeds because they are both very intense, outspoken women — both artists and extremely political. I usually find both of them a little disarming. But for some reason, it feels rude to just unfollow them. But this weekend, one of them posted just some horrific stuff involving animals in peril, it was just awful, so disturbing. So I’m guessing she’s still having some really deep issues about her father’s birthday & his death. (Last year, she was intense, as well, but not in this horrific way.) So very public. All of it. I’m sure that has got to make everything so much harder to process.
But right at this very point in time, I’m coping with all my own issues of loss. I really am. I’m feeling that sense of perspective that’s calmer or perhaps more accepting of things? And not just various deaths, but other issues of loss that I’ve had to confront over the last few (extremely difficult) years, especially revolving around my adoptive mother. All of it is easing up now. It really is.
All right. Well I’m gonna scoot. Thanks for visiting, gang. I leave you with two things. A photo of Tom Petty with his granddaughter shortly before he died:
Tom Petty In LA with his granddaughter, Everly.
And a great song of his off of DamntheTorpedoes, their breakout album from 1978. This is a live version from that time period, in London, but Tom sings his original lyrics to the song. On the album, Jimmy Iovine, the producer, made him get rid of the drug references.
All righty! Enjoy what’s left of Saturday, wherever you are in the world, gang. I love you guys. See ya.
(MINI UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds will be going on tour in support of their new album, Ghosteen, beginning in April 2020 !! One thing that fills me with an inordinate amount of relief is that I don’t have to try to buy a ticket to any of that madness… However. Tickets begin going on sale next Friday.)
Okay. Back to the original post…
I have to say that, as much as I love and utilize Amazon when buying so many things, when it comes to people making money off of my allegedly out of print books, it makes me want to tear my hair out.
Well, my hair is perhaps one of my more outstanding features, so it makes me want to do something else equally frustrating. Not sure what.
And I’m not talking about anyone selling those used “collectors” copies of my old paperback books that frequently fetch hundreds of dollars (as opposed to the $7.95 – $12.95 it originally cost when the publisher published it.) I’m talking about people who are selling brand new copies of books of mine that are out of print, that allegedly sold out of their print runs a long, long time ago. Sometimes, as in the instance I mentioned here before, early in the summer, someone is selling hardcover editions of When the Night Stood Still — one of my out of print books that never came out in hardcover. Ever.
And the way that particular title is distributed is stupidly complex so it becomes impossible to figure out who is actually selling it. And I’m guessing it’s being published by print on demand.
Two things really confound me. One is: Why that particular title? It wasn’t my worst book, but it’s not like it’s a book that flew off the shelves (in 2004, no less). So that confounds me. Why only that particular title? A real mystery to me.
The other thing that confounds me — and I’m not going to say which title it is because I don’t want anyone else to go flocking to it and buy it — but the title is ranking decently in sales in a couple of different Women’s Books categories on Amazon. (Another book of mine that was published in 2004.) That one really irks me because, if it’s showing up in sales rankings, someone is actually making money there.
In both of these instances, the true publishers have been out of business for years. And nowadays, it is so easy to scan and then “publish” a book by printing it on demand.
In other instances — involving eBooks of mine that are published by huge publishing houses — I see now that they’ve dropped their prices drastically on certain eBook titles of mine and that is of course cutting into sales of similar eBook titles that I publish myself. (in other words, they’re drastically underselling me.)
It is just so fucking frustrating. I try not to focus on it, you know. Just keep moving forward and put my energy in that forward direction and not look at life through the rearview mirror — and I guess just be appreciative that people still want to read these really old books… grumble grumble grumble
All righty. That’s my rant for today. My phone chat with Peitor is happening here momentarily, so I’ve got to get into the headspace of script-writing and out of the headspace of frustration. I was glancing over the script thus far and realized that I recall next to none of the details, so I need to really go over my notes before the phone chat.
I want to mention quickly, though, that none of the cats have gotten to the palm tree!! I did see that a copy of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems was lying on the floor this morning, so obviously one of the cats attempted to get near the tree and gave up when a book fell down on them. So, it’s working!! Yay!!
Okay. I’m gonna scoot. And try to reclaim this frustrating morning. I hope you have a happy Friday, wherever you are in the world!! Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya.
Yes, it’s another one of those slow-starting mornings. I’m still in bed, a cup of coffee next to me on the night table. I’m just lying here, staring out the window at the intensity of another lovely October morning.
Cloudy. The wind blowing the autumn leaves into a swirl.
I’m blogging from bed so I’ll be brief. Got my plate super full again so I’m trying to conserve my brain power. Working on both ThugLuckless and TellMyBones pretty much at the same time. And one project is pure porn, the other is pure poetry. And then on my inner horizon last evening, I saw that Letter #5 for GirlintheNight: EroticLoveLetterstotheMuse was taking shape!! And tomorrow morning, bright & early, Peitor and I get back to work on our micro script for Leta’sGotToGo, the first micro short that we’ll be producing for Abstract Absurdity Productions.
Yeah, so. Getting out of bed this morning was a little delayed.
Oh! I had a dream about Nick Cave last night. You know how, whenever I dream about him something about it comes in duplicate, plus the dreams are always utterly indecipherable? Plus I always wake up immediately after the dream so it’s always really pronounced in my mind, which makes their indecipherability all the more frustrating.
This time I dreamed that there were 37 things he was willing to do on the train, but 37,000 things he was willing to do in the other place.
And there you have it. The dream in its entirety. I woke up at around 4:30 with that hovering in my brain and thought, oh my god, what the heck does that mean??!! It was sort of anxiety-inducing, my inability to make sense of it, least of all, at that early hour.
It might have something to do with Ghosteen, I don’t know. But yesterday I couldn’t let go of that song “Hollywood.” It is just so haunting. (I still think I shouldn’t link it here but it is on YouTube.)
All right. I’m gonna close and try to figure out how best to focus this day — in which direction: porn or poetry? Have a wonderful Thursday wherever you are in the world. Thanks for visiting! I love you guys. See ya.
if you follow my childhood memoir, IntheShadowofNarcissa, I just found this photo of me and my brother with our Grandma in the summer of 1966. We are on a beach on the shore of Lake Erie, in Cleveland. She was my most favorite person in my life.
JESUS (speaking quietly to Simon-Peter): “Though I had nothing to do with it, it was an actual miracle — her cats did not go near that fucking tree.”
SIMON-PETER (quietly): “I cannot fucking believe it. Jesus. That’s awesome.”
Yes!! From Christ’s mouth to your ears! My cats did not go anywhere near that tree.
You know how cats are so good at math? How you can actually see them calculating the distance of something they wish to jump up on to?
The actual formula that cats use to calculate the distance up to a tree that isn’t covered with books
Well, when they looked up at the tree, they saw this:
Which led them to think THIS:
And the problem of my cats shredding the fronds off of my helpless palm tree, eating the fronds and then vomiting them back up all over the carpeting has at last been solved!!
Isn’t math great??!!
Well, alas. The photos on Instagram of Nick Cave’s final Conversation of his US tour looked just great. It was mostly photos from the very start of the show, and then two photos from the final song, where he had a guy from the audience come up and sit on the piano bench next to him while he sang “Stagger Lee.” (Nick Cave sang — not the guy from the audience.)
But it looked like a great show. And oddly, it seems like the folks in Los Angeles are more of the rule-following ilk than the folks in San Francisco were. I find that a little ironic. You’d think that in LA, people would be more likely to do whatever they want, but almost all of the photos from last night were from that brief period at the start of the show where they were allowed to take photos. Not so in SF, where you would think they might be more respectful of the other people in the audience…
Anyway, it’s over. I just can’t believe it. For four months, I had my tickets to see him in NYC, and now not only are the NYC shows long gone, but now the tour is completely over. In a heartbeat.
All righty. Well, it is just a really cool day here today, gang. Perfectly fall-like outside. Rainy, chilly, wet autumn leaves scattered everywhere. It just feels so cozy to be inside, looking out at the rain. Drinking my cup of coffee. I have to work on some technical stuff for Tell My Bones here today, then work some more on Thug Luckless. Then maybe go back and do some more work on Tell My Bones. I think it’s just going to be a nicely paced day.
Last night, I spent a lot of time working on Thug Luckless and so it was kind of late when I got around to doing yoga. I had the lights down and I was listening to the 2nd half of Ghosteen. I don’t know if that was the very best idea. You know how, when you’re doing yoga, you’re so focused and anything you hear goes right into your consciousness. I know I keep saying this, but Ghosteen is truly an intensely beautiful album and just so incredibly sad — to me, anyway.
I was in the cool-down part of the yoga when the final song came on (called “Hollywood” but I keep thinking it’s called “Malibu”). The cool-down part of yoga is such a meditative mental place, and that song — the part where Kisa is unable to accept yet that her baby has died, she thinks it’s only sick. Oh my god, that just washed over me like a tidal wave — of love, of loss, of longing. That whole song is almost unbearably exquisite. You should go listen to it wherever you listen to your music.
Okay, I’m gonna scoot!! Have a beautiful, beautiful day, wherever you are in the world. Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya!
I had to re-pot one of my plants this afternoon, so that meant I had to brave the truckloads of Virginia Creeper and go get some potting soil out of my barn.
And just opening the door and being inside of it, wow — one of these days, when I’m not writing 4 projects at once, I’m going to focus on fixing up that awesome barn. The energy inside of it is just too cool; it is so old.
The original owner of this house, built that barn himself, over 100 years ago and, structurally, it is still in amazing shape. It needs paint, the roof of course needs fixing, and there’s some old stuff that has accumulated inside there that some day I want to go through (old doors, window frames, old screens — cool stuff like that. Some of it clearly dating back to the 1940s.).
I just love walking inside it. It’s so peaceful in there. I still sense the horse that lived in there, you know. I really do.
Plus, Kevin’s 1965 VW camper van is still in there! Good thing. Because he should be coming back from Montana before the month is out and will probably want to come get it. It’s been parked in there since May and every once in a while, it dawns on me to go and at least look through the window and make sure it’s still in there…
The other day it occurred to me that I forgot to tell my mom that Kevin’s van was parked out there. I’m guessing that if she went exploring the barn (and who wouldn’t? it’s such a cool little barn) she probably wondered why the heck I had an enormous 1965 VW camper van in mint condition parked in there. But at this point, I’m guessing that she probably wonders a whole lot of things about me. (I miss her so much. I hope she comes back before Christmas.)
Well, my phone chat with Peitor was wonderful. Gosh it felt so good to talk to him again. We’re back on track with Abstract Absurdity Productions, starting this coming Friday morning. Mostly, we talked about personal stuff, but what little time we did talk about our script notes just brought back to mind all the insane work we’ve done on this stuff already. Just indescribably absurd stories. So wonderful. I can’t wait until we actually start filming them. And the jewel in the crown, as far as the importance of the scripts goes, is still 3 projects out. I cannot wait until we are ready to tackle that one. We were in Mel’s Diner on Sunset Blvd. on a Sunday evening when we were first fleshing that one out. Peitor had me laughing so hard, I literally almost fell out of the booth.
Outside of Mel’s, back in December
Even though the scripts are meant to be funny, the humor is intensely dark and the stories have complex emotional undertones. And the character in that particular script is named Marilyn — she is absolutely nothing like me, and the story is historically based, and takes place in 1969, so it literally is not me. But every time Peitor would refer to Marilyn doing or saying something really absurd, it just, of course, made me laugh so hard.
Anyway. A really good day here today. The palm tree is inside and sitting in the front window and so far, nary a cat has ventured past the precarious pile of books surrounding it. Not yet, anyway. I’m really hoping that if they do try to get at the tree, a pile of books clattering down on to them will keep them scared away from it until Spring.
Nick Cave sent out a Red Hand Files newsletter today that was awesome. And I’m not just saying that because I love everything he does. It’s one of those ones when his ability to express himself just blows your hair back, you know? Jesus. It was just so well stated. You can read it at that link up there.
Okay. I’m going to let Thug Luckless out of the box for a few hours and see what kind of progress we can make with him tonight. Have a wonderful evening, wherever you are in the world!! Thanks for visiting. I love you guys. See ya!
Marilyn's Room 