Peitor has familial obligations in – yes!! – Iowa this weekend. So we are not working on any scripts this morning. (It seems weird, doesn’t it – that he spent his childhood in both Florence, Italy and Iowa??!!) (It’s because both of his parents were tenured University Professors. In Literature. Both of them. Talk about intense. Both of his parents were always extremely friendly and all. But they’re both ridiculously intelligent. You always wanted to be wearing your best vocabulary whenever they came to visit in NYC.)
Anyway. So I have a little bit of a reprieve from “projects” today, which is good because now I have way too many that I’m trying to focus on every day. I know it’s because I started that memoir website thing from out of nowhere, and then setting up the page became stupidly time-consuming. I wasn’t expecting that.
But Sandra is in fact flying in here in a couple weeks to begin the initial rehearsals of the play (staying with the director because she’s allergic to cats!!), so I have to redirect my focus away from In the Shadow of Narcissa for a moment and get back to Tell My Bones.
I’m in a good place about that, though. And I’ve been kind of waiting for that feeling: that the play was getting queued up inside me.
If I’m not feeling aligned energetically with a project, it’s useless to kill time sitting and waiting on it. I go in the emotional direction of whatever calls me on any given day. It works out better for me that way. But sometimes, deadlines sort of force you to focus on something, regardless. So I’m gad that I can feel the play bubbling up inside me again because that’s what needs my attention most right now.
Plus, the Internet has been super wonky around here the past few days. It will suddenly go out, for hours, in the whole area. It’s frustrating but it is also a forced “vacation.” I can’t do anything online. I can’t work on the new memoir. I can’t stream any new music. I can’t watch anything on Youtube or Amazon Prime. I can’t work on my Italian lessons, either. Or even tune my guitar!
So I’ve been using it as a signal to just STOP, you know? Because I never just stop until it’s time to collapse in bed at night. And even then, I usually spend an hour or two doing other weird stuff that I won’t go into right now.
Anyway. It does feel good to sort of just stop. To be peaceful. To just listen to the earth. To take in, sort of from a distance, all the things that are going on right now.
Okay. This will be brief because the Internet has gone in & out about 5 times since I started writing this!! Hopefully, Spectrum will have it all figured out by tomorrow.
Have a wonderful Saturday, gang, wherever you are in the world!! Thanks for visiting! I love you guys. See ya!
The internet NEVER used to go out on my typewriter!!
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
And by that of course I mean that the raccoons have returned to my maple tree! A mom and 2 cubs. They’re chattering away as I type. (If you scroll down to my Instagram feed, you can see a photo of them. Click on it and it gets larger but it takes you to my Instagram page. For some reason, the photo has disappeared from my phone.)
Anyway. I love them. The hole in the center of the tree is parallel to the window I can see out of from my bed. I don’t even have to lift my wee bonny head from my pillow to see them. I can just lie there and watch them and they are so cute.
Okay. Well! Thank you to all of you who are visiting my “In the Shadow of Narcissa” site even though I already told you there is nothing there yet but a photo!! You are making me feel guilty!
ME (stumbling upon my stats page this morning because I still can’t figure my way around the back end of that new site): “Oh my goodness! Visitors! And I have nothing to give them!”
It’s sort of like having house guests and no food in the house…
I am going to try, once again, to work on that today and post something there. Although I wasn’t expecting it to take this long and need to focus more on the play. But we’ll see how it goes.
My solution to the problem of not being able to get the new site to do what I want it to do, is that I’ve made it just one single page. That’s it. You can follow it. You can contact me. But that is the only bell and the only whistle. I am just going to post there on that one single page and that’s it.
So frustrating! (grumble grumble) And I’ve been building web sites since 1997, when you basically had to build the whole darn thing from HTML.
Why do they have to “make things better” only to then make them impossible to figure out?
A dear friend of mine, who is almost 80, asked me to look at her brand new dishwasher for her on Monday because it wasn’t washing the dishes. She would load up the soap, press “start,” but the soap would never be used, just be spilled all over, dry, when she opened it, hours later. And her husband, who has dementia, kept putting dirty dishes away in the cupboards. She was going nuts.
HER (heavy sigh): “I should have gotten another Kitchenaide instead of this one.”
ME: “No, this is an LG. It’s much better than a Kitchenaide. Something’s just weird here. Let me look at it.”
And it turned out that the dishwasher had a “Delay” button connected to wi-fi, which had somehow been turned to “on”, so that you can start your dishwasher later on, from your cell phone! She had no clue! It was perpetually set to “delay.”
For Christ’s sake. Who fucking really needs that?! I can understand wanting your home security system connected to your cell phone. I can almost even understand wanting your thermostat connected to your cell phone. But your dishwasher?
My poor friend was going insane because her brand new, really expensive dishwasher wasn’t doing a darn thing and she was ready to have them come take the really nice brand new dishwasher away. (And she has her hands full enough, trying to look after a husband who has dementia.)
So. Anyway. My solution to my growing annoyance over the back end of the new web site was to simply make it one page. That’s all I really need anyway. And, hopefully, on we go.
Nick Cave‘s Red Hand Files newsletter came out again this morning. I already read it, sort of by accident. I usually read it after I “get everything done.” It came earlier than it usually arrives, though, and I was just rapidly scrolling through my inbox on my phone, cleaning everything out of there (meaning “delete, delete, delete”) and then suddenly there it was, right in front of me, so I read it.
It seemed sort of sad to me. Of course, I always read everything from my own perspective, so I could be wildly wrong about that. I will have to read it again, but it sort of seemed sad. God knows, I now have something else to ponder. And no answers will ever be forthcoming, so it will likely be one of those things I ponder until the cows come home.
Although, that said – around these parts, the cows actually do come home…
And raccoons, too! I’m thinking that the mommy racoon is probably one of the cubs that was born in the tree last spring. I have missed them so much!
Which in a roundabout and very convoluted way, brings me back to my thoughts about my niece (see yesterday’s post). And I feel like I can’t figure out what I should really do there.
My one sister and I are very close. She raised 2 girls, and she did an incredible job at it. (When she and her partner got together a million years ago, her partner had 2 very young daughters from a previous marriage and my sister helped raise them until they went off to college.)
And she loved those girls, and did everything she was supposed to do and all that. But they did make her crazy because they did stuff that all young people do. And I recall one time, a guy my sister knew was really, really wanting to have kids but his wife didn’t want them. And my sister took the guy out to her truck, opened the side door and told him, “Here, dude. Slam your dick in this door a few times until the feeling goes away.”
She’s not a real fan of raising children anymore.
And she definitely has a really low tolerance for bullshit from young people now. And her opinion yesterday re: my concerns over my niece was drastically different from mine. And I know she knows what she’s talking about and so I think, what do I do here? Just let everyone live their own lives and look the other way?
Well, yes, let everyone live their own lives. But the other part – not even trying? Just walk away? Mind my own business?
It’s mostly my niece’s dad that I want to talk to my niece about. My brother. Because I saw and I knew a side of my brother that nobody else ever saw. Ever. I was really close to my younger brother for a long time, until he pushed me too far, too, and I finally had to walk away. Like everybody else had.
But I know there was another path he had tried to go down; there was another kind of man he had tried to be. I remember that man he was so well, and I’m certain my niece has no clue that man ever existed. She just sees the man as he is now (indescribable alcoholic). I hate to think that’s all she’s destined to see.
My younger brother is on the left; my second husband is on the right. In Jackson, Ohio, Spring 1993.
Well, okay. Let me get going here. Spend some time on the other site and hopefully get something underway there, finally. And spend a million hours pondering the Nick Cave thing. God knows, I can’t have a fulfilling life without stuffing my head full with a bunch of questions that have no answers whatsoever!
Have a great Thursday, wherever you are in the world! I leave you with this today. A song my brother and I used to play the fuck out of the summer after the album Centerfield by John Fogerty came out (1986). PLEASE please please play this one really loud, okay? In honor of the guy my brother used to be, such a long wonderful time ago. A summer I will never forget.
Thanks for visiting. I love you guys. See ya!
“Rock And Roll Girls”
Sometimes I think life is just a rodeo
The trick is to ride and make it to the bell
But there is a place, sweet as you will ever know
In music and love and things you never tell
You see it in their face, secrets on the telephone
A time out of time, for you and no one else
Hey, let’s go all over the world
Rock and roll girls, rock and roll girls
Yeah, yeah, yeah
If I had my way, I’d shuffle off to Buffalo
Sit by the lake and watch the world go by
Ladies in the sun, listenin’ to the radio
Like flowers on the sand, the rainbow in my mind
Hey, let’s go all over the world
Rock and roll girls, rock and roll girls
Hey, let’s go all over the world
Rock and roll girls, rock and roll girls
Hey, let’s go all over the world
Rock and roll girls, rock and roll girls, yeah, yeah, yeah
I am just now getting around to posting to the blog. The internet was out for 3 hours.
I am trying really hard to move my whole life over onto the new laptop. It’s kinda rough. It seems like everything is just slightly in a different language, you know?
I’m doing it. But it’s making everything go so slowly.
And I thought I was going to spend the day blithely working on the first post for the new blog/memoir thingy, In the Shadow of Narcissa. However, WordPress decided to force me to use the new page editor, and the new site builder. Which is not user friendly, by any stretch.
I thought I had the site all ready to go last night, but I was wrong. There were still some wonky things happening, and it only took me HOURS to fix it!
Not only because I couldn’t find my way around the new “user-friendly” streamlined site builder that kept doing nothing that I was trying to get it to do; but because I’m also still trying to get comfortable on the new laptop AND it’s about 95 degrees Fahrenheit in my bedroom today. So what should be minor annoyances feel like they weigh a psychological ton in all this heat.
For instance, what used to be my “delete” button on the keypad, is now where the “page down” button is. So every time I have to delete something, I suddenly jump down half a page instead!! Took me forever to figure out why that kept happening.
For no reason at all, I just want to post this picture here. I don’t know who drew it but I just love it. It is of course based on Tom Petty’s song “Wildflowers,” from 1994.
And White Lunar, the CD of film music composed by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis arrived. I have not had time to listen to too much of it yet, but I really like it. So I guess I’m glad that Amazon alerted me that it was apparently missing from my collection… (Amazon is kind of spooky that way, gang.)
And Sandra finally called me. It only took her about 2 weeks. Seriously. For 2 weeks, I was sending texts out to no man’s land. But at least she did text me on Monday. Anyway. I still can’t go into it on the blog but it is such good news, gang. Just such good news about our theater project in Toronto, Canada.
It’s almost like I can’t even process it yet. (And everything seems doubly hard to process because of all this fucking heat.) But I am super happy.
And then the other thing I got bogged down in earlier was something that was worrying me about my niece – my brother’s daughter. So I texted my sister to see if maybe I was wrong, but I wasn’t. So then my sister & I got into a texting marathon about that. And then I discovered, either by accident or sheer necessity, that I have this weird sort of “parental” thing lurking inside me.
I never knew it was in there.
In fact, when (grown) friends have asked me, out of sheer desperation because they could find no other sitter, to babysit their very young children in the past, it was always a strange experience. I’m extremely maternal, you know, but I never had any sort of “authority” bone in my body. I’m always on the same psychological level as the kid is. And then the parents would come home and say, “My god, Marilyn, what happened here?!”
ME: “She said she was allowed to do it.”
THEM: “Marilyn, she’s four. Of course she’s going to say that. But you’re the grown up here. You’re supposed to set the rules.”
Anyway. I never think of myself as “parental,” mostly because I don’t have any kids. So I was very surprised to see where I was heading with this whole thing with my niece. I honestly don’t want to live her life for her, or live anyone’s life for them, for that matter. But I suddenly found myself texting her: You’re gonna come here, and you’re gonna listen to me and you’re gonna do what I say.
HER: “Okay.”
ME (stunned, thinking): Wow. That was easy.
I know I can get on my family’s nerves when I get it into my head to tell people how they ought to live. It totally ruined the relationship I had with one of my sisters. She made sure I had nothing to do with her daughter the whole time my other niece was growing up. So I’ve tried hard to sort of mind my own business since then. But at the same time, I’m not one of those people who can just keep the family skeletons hidden away in the closet.
I think denial and avoiding things hurts younger people, especially, more than it helps them. So I’m guessing I’m going to piss everybody off. But I would rather my niece be able to make choices about her life and who she is, with her eyes open. If she wants to.
So I guess we’ll see. I just hope I don’t say something horrible, like, “I’m so disappointed.” Aaaarrrrgh….
Okay, gang. Even though I made no headway whatsoever in what I was hoping to do today, I’m still closing up shop, walking away from the desk, and going downstairs to watch another episode of “Z: The Beginning of Everything.” F. Scott Fitzgerald has finally sold his novel, This Side of Paradise, and so the Jazz Age is getting ready to officially begin!!
Have a wonderful evening wherever you are in the world. It’s frustrating for me to not be able to tell you where Nick Cave is tonight and what he’s wearing, but he is steadfastly refusing to post his own private life to Instagram so I am helpless here until his Conversations resume.
Meanwhile, I leave you with my breakfast-listening music from this morning. A totally hot little rock & roll love song from Tom Petty’s skinny, angry, cynical, attitude-filled years! ” A Thing About You” from my own personal favorite Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers album, Hard Promises. (Play it loud or it doesn’t work, gang!!)
Okay, Thanks for visiting! I love you guys! See ya!
“A Thing About You”
I’m not much on mystery
Yeah you gotta be careful what you dream
I thought this might pass with time
Yeah I thought I was satisfied
[Chorus:]
But oh baby let me tell you, I got a thing about you
Baby let me tell you, I got a thing about you
It don’t matter what you say
It don’t matter what you do
I, I, I, got a thing about you
Somewhere deep in the middle of the night
Lovers hold each other tight
Whisper in their anxious ears
Words of love that disappear
[Chorus]
Baby you hold some strange control over me
Yeah it’s so wild it hypnotizes me
Plus, recently, my new coffee cup – the one that loves me, or I should say, has that very loving quote on it by F. Scott Fitzgerald that makes the cup appear to love me. Well, recently, the cup reminded me that I never finished watching “Z: The Beginning of Everything” on Amazon Prime because I moved to this house in the middle of it and then forgot all about it.
So I’m trying to make myself stop working in the evenings and watch that show in its entirety. In other words, be like a normal human being (sometimes).
However, as I indicated earlier today, I am indeed going to be doing 2 new blog-related things every week. I am launching a new blog that is an intimate memoir-in-progress, titled In the Shadow of Narcissa. You can look at it here, but there is only a photo there right now.
If you were raised by a narcissist, or deal in any personal way with a narcissist, you know what a scarring psycholgical nightmare that can be. It’s not going to be a nightmare about the horrors of being raised by a narcissist. It’s about how my mind helped me creatively survive being raised by a narcissist and how that childhood shaped me into the delightfully erotic and neurotic creature I am today! I will probably post there twice a week.
However, I’m also going to be taking excerpts from those posts, condense them down considerably, and publish them at the Edge of Humanity Magazine once or twice a week, as well.
So I am excited and I will keep you posted about all of that.
I am also very excited to announce that an excerpt from my new novel, Blessed By Light (an excerpt that none of you have read yet, I might add) will be published in an upcoming issue of the Exterminating Angel Press Magazine.
So I am just very, very excited, gang. On all fronts.
But now I am just very, very exhausted, so I’m gonna close down the laptop and actually step away from my desk!! And I’m gonna go downstairs and watch F. Scott Fitzgerald convince Zelda (she is, in fact, the “Z” who is the beginning of everything) that he is going to marry her, even though she’s beginning to worry that he’s just a weak alcoholic and not committed to being a great writer.
Okay! Thanks for visiting, gang. I hope your evening is swell, wherever you are in the world and whatever you’re doing in it! I leave you with what I was listening to this afternoon on my “lunch hour” (or 20 minutes, or whatever I actually allow myself!). New from Texas Hippie Coalition, “Why Aren’t You Listening?” From their album High In the Saddle. Okay. I love you guys! See ya!
“Why Aren’t You Listening”
The song has been sung
The deed has been done
God has not come
Why aren’t you listening?
Deep inside I deal with struggle
As you’ve seen my mind gets muddled
And though I seem complicated
It’s the reason I’m so hated
And though some may find me frightening
Others say I’m quite enlightening
And though you may find it shocking
I am still alive and rocking
The song has been sung (I’m still singin’)
The deed has been done (We’re still breathin’)
God has not come (I’m still believin’)
Why aren’t you listening?
I hear you say you want to kill me
And still deep down I know you feel me
I try to cut through all the static
Still I feel a little panic
Please address my mental illness
And please tell me that you feel this
And though you may find it shocking
I am still alive and rocking
The song has been sung (I’m still singin’)
The deed has been done (We’re still breathin’)
God has not come (I’m still believin’)
Why aren’t you listening?
Why aren’t you listening?
It doesn’t have to be mystical
Just as long as it’s spiritual
No need for the ritual
Just as long as it feels magical
It doesn’t have to be mystical
Just as long as it’s spiritual
No need for ritual
Just as long as it feels magical
You’re still singin’
We’re still breathin’
I still believe in
Why aren’t you listening?
The song has been sung (I’m still singin’)
The deed has been done (We’re still breathin’)
God has not come (I’m still believin’)
Why aren’t you listening?
The song has been sung (I’m still singin’)
The deed has been done (We’re still breathin’)
God has not come (I’m still believin’)
Why aren’t you listening?
Why aren’t you listening?
And, NO, they have not yet actually taught me how to say the above in Italian. I looked it up on google translator.
I thought my unending vanity sounded better in Italian.
(I considered quoting from Ecclesiastes, because it has much to say about vanity, but it wasn’t catching the overall verve I was going for.)
Anyway. Yes, I’m vain. And I might have to actually confess here that I am a “skin products” fanatic. And I only buy my (indescribably huge amounts of) skin products from one specific company in France. They’ve been shipping them to me for 20 years now because they are the best products I have ever used, and I have used everything.
And I’m talking everything, because I’ve been a skin products fanatic since I was 13 years old. I used to have this metal lock box that I kept all my skin products in. I didn’t ever lock it, it was just the only thing I could find in the house that was big enough to hold all my many skincare products.
I have no clue why I’ve always been obsessed with skin care products, and the worst part is that, even at age 13, I was obsessed with high end skincare products. And I was not rich or anything like that. I had to do a lot of babysitting to afford all that stuff. And babysitting used to pay 50 cents an hour, so that was a lot of babysitting.
(Apparently, I had not yet realized that writing porn might pay better.)
(And NO, I don’t really think I write porn. It is everyone else in the world who thinks that.)
Anyway. I have always been completely okay with my unending need for skincare products. Because, even back then, I really believed that, when I got old, I wouldn’t look old if I was vigilant about using skincare products.
I didn’t realize that everybody else wasn’t like this until one day, when I was 14, a girlfriend was in the bathroom with me when I took out my metal lock box and she saw everything that was in it and could not get over it. And she was sort of horrified that even my elbows were smooth. And I was sort of horrified that she was horrified. Who wouldn’t want their elbows to be smooth at age 14??!!
She was one of those girls who had all sorts of other things to do with her life, even way back then. (And I recoil to think, if she’s even still alive, what her elbows might look like today!)
We did not stay friends, of course, because it’s hard for me to stay friends with girls who have non-smooth elbows. And she was unable to stay friends with me because I made out with her boyfriend behind her back. (See? She clearly had some weird sort of value system she was operating under in all areas of her life.)
But in my defense, the boy liked hanging out with me. And he gave me, literally gave me, a pristine, original copy of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, complete with its original photos & cutout things inside the album sleeve. He simply gave it to me because he didn’t want it. And the only thing I had more of than skincare products were record albums. So how could I not make out with him?
Anyway. I’m bringing all this up because, no, I’m not really that vain. I do still use a ton of skin products, but I also have wrinkles and stuff. I don’t actually mind having them. However, most people who meet me for the first time think I’m about 10 years younger than I actually am… which then gives me about 10 seconds to feign modest humility when they learn that I’m actually way more incredibly-older than my decades-long-moisturized face leads you to assume.
I also have a ton of cellulite on my thighs – that I have always had. I’m not sure why. My legs are strong & stretchy & flexible! Because I have been working out steadily & continuously since I was — yes!! — 13 years old. Cellulite has never bothered me. It’s just not on my radar of things I worry about. However, the company in France that I am addicted to, had this 2 for 1 sale on this new (ridiculously expensive) Mangosteen extract cellulite reducing cream. And I mean it is stupidly expensive.
I have never really believed that cellulite reducing products could actually work, but since I never cared one way or the other about cellulite, I never tried any of them. But I have noticed that whenever this company comes out with a new product that I don’t think I could possibly need, I buy it, and try it, and the results blow my mind.
(They recently were giving away tubes of another new product they have – a detoxing flash mask. I accepted it graciously because it was free, and it normally costs something like $64. But what the fuck is a detoxing flash mask for, exactly? Who knows? But I tried it anyway. I followed the directions. Put it on my face for 5 minutes. Tissued it off. Went about my glorious day. And the next morning — holy shit. My skin looked incredible. And I don’t wear makeup, gang. So I have to get an incredible amount of dazzling mileage out of just my skin. So now, I always have an expensive tube of imported-from-France detoxing flash mask in the medicine cabinet in each bathroom. Because now I never know when I’ll need to detox my face in a flash and won’t even have enough time to get to the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom! And I still don’t know what the fuck a detoxing flash mask is, I only know that it works!)
So I went for the 2 for 1 deal on the new cellulite cream and it arrived yesterday and now I’m very curious to see what the results of stupidly expensive Mangosteen extract cellulite reducing cream (that you must use twice a day in order for it to work) will be.
I’m hoping the results will be negligible because I really don’t need to get addicted to something else that’s really expensive. In addition to the detoxing flash mask, I have other masks I’m addicted to; one that is used 3 times a week, one only once a week; one just at night, a couple only in the daytime. I have morning face creams, night time face creams, nightly foot creams, even, and daily intensive hand creams, twice-a-day eye creams, and then other intensive creams that keep all those other parts of my really old body looking a little less than “really old.”
So I’m really kinda hoping that stupidly expensive Mangosteen extract cellulite reducing cream does nothing for me. But I will keep you posted!!
Meanwhile!!
I have a ton of writing to do here today. I am so excited about the stuff with Sandra that I can’t blog about yet. But in order to manage all of this, I really have to focus, gang. Plus I’m thinking of adding a twice-a-week memoir-type, nonfiction column to a blog that is not this one. So, um. Yes. I gotta get going!
I hope you have a terrific Tuesday, wherever you are in the world. Don’t worry if your elbows are rough, I still love you!! And I won’t make-out with your boyfriend behind your back ( or your wife, even) as long as s/he refrains from giving me vintage and quite valuable old Beatles’ record albums 100% for free! Thanks for visiting!! I love you guys! See ya!
First, let me say that Ohio is one of those States where helmets are optional on motorcycles. If you want to take your fate into your own hands, and go helmet-less when you ride your motorcycle, you may.
And if you don’t want to ride with your girlfriend seated behind you, you can have your best friend — yes, your dog — strapped in behind you, instead.
No lie.
You’d think that Ohio had been one of the Rebel States, but in fact, it was not. It was so deeply entrenched on the Union side, that a few famous Civil War Union Generals came from Ohio, including William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant.
Actually, it isn’t until you start getting deeper in the Hinterlands that you truly encounter this rebel attitude. And by rebel, I’m not talking about KKK-type, Confederate flag-type stuff; just the general attitude of “you can’t tell me what to do.” Whereas, if you go deeper into the cities, you find that mentality where everyone basically tows the line and deeply wishes you to do the same thing and will look disapprovingly at you the minute that you don’t.
However. Out here, as I said, I saw the coolest guy!
He was riding his motorcycle, no helmet. He had long, straight brown hair that wasn’t pulled back at all. No jacket, just a tee shirt. A pair of shades. He did not look older than 30.
He was coming from the other side of Wakatamika Creek, out where Black Run Road is.
At first, I just thought he was cute. I was turning onto the highway, as he was going past me in the other direction. But then suddenly, he appeared on the Old Highway 16, which is a twisty-turny, winding and beautiful 2-lane highway and sometimes runs parallel to the new highway, and man, was he going fast. I was already going 85 mph and he was easily a little ahead of me.
His hair was blowing back in the wind. His tee shirt was even blowing halfway up his back. He was very clearly looking around for the Highway Patrol, but you could just see that he was the freest human being on the entire planet. It was breathtaking to watch him. But then the Old Highway veered up into the hills and he disappeared.
Of course, I’m very maternal, and right away, I was hoping that his mom had no clue what he was out there doing — going at that speed on that winding road with no helmet on, because even without having any clue who she is, I know her heart would have dropped down to her feet to see him like that. But at the same time, maternal instincts aside, it was just incredible to watch him in all his fearless glory. It really was. He was just beautiful.
I hope he stays young (at heart) and fearless forever. Whoever he was.
Okay, gang! Good news arrived from Sandra today re: our other theater project that’s going on in Toronto, Canada. I cannot blog about it yet, but it is sufficient to say that if I thought I had a tad too much on my plate before I got out of bed this morning, I now have great big heaping piles of incredible awesomeness. And I have to somehow tackle it.
I know I will. I just have to stay focused. But it seemed like I was getting to a place where I was going to have some breathing room, but such is not the case.
But, still, I couldn’t be happier, gang, even though now I am just stupidly busy.
Well, okay. I don’t usually post songs from Mojo, however, it is probably the best Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers album, ever. It was their 2nd to last record before he died, although the final album he did was a Mudcrutch album that had a few of the Heartbreakers on it, as well.
In terms of their musical prowess, their maturity, the songs on Mojo are really just off the charts good. It is decidedly the “older/calmer” Tom Petty ( he was 60 years old when it came out). Not the scrappy, angry, skinny, attitude-filled and much younger Tom Petty that I usually listen to. This is the much more laid back one, but the album is just killer. If you like more blues-based rock & roll, that is.
I played this song about a zillion times this morning. “Running Man’s Bible.” I get the feeling that he wrote it sort of as a tribute to himself and the Heartbreakers and their 40 years of being on the road together. Of course, I could be wrong because I was never very good at guessing what Tom Petty was ever really writing about.
But, anyway, it’s a great song and it was great music to listen to while that cool motorcycle guy went flying past, in all his youth with all his fearlessness and all those unanswered questions still way out ahead of him on that highway somewhere. Okay! Have a great evening, gang. Thanks for visiting. I love you guys! See ya!
“Running Man’s Bible”
You’re with me tonight on this dark highway
We’ve run it together
So many times
We’ve run it for money
We’ve run it for music
We’ve run it to pay for our innocent crimes
I took on my father and I’m still walkin’
Took on all comers in some shape or form
And I see with the eyes of somethin’ wounded
Somethin’ still standing after the storm
Here’s one to glory and survival
And stayin’ alive
It’s the running man’s bible
I been next in line
I been next to nothin’
Been next to bystanders
Who shoulda said somethin’
It was not in my vision
It was not in my mind
To return from a mission
A man left behind
Here’s one to glory
And survival
And stayin’ alive
It’s the runnin’ man’s bible
I don’t speak of the times I’ve nearly died
I don’t speak of out lastin’ those who are gone
Or the things I’ve done
I care not to remember
Or the desperate measures
That might have been wrong
Honey here’s one to glory
Here’s to bad weather
And all the hard things
We’ve been through together
Here’s to the golden rule and survival
And to stayin’ alive
It’s the runnin’ man’s bible
Here’s one to glory and survival
And stayin’ alive
It’s the runnin’ man’s bible
Yesterday was so cool. Specifically, I am referring to my weekly Saturday morning phone conference with Peitor, re: Abstract Absurdity Productions.
We’re still working on one specific script. Shot by shot and moment by moment, even though (and especially because) it is only an 8 minute film. Everything has to be so tight.
First off, Peitor weirdly overslept a huge amount and so we didn’t actually get started until after 12 noon, my time. I think that on some sort of subliminal level, those earthquakes they’re having out there in Los Angeles wore him out.
But eventually, we did indeed get started and it yielded another incredible session.
I know I bandy those words about: incredible, amazing, astounding, and the ever popular “so cool!”. But, I really, really mean it, gang! The psychological level we got to yesterday for the 3rd segment of the film really just astounded both of us.
(If you’re new to the blog — the plot premise of every film we’re developing is absolutely, completely, 100% absurd, otherwise we aren’t interested in making it. But from that starting point, we then want to make it a really watchable, engaging film/video experience that lasts 10 mins or less. )
When you’re scrutinizing something shot by shot, you readily find the holes in the script and while we’re brainstorming on how to fix a hole, that’s when the psychological level of the whole plot just goes off the charts for us. It’s so funny. Because the bottom line is that the entire premise is absolutely ridiculous. Yet it is layered now with all this emotional/psychological stuff.
The creative process is so beautiful. How something evolves and really just takes on a tangible life, you know? Yesterday, Peitor was comparing the notes/script we now have against our original 3 lines of notes we made on this specific idea. Just the simple premise we had come up with originally that had made us laugh really hard.
We were sitting on stools at the counter in the French Market in Los Angeles, eating quiche and looking at row upon row of intricately decorated chocolate and caramel pastries. It was a sunny Friday in December; we were just hanging out, nothing to do. For a change, I wasn’t trying to dash off to too many meetings at once. And suddenly we came up with this small, absurd idea and we were laughing so hard, we were nearly falling off the stools. (And me being a genteel woman of a certain age – I totally pissed myself.)
However. That said.
If you’re a creative type, then you know how that small germ of an idea can really, really excite you. And yet once you start really developing it – whatever “it” is – and really opening to the creative life of it, it truly is astounding where it will take you and what actually – ultimately – gets created.
It is such a beautiful feeling, regardless of what it is you’re bringing to life.
And it’s so wonderful for me, personally, to be going through this process with someone I’ve known so well for so long. I’m an intense person and not everyone can work that well with me. I try not to be overwhelming or anything, but I also still cannot help being myself. I’m driven by visions. And eventually my visions achieve a flow, you know? And if you’re clogging up the flow, well, “consternation” is a good word to describe my overall everything at that point. So trying to work with me is often not as easy as just being my friend.
And even just being friends with anybody, whether or not I’m involved, can get stressful, right?
Of course, years of experience of being someone’s friend (Peitor and I have been friends now for 35 years), teaches you how best to keep the flow open and to allow the other to just be who they are, because even while Peitor and I are very similar in so many ways, we are definitely not twins, or anything. Our minds work in very, very different ways.
And to be honest, at my age (I’ll be 59 in 17 days!!), I have already started to see so many people just drift off. To ill-health, to boredom – they’re not really interested in moving forward in any way; or their minds stay in some wonderful place in the past that they liked better. And of course, a number of my colleagues have died already.
I love younger people, I really do. I love the energy and the thoughts and the approach to life that they bring to a conversation. To the planet. But it just feels so wonderful to be so creative with someone I’ve known so well for such a long time and to have it be a really positive (non-argumentative) experience.
And speaking of my birthday!!
And speaking of unending relationships, perhaps even of relationships that have come back from the dead!!
I have to scoot here because my first husband is calling me here momentarily. It is one of our annual phone chats. He likes to call me around my birthday. And he has to be discreet – calling very early in the morning, his time zone. Because his life is on a whole different path, in a whole different world; a whole different life! Which is a way of saying that he is not only in a relationship with someone who does not know that I exist, but it is a relationship that does not seem to even know that he was ever married. Ever. At all. Regardless of to whom ( for 9 years). And apparently he intends to keep it that way.
Okay-dokey! I sure don’t mind. I love chatting with him. He always makes me laugh. And he cares about me and he knows me really well. I live in a world now where nobody knows me at all, so to be known is a beautiful feeling. (Plus, you know how it is when you aren’t married to a person: what they do or don’t do is none of your business anymore at all.)
Have a super Sunday, wherever you are in the world, gang! Thanks for visiting. I love you guys! See ya!
Really lovely morning here, gang. Although later it’s supposed to rain unendingly, on into the wee small hours of the morning…
So let us gather our little rosebuds while we may!
Yes, the Spider did indeed replace all his lovely webs on the kitchen porch. He looked amazing last night. He always seems so happy to be sitting right smack in the middle of his kingdom in all his brand new webs!
Of course, I might be projecting a bit. He might come down from wherever it is he lives during the day, and see my handiwork with his old webs, and think: Jesus fucking Christ! What is the matter with that crazy dame? As soon as I get everything looking exactly the way I want it, she comes through and trashes everything and I have to start all over again.
It’s actually kind of hard to tell what he’s thinking. I know he’s not afraid of me, or anything. Sometimes I just stand there at night and marvel at him in his amazing web. And he just sits there and stares back at me with all 1800 million of his eyes. Saying nothing.
Anyway!
Yes, it’s Saturday, which means I have to work with Peitor on the video script here in a bit. FYI, they’ve been having earthquakes again out in Los Angeles. He texted last night and said that last night’s quake was the only one he truly felt. It was another strong one.
Those earthquakes are one of the primary reasons I don’t want to settle in California. It just feels like flirting with disaster.
You know, back in 1989, when they had that terrible earthquake in San Francisco, my first husband had just moved there from Honolulu. This was in the “death throes” era of our marriage. I had stayed in NYC when he moved to Honolulu, which is what caused our separation – I still had my band, I was still singing all the time; I did not want to move to Honolulu.
But once he moved to San Francisco, he expected me to move out there and start behaving like a wife and stuff like that.
He called me on the phone. I was still living in my hellhole apartment on E. 12th Street. He said, “I’m buying you a house here and you’re going to move out here and you’re going to start behaving yourself. I’ve been patient, but you’re my wife. It’s time for you to grow up and act like it.”
Gentle readers, I know you don’t actually know me, personally, but you probably know me well enough to presume that that little conversation didn’t go over too well with me.
Yes, I could have been smart!! I could have been like other women I know, frankly, and I could have thought: I could own prime real estate in San Francisco. Move out there for now. Get a deed in my name. THEN get a divorce.
But, honestly, my mind doesn’t ever work like that. Instead, I told him that I didn’t want to do any of those things.
So he got on a plane and flew out to NYC to have a more persuasive chat. But for some reason, I just wanted a divorce. I just wanted to be myself, you know? I would have suffocated if I’d tried to be any sort of wife in a house in San Francisco. So he finally gave me my divorce.
Then, about a dozen years later, I did it again. Got married. And it didn’t work out. Because I am always “me” in whatever marriage I am trying to be in. And a priest who was counseling me while I was in the process of leaving my second husband – because I was suffocating; going further out of my fucking mind; could not figure out how to be myself and still be “a wife.” The priest very discreetly said, “Are you sure you want to just leave? Have an uncontested divorce? You’re walking away from prime real estate in Manhattan.”
He honestly really said that. Nothing about how God might think that marriages should be eternal or anything.
I don’t know what it is about me. I just need to be in this perpetual state of divorcement or something, and clearly, I never want to be a gal who owns valuable real estate.
Actually, I just want to be loved, for who I am, and haven’t found marriage to be a real promoter of that kind of thing for me. And even The Beatles taught me very early on that: Money can’t buy me love, gang.
Who the fuck needs real estate, and real estate taxes that are off the charts, if the person you’re with constantly wishes you were something else?
There is that saying, “I clean up real good.” Meaning that I did look really good in a little black dress, high heels, the whole 9 yards of it. And both husbands appreciated that. But they both really, really, really wanted the personality underneath that “look” to just go away. The 2nd one, especially.
We were always locking horns with my career. And I thought I had the coolest career ever, because I was doing stuff that had never been done before.
After Marilyn’s Room.com had been around for a little while, a director came to me with a script he wanted me to produce for Marilyn’s Room. I usually just promoted erotic fetish films that had already been made. But this one would be made exclusively for Marilyn’s Room; a 10-minute film, super saturated color, a fetish lesbian vampire thing. Hardcore fetish (blood sport), but not actual porn. And it would stream on the Internet instead of having to be downloaded, which was way too time-consuming and way too expensive.
This sounds so ordinary now, but back then, no one had ever done it. Ever. No one was producing highly stylized extreme hardcore fetish just for the Internet. It was so exciting to me.
When I went home and told my husband about it, he not only looked at me like I was from Mars, but Polanski’s film Repulsion barely captures everything else he felt. He just couldn’t stand the things my mind loved.
I never made the film because the only people willing to fund it were either in the hardcore porn industry, or in the Mafia.
I had very good relationships with both of those avenues, but I wasn’t stupid or anything. It was so important to me that the porn industry not be what was funding Marilyn’s Room, because to me, what we were doing was Art. And then the Mafia. I mean, I’m just not stupid.
The bar I hung out in at that point was a Mafia place in Midtown, and the men there were well into producing movies. Regular movies, I mean. I was telling one of them about this great script, this cool great new idea that I was trying to get funded, and he jumped on it, even though I wasn’t asking him for funding. He said, “I can give you $50K right now if you’ll just wait right here!”
But you know. I was still young and kind of good-looking. I knew exactly what they were gonna want from me in exchange for $50K for pretty much the rest of my life.
It was too funny! Why couldn’t any regular people say something to me like, “I can give you $50K right now if you’ll just wait right here!”
But nobody else I approached really “got it.” They could barely understand the Internet yet, and so could not understand producing a 10-minute, intensely strange fetish video for it. Instead, they wanted me to go out to Hollywood with them and make regular movies out there.
ME: “But why would I want to do that? Everyone’s doing that. I wanna stay here. And do this.”
And that’s sort of the story of my life, right? “But I wanna stay here, and do this.”
Oh well! Whatever, gang! Such is the tale of me and matrimony and art and real estate.
Okay. I’m gonna get going here before I have a 3-hour phone call to attend to.
I leave you with 2 options today. One is my actual breakfast-listening music from this morning. A song I absolutely love & wish someone would sing about ME, just exactly the way I am!! However, it is no longer politically correct to listen to this song. So it might offend you. (Michael Jackson, “Got to be There.”)
The second is something I heard this morning on a music blog I follow, hotfox63, from out of Switzerland, I think. I love the song but never knew the name of it before because I was about 7 years old when it came out! (The Kinks, “Waterloo Sunset.”)
All righty! Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya!!!
I finally finished the final edit, final re-write, final everything on Blessed By Light and it is done, gang.
I am just so pleased with it. I have the best Muse ever, and I just feel so blessed. What a strange little book it is but I really, really love it.
And continued thanks to all of you who keep downloading the eBooks at Smashwords. At this point, I know it’s people who probably aren’t even coming to this blog, unless of course, you all like to download the exact same books over & over & over.
But, still, thanks.
In fact, I remember the long ago days when each of those stories in those erotic “Muse” collections was brand new, and I would finish writing one of them — it was always a great feeling. And a really great feeling when the story got sold.
The thrill of getting that letter from a publisher that said, “We are happy to inform you…” (Back then it was actual letters, not emails.)
In fact, I only wrote one short story – a really early one – that didn’t eventually get sold, gang. So if you are still new to your own writing career, just hang in there and keep believing in yourself. It all eventually comes to pass.
(And eventually the letters became, “Dear Ms. Lewis, We know how busy you are, but we are writing to ask you if you’d be willing to contribute” etc., etc.)
So, yeah, it’s a beautiful world!!
Okay, I’m gonna go collapse for a few minutes! Thanks for visiting!!
I leave you with my current favorite song for my Muse! (Honestly, I can’t stop playing this song, gang. I think this is gonna go down as the best year in my life.)
Marilyn's Room 