Now HERE is a LAMP!

$25 on eBay. I won! Just one tiny step on the road to self-recovery... (Sad but true: "Things" really do sometimes help you feel better, when they're an outer reflection of your inner self... This damn lamp is ME!) ;p

Weehawken Fall

After 6 months away, I keep thinking about and seeing and smelling the place. I liked so much about it. Especially the trees and how they looked. And the walk along the Hudson and the view of the Manhattan skyline. And my slice-and-a-salad once or twice a week, from a pizza shop where the boys wore their hair gelled and upswept long before the rest of America ever saw "Jersey Shore."

I'm a lonely, and alone, person by nature. In Austin, my home since '83, my internal loneliness was/is hardly ever assuaged by my outer surroundings. When I lived in Weehawken, working in Manhattan, I might have been personally depressed while sitting around the house (no job, no love life), but the second I stepped out of the door, I almost always felt invigorated, excited about how pretty and/or grand things looked around me. I forgot my self and my problems and was amazed and interested and blatantly thankful.

Not just a case of being in a new place -- when I lived in San Francisco for 2 years in the '90s, the physical beauty of the place did nothing to overcome the shallowness/dullness/PC-ness of the town's occupants, or the hideous two-note weather. Living there, I couldn't wait to get back to Austin.

Weehawken/NYC are a completely different phenomenon...I immediately felt at home there -- aesthetically, historically, climatalogically (all 4 seasons), psychologically (down-to-earth, but merit-based, and with an admiration for glamour), organizationally (public transit, nearby shops), what-have-you. What/how it was pleased me, my psyche in many ways.

Mostly, tonight, I'm missing the fall (soon-to-be-winter) trees. I'm homesick as hell.

The Worst Lamp Ever

For years, I've always mocked this lamp when it used to sit as a fixture in my mother's living room. There's the hideous shade, the hideous fluted faux wood, and, to make matters worst of all, the fact that the on/off-switch no longer works: You have to physically plug/un-plug it each time. All the way around, it's a stupid lamp. And, boy, did I let my mother know it! (Lest you think me ogre-like: The woman's not poor. If she had been poor and could not afford any other light fixture, I of course wouldn't have criticized!)

End of ironic story: The ugly sonuvabitchin' lamp is now the sole source of independent light in my one-room apartment! (There are built-in track lights, and kitchen/bathroom lights, but this is the only living-room light.) Thank you for the light when I need it, yet... Damn You, Ugly Lamp! I hope you and your other mom-cast-off cohorts -- the white kitchen table, the 1970s TV table, the green fold-out chair -- are having fun while it lasts. (And the fun may be over soon -- I just bid, eBay, on a COOL vintage 1950s lamp for $17.99 + $8 shipping... It will be a pleasure and relief when my surroundings begin to mirror my tastes once again and I'm not forced to live among, and be grateful for, purely utilitarian, unaesthetic things...)

Joan Crawford "My Way" Tribute

The epitome of the lyrics of this song.

The Honeybees: You Need Me

aka: "Ginger made me gay." ;p

No one makes passes...

...at me in these glasses!

Oh my god. I'm officially middle-aged. In 2009, I noticed that my eyes were starting to dim a little. I could still do all of my proofreading and New Yorker-reading without glasses, but had to have really good light. As of 2010, though, I'm officially decrepit! Most texts are a bit blurry now without my super-duper READING GLASSES, courtesy of what my mother dug up from her cache of old, used reading glasses lying around her house. Circa 1986 or so, I'm afraid. They're fine for around the house (and I'm grateful to them), but... if/when I get a job in a public office, I'm going to have to NOT be seen like this! :)

Cheese Whiz

Was I just, in my earlier post, mocking others for being proud of "doing homework" on their Facebook pages? Oh my goodness.

For today, I returned some cheese, and was proud. And recount the tale here...

Hey, I recount the tale here because it's a big-ass hassle for me to buy groceries via bus in the first place, much less having to return sordid, stinky cheese that has gone bad! I bought the stuff Monday (9/27), first cut into it Wednesday, discovered its saggy (in)consistency, looked for the first time at the expiration date... 9/08/10. Fuck. I don't have a car that enables me to zip on over to the 2-mile-away supermarket, so the nasty cheese had been sitting in my fridge festering all week, me worrying about getting rid of it and getting my money back and also needing some non-rotten cheddar cheese for my food...

Let me, for a sec, go on with further trivialities: For the past 2 months I've also been without a USB cable from my digital camera to my computer. Why? I got aggressive with trying to plug in the original cord and bent it. So I couldn't download any pictures I took. The sad mutilated cord has been sitting around for ages. Me worrying about how to replace it and really wanting it replaced...... Finally scheduled the long bus journey to a shopping center with a Best Buy. They didn't have a replacement. Staples didn't have a replacement. The guys at the stores said such a cord wasn't available any more. One guy offered a $22 substitute involving a memory card that I didn't need. I said no, gave up, got on the bus to go home.

After all of this, I felt like a burger, which I hadn't had in 2 weeks. Got off one bus to catch another to Whataburger, stood on the side of the road by the bus-stop like a dork for nearly a half-hour, both to and fro.

The day's events in short: Finally got my money back at the grocery store, got some non-expired cheddar cheese. Went to Whataburger, got my burger. Got home, went online, found a USB cable for $1.29. All of this took all afternoon (more than 4 hours), when it should have taken under an hour. I don't recount this here for any reader's benefit, but just for myself ---- the bus-life in Austin, Texas, is ridiculous. And one day, I will be beyond it and able to look back here to see what kind of shit I had to go through just to do 3 simple errands.

What did I do before the Internet?

One thing that I really loved about the Internet when I, a late-comer, first discovered it in 2000, is the "web" concept of all of the links on a site. An interest in one thing will lead you to another related thing, then another, then another... But back before I ever had a computer, I used to do the exact same thing, just in a physical, and a more time-consuming and much more thorough, sense, i.e. READING BOOKS! Good non-fiction books provide a Bibliography list, plus I always ended up wanting to know more about the other characters peopling the books, or the cities, or the time period as a whole. Luckily, I was for several years the 6th-floor supervisor of UT's Perry-Castaneda Library (same floor where the AK-47-bearing guy at UT killed himself earlier this week), so I had easy access to the vast collection of fiction, poetry, movie books...My actual work only took about 3 out of the 8 hours, so I'd spend the rest of my time holed up in my office, reading and reading and reading...

This week flashed me back to that "old-fashioned" way of learning about stuff: The slightly cooler weather put me in a mood to read; I was missing Sandra so I thought I'd revisit the excellent Zelda bio by Milford to see if I could pick up any clues; the Zelda book mentioned that Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" was partially about their relationship, so I read that for the first time (I've got all of Fitzgerald's novels, but was never able to get into "Tender" before); "Tender" led me to Scott's essays, including "The Crack-Up" (his self-flagellation about his drinking and perceived failure) and his look back at his time in New York City (interesting to compare my experience with his -- he was, ultimately, a huge success there but found it too enervating; I was a huge failure there but fell in love with its energy); the essays, plus accounts in "Zelda" about her and Hemingway's mutual dislike, led me to Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast," about his '20s years in Paris, including intimate details about his encounters with the couple...

It's interesting to try to puzzle out "how it was" from different perspectives. Just shallowly: Reading "Zelda," I found myself judging Scott for being a horrible drunkard and partially to blame for her mental troubles; reading "Tender" and his essays and Hemingway's account, I saw much more how he was struggling to work on his craft and how she kept hindering him with demands to be entertained, how he really wasn't the ideal "help-meet" for her, but, rather, quite needed a help-meet himself, as genius-level artists (or any genius-level people in any field) do...

From Hemingway's "Moveable Feast"? Well, I just read a bio of Sylvia Beach and her "Shakespeare & Co" bookstore this summer, so I'm not in the mood for that again so soon... I'm definitely not in the mood to try to re-read any of Gertrude Stein's stuff. (God help me. The first time was annoying enough.) And, strangely enough, being lesbian myself, I'm not in the mood to re-visit accounts of the decadent lesbian '20s Paris scene, which was mentioned in EVERYTHING I've read over the past few days. (Fitzgerald and Hemingway both freaked out by it; the Zelda-book hinting that she'd been under the sway of the ladies...) I think at the moment I've pretty much had it with "decadence"... Had to go look up the definition: "characterized by a highly mannered style and an emphasis on the morbid and perverse." Yes, I'm definitely sick of it.

(BTW: I think the Internet by its very anonymous nature contributes to too much "stylization," i.e., creation of fake personae -- a bit thrilling at first, but ultimately soul-deadening when one attempts to make the leap from fantasy to reality after being attracted to the online persona... often, there's no "there" there, other than the image that the person has falsely created... At 25, 30, 35...that attraction to surface was still quite interesting to me. At 45, it's extremely boring. What I've also found boring is the fact that quite often -- really, the majority of the time -- people online, when given a public forum like Facebook, for example, have absolutely NOTHING TO SAY! They'll post their Farmville or Farkle scores; they'll tell you they're about to do their homework or go to the doctor or breastfeed their kid; the right-wing (my hometown people) will say stupid stuff about Obama and the lefties (my Austin people), stupid stuff about Palin; they'll tell you they finally got caught up on their DVR-watching... Out of my 50-odd Facebook friends, there are maybe 10 that actually say anything at all. The nearly constant onslaught of dumbness is just plain soul-wearying.)

Probably why I've, sans Sandra, returned to books this past week! I was starved for anyone, anything that said anything, that made me THINK and FEEL. I like thinking and feeling. I've missed it. Even "Tender is the Night," which is definitely not a very well-constructed or psychologically astute novel overall, provided much more mental sustenance than TV or the Internet, just on the merits of this quote alone: "...we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity -- we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity."

I'm sure I'll be in the mood for "Jersey Shore" bons mots like "You dirty little hamster!" sometime quite soon, but in the meantime... Thanks, Scott, for the anchor to the actual complexity underlying human interaction! :)

Haunted

In 1946, at Zelda Fitzgerald's last evening at the home of friends, all were sitting on the porch, waiting until it was time to leave to take Zelda to the train station. As the time for the train to depart grew closer, the hosts kept stressing that perhaps they should be on their way...: "Zelda said we didn't need to worry, the train would not be on time anyway. We laughed and said, perhaps, but it was a risk we didn't intend to take. 'Oh, no,' she said, 'it will be all right. Scott has told me. Can't you see him sitting here beside me?'"

Scott had died in 1940. And when they finally arrived at the train station, they had a half-hour wait because the train was late.

--------------------------------

And then these excerpts from her autobiographical novel "Caesar's Things":

An encounter between the main character and her brother:
"...Before she could say anything, her brother had his thumb in the eye-sockets and the child died of horror as the eye-ball came out in a film of white plasm. It was a pale blue eye; and that was the first indication that the thing he was playing with was a corpse... That God would let this happen had broken her heart forever and that was the way she would live."

An encounter between the main character and neighborhood boys:
"Then the boys assumed the air of authorized committee 'You won't have any friends -- nobody else will come to see you. That I promise you.'... They went up to the haunted school-yard so deep in shadows and creaking with felicities of murder to the splintery old swing and she was so miserable and trusting that her heart broke and for many years after she didn't want to live...."

------------------------------------------

And a story that the Fitzgeralds' friend Gerald Murphy told about an incident in the summer of 1929, when the couples had gone to see a documentary about underwater life: "There were all sorts and varieties of strange fish swimming by the camera...and then the movie began to show photos of the predatory fish in their natural habitat. Quite nonchalantly an octopus, using his tentacles to propel himself, moved diagonally across the screen. Zelda, who had been sitting on my right, shrieked and threw herself all the way across my lap onto my left shoulder and...screamed, 'What is it? What is it!' Now, we had all seen it and it moved very slowly -- it was perfectly obvious that it was an octopus -- but it had nevertheless frightened her to death. She was hardly a timid woman; I mean, she was really absolutely fearless and she was an expert swimmer. One simply didn't think she would have been so frightened by what she had seen, unless, of course, she had seen it as a distortion of something horrible."

---------------------------------------------------

All of the above made the hair on my arms literally stand straight up. So exact a portrait of what it is to be haunted. The woman was haunted. In my late teens and early 20s, I had to deal with a few "otherworldly" incidents that spooked the hell out of me, but they for the most part faded after my mid-20s. Still, they gave me a taste of what I DIDN'T want to live with. I don't know that I had a choice; the spirits just kind of left me alone after a certain point, so I was lucky. I take that back: Maybe I did make some kind of conscious effort to "toughen up" psychologically, i.e., not leave myself so open to the haunts... By praying, for instance, to God, begging for peace... Not asking for more other-worldly knowledge, which I'd been as a young person been so hungry for, but rather for much, much less... Cowardly in a way, I suppose. But also life-saving. (Perhaps, also, the fact that I've had to actually earn a living for myself has prevented me from giving in to the extremes of my nature, has forced me to construct a workable way of dealing with everyday life. I financially have never had a choice in the matter. That mundanity also life-saving. As was, come to think of it, my overtly talkative and tattle-tale nature as a kid... While intellectually curious as a youngster, I was also very puritanical about boys lifting my skirt on the playground, Dad wanting me to sunbathe without my shirt at age 12, etc. It soon got around that I was the girl who "would tell." A junior Hard Bitch, in other words. But a little bitch who didn't get bothered.)

I think I admire people like Plath, Sexton, Zelda (and, yes, Sandra) for daring to go much further psychically and psychologically and artistically than I have been able or willing to go. My sense of outrage, and innate sense of self-preservation, have kept me linked to the mundane world that I constantly criticize so for its very ordinariness!

Zelda Shoes

While I was searching for Zelda images online, I came across a place where you could actually order Zelda shoes! I thought they were so beautiful, and I wanted a pair. They were $65, and I thought long and hard about how I'd not been attracted to anything for over a year now and how much I really liked these shoes and how really happy these shoes would make me, and how I hadn't bought anything for over a year and how I finally had a little bit of extra money to spare, and then I clicked to order. And then an $8.95 service charge showed up.

I started crying and cancelled the order. Why. What is the difference between a $65 pair of shoes and a $74 pair of shoes? Why am I so saddened by this?

"A vacuum can only exist, I imagine, by the things which enclose it."

Just for the record:

First cool night of the Austin fall season: Sunday night, September 26.

Since I moved into my apt in late June, I've had sheets and a comforter on my bed, but have always just lain on top of the comforter to go to sleep. (The window-unit AC in the apt works fine, but it's annoying with its very loud, constant off/on during the night. In the past few months, I've just been shutting it off when it was time to go to sleep. So... no covers on me when I've gone to bed,'cause it always got too hot.)

Last night, though... It got down to 57 or something! (The first time below 75 or so at night since June.) :)

I was able to actually get under covers to go to sleep for the first time in over 3 months! It was cozy!

The next morning, Monday the 27th, the air still cool and fresh, I jumped right up, did grocery shopping (a major chore with no car, involving bus schedules and lugging shopping bags home on foot for a mile after getting off the bus)... Didn't dread it for the first time in months, and didn't come home completely sweaty and exhausted this time! Was actually liking waking up and moving about!

"Mean Streets" of Austin

Back when I rented my little house from 2000 to 2007 on the East Side of Austin, I had a front porch that I could never sit on. Why? Because, though the house was in a neighborhood that was rapidly being gentrified, the only people usually walking around were homeless guys. And whenever they spotted a female -- any female -- out in the open, they felt it obligatory to come over and chat. Not just a friendly "hey," but an approach up the walk and onto the stairs of my porch, and a not-leaving. That happened to me about 3 times before I just gave up on the porch.

Same with bus-stops, both then and now: Lower-class men in Austin see a woman alone at a bus-stop, and they seem to automatically assume that she's lonely and in need of their heavy come-on "companionship." Or worse: At one time in the early 2000s, I tried taking a bus from my neighborhood to the downtown clubs -- a big, fucked-up, black homeless guy at the stop where I was quietly waiting got in my face: "You scared of me? You scared of me? You scared?" What the fuck. (No, I wasn't scared of big black homeless guys in general until YOU loomed in my face for no reason, you drug-addled dick.)

And when you're a female walking in Austin, guys also seem to feel obligated to either honk or yell at you out of the windows of their cars. In the past couple of months I've gotten a couple of "Woooooooo"s, plus one "fuck you, bitch" -- have no idea what that latter meant; I haven't been back home long enough to offend. Oh yeah, and then there was the one shout-out from a white passenger car while I was doing my then-daily walk -- turned out to be my brother on his way to work! :) THAT one was funny. The rest are just stupid and tiresome.

It really is draining. Yes, I've been comparing the Austin, Texas, stupidity to being in Jersey/NYC: "Up there," if someone's sitting outside on their porch or stoop or curb or stair, you nod or ignore them if they're a stranger, or nod or say "Hey" if they're your neighbor and you're on your way up to your place. If you're at a bus or subway-stop, or on the bus or subway, you ignore the people around you and give them their space. When walking... there's no issue at all. Everyone walks everywhere in NYC and in the urban areas of Jersey; it's nothing unusual and the sight of a female on the sidewalk or at a bus-stop certainly doesn't create any utterly rube-like need to hoot and holler.

In NYC, women are protected by the mundane: Women out everywhere walking around are no great big deal. In Texas, a woman out by herself -- porch, bus-stop, sidewalk -- is somehow seen as "fair game," to be generally accosted by creeps and assholes.

I miss just being able to walk and/or sit around in public, saying "hey" on occasion and not getting hassled any further.

Frankie Say: Arm the Unemployed

I paraded around the Mean Streets of Austin circa 1985 wearing my Frankie shirt (accompanied by my neon-pink cardigan), not ever guessing that I'd one day actually be unemployed, or that I'd one day be too old and tired to even think about arming myself in protest.

The Evolution of Joan Crawford

Shane, from my Joan message board, posted this Joan homage on YouTube. I love it!

I can't believe it...

...I finally, actually have a busy schedule for the next month or so! You see, I've been invited on a whirlwind, all-expenses-paid tour of Europe. I have only a week to shop for clothes before we're off!

Um, yeah, if you believe THAT, you'll believe anything! :)

Actually, I really do suddenly have a busy schedule for the next few weeks. Work-, not Paris-, related, which is just fine with me! (Anything that doesn't involve lying on my bed and watching every single reality show known to mankind, and their re-runs, for 12 hours a day is just fine with me!)

After months of lethargy, just doing sporadic work for one company, I'm suddenly involved with freelance projects for, count 'em, FOUR different publishing companies! Not just taking tests for them, but actual assignments ASSIGNED to me, accompanied by web/phone meetings, deadlines, paychecks, etc.!

I've been so starved for work that I'm now grabbing up anything/everything that all four companies offer me. I think once I finish my first assignments for the new three, I'll have some idea of how much I actually can and cannot take on after that. But for now, through October: Bring it ALL on! I WANT to work 10-hour days. I WANT to go to bed actually tired at, say, midnight, instead of at 6am after hours of drinking beer and goofing around on the computer. (I also, needless to say, WANT new clothes, an iPOD, a SmartPhone, a love-seat, some rugs, some prints for my walls... oh, and a friggin' CAR! That's all!) :)

"Life is what happens to you...

...while you're busy making other plans." (John Lennon, 1980)

[Sigh.] It's hard to realize that you're not "special." I think I, up until the past couple of years, always based my own personal "special" (and "aware") feeling on a few odd things:

(1) When my dad took me to his office when I was 11, one of his co-workers told him that I was "the prettiest girl" he'd ever seen. (!!) Very great for my ego, and it's tided me over -- falsely -- to this day. But it's hard to admit that your looks peaked at age 11! :)

(2) Starting in about 4th grade, I started being very aware of the group dynamics between people, that things were far from rational. For instance, in 4th grade, our home-room teacher asked all of us if we'd prefer to be in school or out of school. All of us little sheep chose "in school" except for one scruffy kid, who said he'd rather be out of school. The teacher then grilled him excessively: What would he rather be doing? Riding horses. Oh, so did he have a horse? No, but he liked them. Oh, so if he didn't have a horse, then he'd STEAL a horse and ride it? No... Well, it sounds like you'd steal a horse...

Jesus. What was the fucking point of all of that?

(3) In 5th grade, we girls were in our "locker room" after PE, changing. The preacher's daughter, a popular girl named Cheryl, thought it would be funny to hold the locker-room door open while we all in turn ran in front of it, half-dressed. It was funny, until a teacher caught us. Or rather, the teacher caught an unpopular girl named Laura while she was flashing. The teacher demanded to know what was going on. No one spoke up. Laura got busted. Not Cheryl. Cheryl wouldn't "man up" and admit it was all her idea, so someone else took the fall for her. And nobody, including myself, said anything.

(4) When I was in 6th grade, I moved from one Texas small town to another in early Fall. When we got to the new town, all of my clothes hadn't been shipped yet, so I had to wear the same 3 dresses for 2 weeks. My home-room teacher treated me like I was a piece of shit based on my crappy wardrobe. On one occasion, at the end of the school-day, parents were pulling up in front of the school, which we could see from our window. We would all stand up to see if our parents were there yet. But I was the one who got yelled at.

My status quickly changed with this teacher for two reasons: One, I scored very high on the 6th-grade aptitude test that was being given. Nothing to do with her, but it made her look good and she liked that. Two, I won the school spelling bee. Again, nothing to do with her, but it made her look good and she liked that.

After that, she was sweet as could be to me, to the extreme point of letting me make seating charts for the class. I wallowed in my newfound approval, but the earlier memories of her shallow disgust and hatefulness over my "3 dresses" stayed with me.

---------

The idea of not being able to trust anyone or anything was set at a very early age. Some people feed off of societal recognition, vowing to do what's acceptable in order to at least not be shunned...I did this when I was a kid. It was drilled into my head that if I preferred riding horses to being in school, if I didn't have a sufficiently varied wardrobe, if I ran unclothed in front of open doors, then I was going to be publicly derided by authority figures. I accepted this when I was 9, 10, and 11.

Around 15 or so, though, came the break: I still lived in a small town in Texas, ruled by religious fervor. Everyone was being "saved." I was in love with a religious friend, and myself got "saved" at her fundamentalist Baptist church. I took it seriously and started reading the Bible seriously... only to discover that the Bible had multitudes of discrepancies: If we all came from Adam and Eve, then where did the cave people fit in? What about the dinosaurs? And women are to be subservient to men??? Like hell to all of it. Like my 4th-grade teacher, the Bible was bullshit.

I see Age 15 as the year of my Awakening and Recognition. Previously, I'd only wondered and worried about what I'd been aware of when I was little. When I was 15, though, the bullshit kind of solidified into an obvious pattern of corruption that I've been aware of and guarding against to this day. Not always successfully.

Re-make of "Mildred Pierce"

Looks like it might be more true to the original book! (Heresy coming from a Joan fan!)

Jersey Shore: The American Dream

I admit it: I "Like" DJ Pauly D of "The Jersey Shore" on my Facebook page. On his recent happy Facebook update about the show's cast members' group appearance on last Sunday's VMA Awards, I responded (one of a couple of thousand responses) something like: "Congratulations! You guys are really living the American Dream!"

And I meant it. The cast all came out of nowhere and are now highly in demand based on their interesting, funny personalities. They're not hurting anyone. Good for them if they can make some money from the media attention.

The show's been derided for its "decadence," for displaying little but casual hook-ups and drinking and generally loutish behavior, for giving a "bad name" to Jersey residents. Those are all mild points (except the latter-- only one of the cast members is actually FROM Jersey). It's true that you don't see the cast members reading and/or discussing world affairs. But as Vinny said during a cast appearance on "Ellen" this week when asked about being "bad" for America [paraphrasing]: "We're bad for America? What about the wars and the economy and equal rights? I don't think we're the problem."

Exactly, Vinny. What's wrong with America is not a bunch of kids getting drunk and hooking up and putting their touchingly open, undeveloped personalities on display for the world to see and getting paid for it. Good for them if we all want to watch, and the networks want to pay them to let us watch.

Entertainers, and athletes, and even Internet entrepreneurs like Gates... I've never, ever begrudged them their money. They've never exploited anyone.

The Gyro Police

The Austin Gyro Police are still at it after all these years. And I will no longer be intimidated, thank you NYC and NJ!

I wrote about this a year or more ago on this blog: How relieved I was to find that in NYC and Jersey, the Greek sandwich "gyro" was pronounced JIE-ro. How "scarred" I'd been 20 years ago in Austin when I asked for a "JIE-ro" and the pretentious bitch behind me in line mock-whispered to her boyfriend, "She doesn't know how to pronounce HYEE-ro!" (Funnily, up north when I -- frightened by Austin PC -- tried to order it as a HYEE-ro, the Greeks behind the counter thought I wanted a hero sandwich! When I spelled the word, they said, "Oh, a JIE-ro!" I felt I was home at last!) :)

Today I was around campus for a haircut and stopped off at a nearby Greek place on the way home. A very white, non-Greek young lady was behind the counter. As I looked at the menu, I asked how much for a single JIE-ro, not a plate... She very pointedly answered, "A HYEE-ro is $6.99..." OK. She thought she was schoolin' me! I kept quiet for a second while I continued to look at the menu. Noticing that their gyros listed were made of PORK or CHICKEN!

So I asked, "Do you have any lamb JIE-ros?"
"We do have lamb HYEE-ros, but they're more, $9.99."
Then I had to burst out with, "I'm from New York, and the Greeks there pronounce it JIE-ROS, so I've gotta say it that way! Thanks." [b'bye -- I left, not in a huff over the word, but because I didn't want to pay $9.99 for a single sandwich that I used to pay $4.99 for in NY.]

OK, so I lied about where I was from. But it felt so good to lie, just to let the snooty girl know that, yes, I'm aware of the HYEE-ro pronunciation, but REAL GREEKS serving the food in NYC don't feel the need to be pretentious as shit!

HYEE-ro is sooooooooooo Austin. I'm soooooooooooo over that kind of thing. I wanna be in the land of $4.99 lamb JIE-ros again!

Birthday Letters

I think the last time anyone other than my mother remembered my birthday was in 1994.

Here's a big FUCK YOU to the people I've given love and time and energy to who didn't, couldn't, wouldn't reciprocate. To those who forgot my birthday, lost my number, not just once but numerous times. I feel nauseated by the beautiful and powerful love energy that I've wasted on you all over the years. Your neglect and carelessness in return is indicative of your own inability to recognize and cherish something real, something of value.

"Love Wins" read one bumpersticker slapped on the dash of one car I rode in. Yeah, and "Visualize Whirled Peas," you shallow, shallow fool.

We'll see how this plan works...

It probably won't. Money.

But nonetheless... I am HOMESICK, yes homesick, for New York (despite my having lived in Texas all of my life, aside from 2 years in grad school in San Fran). The 9th anniversary of 9/11 is this Saturday, and there have been many images of NYC shown on TV this week (along with the constant shots that I see routinely on various shows and ads). I just get pangs every time I see it. Especially with fall coming on... I miss the subway. I miss the scarf and hat sellers. I miss walking to the local delis for a salad. I miss Times Square. I miss Union Square. I miss sitting in Central Park outside of Joan Crawford and John Lennon's apartments. I miss the Chelsea Cinema. I miss walking on the Brooklyn Bridge. I miss standing at the southern tip of the island getting wind-whipped and looking out at the Statue of Liberty in the harbor. I miss the beautiful buildings, and being utterly steeped in centuries of history. I miss stepping out of my house on a Saturday and just walking around the city, seeing stuff and eating street-vendor food. I miss the fall and winter there. I miss the elm trees. I miss how the place smells. I miss the accents of the locals. I miss the variety of people. (Austin's pretty white, and I don't feel a kinship with either hippies or hipsters.)

And I miss Weehawken, too. The cute, turn-of-the-century neighborhood. That 5-minute walk to the Hudson, standing and looking over at the Manhattan skyline. My supermarket and drug store and deli and beer store all within a few-minute walk. I even miss walking inland to Union City and being one of the few Anglo faces amid all the Dominicans and Central Americans on the main shopping street, Bergenline, and checking out all the cheesy, crowded little dollar stores lining the street, walking home with bargain dish liquid and candles and socks and my slice-n-salad from my pizza place.

I really, REALLY shouldn't have left. I should have registered with 20 temp agencies instead of 4. I should have gotten a roommate to split the bills. Sigh.

Here's my plan. Well, not a "plan," really, since it relies on money that I do not currently have. Maybe I'll call it "a seedling of an idea," or "a ray of hope": My Austin lease runs out March 31 (in 6-and-a-half months). I've been doing long-distance freelance work for much of the summer, which is continuing. (Ironically, for the Jersey publisher that I worked for in-house when I lived there.) There are also two other publishing companies that I've taken proofing tests for and that have freelance projects about to start that they'd said they'd like me to work on. That's three places with at least some work for the next few months. Between the three, and with my low rent of $545, maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to save a bit of money up by March to move... "A bit" -- ha! I figure I'll need about $5000!

I was paying $1550 per month in rent in Weehawken (cheaper than NYC, but still!). However, I got into that lease in early 2008, months before the economy and rental markets crashed. And it was a big (2-bedroom) place, twice the size of what I really needed. I can get a one-room place in Weehawken or Union City or West New York like I have here now in Austin for about $850 per month. So that's about $2500 I'll need for first/last/deposit. And $500 for plane ticket/shipping of books-n-stuff. And $2000 to sustain me while I get re-settled there and re-register with my old temp agencies (plus 16 more!)... And, god willing, I'll still have the freelance income coming in. The work from those 3 publishing companies is the key, of course...

I don't mean to dis Austin with all of this. It really is a pleasant town, where I lived from 1983 to 2007. (Since I told people like my Jersey editors and author Donald Spoto that I've moved back, many have shared how much they like the town, have enjoyed either working or visiting...) It's just not ME. Like I said above, I don't feel a kinship with either hippies or hipsters. And it's a college town -- liberal and gay-friendly, yes, but also frat-boy-laden 9 months out of the year. It's just not diverse and exciting enough for me. There's nothing particularly beautiful to look at. I don't step out of my front door and get a THRILL, a sense of "what's going to happen next? what will I see next?", like I did in both New York AND Weehawken (where Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton dueled!).

Just writing all this out has made me feel better, less trapped... That $5000 may be a pipe dream, but it's not COMPLETELY impossible. Like I said, just a little ray of hope, something to think about and hope for. I was a complete idiot for moving back, but... at least doing so helped me to discover what I REALLY wanted. I honestly didn't think that I'd miss being up north like I do. I was sick of the constant job-hunting and not having enough money, just wanted to come home and be in a familiar, "safe" place again... I've learned that NYC and Weehawken were actually a lot more "familiar" to my psyche than Austin is.

Stimulation

I love Rob Brezny's horoscopes! The below is sooooooooooo true of my personal life for, oh, the past 10 years!! Like he says, I have seriously GOT to "retrain myself"! Hopefully his reading of the omens for Leo is accurate. I'm bored to death being by myself all the time! When I was in New York, I didn't really care that I was single; I was in NEW YORK, which, seriously, was girlfriend enough. But now that my outer environment is no longer so stimulating, I definitely need some other, er... stimulation, both mental and physical.


Leo Horoscope for week of September 9, 2010

For years I've been in love with a woman who is also in love with me. Hooray! But when I was younger, I sometimes got embroiled in obsessive adorations for unavailable women. One didn't want me, another was already in a committed relationship, still another lived 6,000 miles away, and a fourth was a lesbian. The pain of those impossible attractions eventually prodded me to retrain myself so as to not keep repeating the pattern. Can I convince you to learn from my hardship? According to my reading of the omens, the next few months should be a time when you put a strong emphasis on allies who are available, not on the other kind.

Mansard Roof by Vampire Weekend

The band's official video for this song is them floating around the Isle of Manhattan. I liked this fan-made video much better. (How cute is it to have a song called "Mansard Roof"??) :)

Chester French - She Loves Everybody

RIVER OAKS ANTHEM: Rodney Crowell - Sex and Gasoline

[THE RIVER OAKS ANTHEM]

So much beauty abs & tush
Swoop down on you like a burnin bush
Pop religion bullwhip thin
Says you ain't nothing but the shape you're in
Come on now girl genuflect nude magazine
This mean old world runs on sex and gasoline

19 candles adorn your cake
Life's simple pleasures is a chance you take
So here's the skinny, indulge the urge
Then sometime later you can binge & purge
Come on little girl, we both know what I mean
This mean old world runs on sex and gasoline

You're pushing thirty why you old hag
Here's something dirty for your shopping bag
You spend the money and here's the deal
we'll do our best to mend your sex appeal
Ah come on dear girl the process is routine
This mean old world runs on sex and gasoline

You're over forty that's it for you
i'm pretty sure there's nothing else that we can do
Perhaps the convent, perhaps the knife
You woulda coulda shoulda been a rich man's wife
Come on old girl, Lolita in her prime was yet thirteen
This star-crossed world runs on sex and gasoline

Tired ole story sad but true
We mama's boys have got it in for you
Our faults are many our virtues nil
We never loved you and we never will
Ah come on now girl, it's time we both come clean
This mean old world runs on sex and gasoline
From the first grade princess to the last homecoming queen
The star-crossed world runs on sex and gasoline
The whole wide world runs on sex and gasoline
Oh yes and your mama's world ran on sex and gasoline

In the "HA!" Department

From astrocenter.com:

Your [Leo] horoscope for September 5, 2010

If you've been thinking about doing some writing, perhaps for film or television, STEPHANIE, today should be a good day to get started. You may find that your creative juices are flowing freely, and your imagination is operating at a very high level. You might decide to work with a partner, and this may be a good idea. Sometimes the blend of two minds produces a work far greater than either could separately. Dig in, and go for it!

Eric Faulkner's Bay City Rollers 2009

Below: My 1970s Bay City Rollers Boyfriend Eric Faulkner (pictured above), in 2009. It all turns out a little more haggard, and sloppy, in the end, doesn't it? :P

Bay City Rollers - Give a little love

The Love Bug, by George Jones

Check out, especially, the audience and the band solos.

George Jones - Still Doin' Time

Ashes

I sometimes take my cat Gracie's box of ashes to bed with me and talk to her whenever I feel especially sad and lonesome. Last night I did. Here's a poem I wrote in May 2009, a month after she died:

(RE)BOUND

I'd imagined me trapped
in your game-world forever.
My real-life cat
dragging herself from corner to
corner, while your glass-enclosed "No"
echoed over phone and 'Net,
pinballing off my walls.

I could not flip it back.
Still it wracked up its score, bouncing
off both wacky bells and my girl's
silent writhing.

Now through my screen
the smells of the sun and grass and asphalt
rise to a new season. It's May.

On my wall
the light and leaves shy lashes
butterfly kisses
leaving, alighting again
flirting with my cat's ashes.

In her place I soak up the shimmering sun.
I stroke my hair and arch my back
and let my eyes go green.
In shadows glancing off you, and me, and
everything.

--SJ, May 2009

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

And while reading the above poem from a May 2009 blog entry, I came across another entry from that same month. Rilke really helped me then. I must read, read, and read again, and allow his spirit to enter me again. I have got to transform all of this darkness into something. He shows how it's possible.


"Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said..."

-- Rilke, from "Lament"


"That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter...And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."

-- Rilke, from "Letters to a Young Poet"

But how?

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

--E.M. Forster, Howards End

"The Stray"

"The Stray," by Margaret Keane. On display in Joan Crawford's Imperial House apartment.

Batwatchers, Austin

Photo by Jordan Conard.

Julie London - 'Round Midnight

That Face!

The one in the middle, not Walter Huston's! :)

Cat Power - Lived In Bars

we've lived in bars
and danced on the tables
hotels trains and ships that sail
we swim with sharks
and fly with aeroplanes in the air

send in the trumpets
the marching wheelchairs
open the blankets and give them some air
swords and arches bones and cement
the lights and the dark of the innocent of men

we know your house so very well
and we will wake you once we've walked up
all your stairs

there's nothing like living in a bottle
and nothing like ending it all for the world
we're so glad you will come back
every living lion will lay in your lap
the kid has a homecoming the champion the horse
who's gonna play drums guitar or organ with chorus
as far as we've walked from both of ends of the sand
never have we caught a glimpse of this man

we know your house so very well
and we will bust down your door if you're not there

we've lived in bars
and danced on tables
hotels trains and ships that sail
we swim with sharks
and fly with aeroplanes out of here
out of here

Corduroy skirts are a sin.

"Revelations" -- Yoko Ono song lyrics

Bless you for your anger,
It's a sign of rising energy.
(transform the energy to versatility and it will bring you prosperity)

Bless you for your sorrow,
It's a sign of vulnerability.
(transform the energy to sympathy and it will bring you love)

Bless you for your greed,
It's a sign of great capacity.
(transform the energy to giving, give as much as you wish to take and you will receive satisfaction)

Bless you for your jealousy,
It's a sign of empathy.
(transform the energy to admiration and what you admire will become part of your life)

Bless you for your fear,
It's a sign of wisdom.
(transform the energy to flexibility and you will be free from what you fear)

Bless you for your search of direction.
(transform the energy to receptivity and the direction will come to you)

Bless you for the times you see evil.
(evil feeds on your support, feed not and it will self-destruct, shed light and it will cease to be)

Bless you for the times you feel no love.
(open your heart to life anyway, in time you will find love in you)

You are a sea of goodness,
You are a sea of love.
Bless you, bless you, bless you,
Bless you for what you are.

Count your blessings every day for they are your protection
Which stands between you and what you wish not.

Count your curses and there will be a wall
Which stands between you and what you wish.

The world has all that you need
You have the power to attract what you wish.
Wish for health, wish for joy,
Remember, you are loved.
I love you.

Mike Stinson - "No One to Drink With"

Me and Austin.

Heartbreak warfare / All we ever do is say goodbye

I've disliked John Mayer ever since I heard him, back in the early 2000s, on an Austin radio station saying condescendingly in an interview how he liked Austin because it wasn't like the rest of Texas. (Fuck you! May be true, but YOU'RE not allowed to say it, you ignorant-of-all-areas-outside-of-NY-and-LA jerk!) In subsequent years came his obnoxious high-profile dating (and kissing-and-telling), and his "Benetton heart/David Duke dick" comment -- the latter particularly annoying because he later cried onstage about saying both that AND the word "nigger" (the latter in reference to his alleged "street cred," not to women he liked to sleep with). Please. We all have our types. Who cares if you're not attracted to black women? And no one, no one -- gangstas especially -- thinks John Mayer has ANY "street cred."

In short, the guy's public persona and pronouncements were obnoxious and pretentious.

A couple of nights ago, though, I was watching re-runs of "The Hills" and "All We Ever Do Is Say Goodbye" came on in the background. I had no idea who it was, but it sounded, in its emotional honesty, like something John Lennon might have written, and I actually teared up... Just looked it up tonight on YouTube, found out it was Mayer.

Around the same night, I came across Mayer's "Heartbreak Warfare" video for the first time on VH1:

I don't care if we don't sleep at all tonight
Let's just fix this whole thing now
I swear to God we're gonna get it right
If you lay your weapon down
Red wine and ambien
You're talking *shit* again, it's heartbreak warfare
Good to know it's all a game
Disappointment has a name, it's heartbreak, heartbreak.

While I initially wanted to turn the channel because it was HIM, I couldn't help listening to the music and lyrics and staying glued to the TV for the duration of the song, wanting to know how he was going to work it out in the song...

Both songs are gorgeous and make my heart hurt. He gave the murkiness of what I've been feeling a name. I can't dislike him any more.



Lightning strikes
Inside my chest to keep me up at night
Dream of ways
To make you understand my pain

Clouds of sulfur in the air
Bombs are falling everywhere
It's heartbreak warfare
Once you want it to begin,
No one really ever wins
In heartbreak warfare

If you want more love,
why don't you say so?
If you want more love,
why don't you say so?

Drop his name
Push it in and twist the knife again
Watch my face
As I pretend to feel no pain

Clouds of sulfur in the air
Bombs are falling everywhere
It's heartbreak warfare
Once you want it to begin,
No one really ever wins
In heartbreak warfare.

If you want more love,
why don't you say so?
If you want more love,
why don't you say so?

Just say so...

How come the only way to know how high you get me
is to see how far I fall
God only knows how much I'd love you if you let me
but I can't break through at all.

It's a heartbreak...

I don't care if we don't sleep at all tonight
Let's just fix this whole thing now
I swear to God we're gonna get it right
If you lay your weapon down
Red wine and ambien
You're talking *shit* again, it's heartbreak warfare
Good to know it's all a game
Disappointment has a name, it's heartbreak, heartbreak.

It's heartbreak warfare.
It's heartbreak warfare.
It's heartbreak warfare.

-----------------------------------------------------



Just when I had you off my head
Your voice comes thrashing wildly through my quiet bed
You say you wanna try again
But I've tried everything but giving in

Why you wanna break my heart again
Why am I gonna let you try

When all we ever do is say goodbye
All we ever do is say goodbye
All we ever do is say goodbye
All we ever do is say goodbye

I bought a ticket on a plane
And by the time it landed you had gone again

I love you more than songs can say
But I can't keep running after yesterday
-------------------------------------------------------

"This hair ain't moving, my dude."

"My boss seems to think that my hair is going to fall off and go into the ice cream. This hair ain't moving, my dude. 150 miles per hour on the highway on a street bike, it doesn’t move. What makes you think it’s going to move in a gelato shop?"



I first discovered hair like this back in 2008 when I lived in Joisey, worn by a kid working at my local pizza joint. I was fascinated by its simultaneous hideousness and fastidiousness. Jersey's answer to the Mullet!

Opinions Without Agendas/ No Mercy

My brother told me yesterday at dinner how my 5-year-old nephew had recently watched the Tom Hanks movie "Cast Away" all the way through and actually paid attention to it, and felt sad when Hanks lost his only friend "Wilson." I was amazed that a 5-year-old kid had that kind of attention span for a serious movie, and that he was moved by it. (For those who haven't seen the desolate film, Hanks gets stranded on a desert island; a Wilson VOLLEYBALL washes up on the island with him; he draws a face on the ball, and "Wilson" becomes his only companion.)

On the way home from dinner, I was sitting in the back of my brother's car with the boys; there was a SOCCER ball on the floor, so, trying to be cute and make what I thought was appropriate conversation with a 5-year-old, I said cheerily to the ball: "Hi, Wilson!"

My nephew looked at me like I was an idiot: "That's not a volleyball, that's a soccer ball." Doh! :)

My mom also told me a story recently about the same kiddo: She, "Oma" to her two grandkids, had walked with the boys to a nearby playground. On the way home, she pointed out, in third-person adult-speak: "There's Oma's house." The 5-year-old looked at her and said, "But... YOU'RE Oma!" (As if to say: "I fully understand the concept of "my" as a possessive -- HULLO!)

So much for dumbing down your conversation when speaking to kids! As a further reminder: Last night, the 8-year-old nephew (the one interested in Joan's movie exploits) was grilling me on where I got my lighters (and why I'd been getting them for free from the store near my house and how many I had by now) and why I didn't move my CD-case from one wall to the other, where he thought it would look better, plus why I was finding it so hard to get a job... RE the latter: He was honestly curious about why I couldn't find a job, not getting in a dig (what a relief THAT was -- just to TALK about it and not defend myself about it...)

His curiosity about random stuff was/is so interesting to me! Both of the nephews -- they're not just "dumb sponges"! They're actually LISTENING to what's being said and offering up their opinions, and engaging, without trying to please and/or trying to be nasty... It's really fascinating and exhilarating to me, being around this stage of little humans: OPINIONS without AGENDAS. I miss being that way.

p.s. As an addendum: I've been bitching about my parents recently. But one thing I'll grant them is that, for the most part, they weren't/aren't phony in their adult lives. I wasn't taught any "social graces" by them, because they didn't think them important (it still cracks me up that my dad was named "Friendliest" in his high-school yearbook). It's messed me up greatly, sure, when it comes to my personal relations. I absolutely don't trust people because of how my parents acted toward me, and how they presented the world to me. But, still, the one quality I do value about each of them, a quality I possess, is their intelligence and ingrained bullshit detector (the latter many times greatly irrational and off-base). Just wish I'd been taught to temper that harshness and sense of judgment with an accompanying sense of love and kindness and mercy (on occasion, Sandra was like what I heard heroin was like -- a wash of mercy...I couldn't believe how utterly deep and sweet, I couldn't believe how much I needed how she was...)

For me, everything filters first through the distrust, almost everything always gets caught there... It's a hard way to live.

Dinner With Joan

Just got back from my birthday dinner with my ma, bro, sis-in-law, 8- and 5-year-old nephews.

We ate at my favorite BBQ place in Austin, which is decorated in retro style (aside from old hub-caps and license plates, also lots of old movie posters, magazine covers, etc.)

At our booth, the wall was filled with a mix of vintage magazine covers and sheet music, everyone from Clark Gable to Judy Garland to Perry Como... I immediately started looking for anything with my gal Joan Crawford, with my adult family members meanly teasing me: "Aw, she's not up there. No one likes her." Sadly, I indeed couldn't see her face anywhere... But I kept insisting: "I KNOW she has to be up there SOMEWHERE!" "She's not up there! Give it up!"

As dinner went on, I kept peeking at the wall out of the corner of my eye... Surely... And then, lo and behold, at the very top of the wall, I caught the words "Hollywood Canteen"! I can't remember now which song it was, but there indeed was a piece of sheet music from the movie, with Joan's face in one of the circles featuring the stars! I actually YELLED "A-ha! THERE she is!", startling everyone! :) Vindication!

Later, we all started talking about the time at my old job where people challenged me to find a photo of Joan in a movie scenario (baking a pie, fly-fishing, etc.) -- if I could find it, the co-worker had to put that picture up as their screen-saver!

This for some reason fascinated my 8-year-old nephew, so he started coming up with scenarios: "Joan Crawford rescuing a kitten in a tree!" ("Um, no, don't think she did that...") One that cracked me up: "Joan Crawford breaking a glass!" ("Um, yes, THAT one happened all the time!") :)

Then my sister-in-law had to be a smartie: "Joan Crawford drinking and exhibiting extreme sexual neurosis!" Har-har!

(p.s. Bitch as I might about Texas, it's got THE best food in the world: Brisket, chicken-fried steak, Tex-Mex fajitas and tacos. My mind, heart, and soul might be in New York, but my stomach is definitely right here!) :)

The OTTOE

OK, right after I moved into my new apartment in late June, I, with my long summer toe-nails and flip-flops, stubbed the big toe on my right foot, jamming the toe-nail... TWICE within one evening. By the next day, the nail had turned a dark purple. I thought it would fix itself within a week, but no. As of August, two months later, now the sides of the nail are separating from the skin and most of the nail is still dark purple.

At first, I was just pissed off that I couldn't go and get my nails done for the summer. (How retarded is it to have 9 red nails and one big ol' PURPLE NAIL? That's NOT a summery and sexy look.)

Now, though, it's just plain freaking me out! Why? Well, for one thing, I know everything about Sylvia Plath, and I know that her dickwad father, Otto, DIED -- DIED -- after gangrene set in after he STUBBED HIS BIG TOE! I really, really, REALLY DON'T want this sort of irony in my life and/or death.

After checking out the "toe-nail issue" online, found the below:

http://walking.about.com/od/blisterfoot/a/blacktoenail.htm

"...If the toe continues to be swollen and red after you have drained the excess fluid, see a doctor to ensure it has not become infected. Take infection seriously, if it continues to hurt or the pain increases, this is a bad sign. Toe infections can lead to blood infections, gangrene, and worse, especially if you have diabetes..."

That's not fucking helpful! Oh my god. What if I die like Otto Plath?? (That's just embarrassing, like going out a la Michael Lohan or Jon Voigt...)

-------------------------

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time ---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal...

Oh my god. I really, really fucked up.

Monetarily poor as I was in Weehawken, New Jersey, the below is what I saw when I looked around. It's EXACTLY my landscape, internal mirroring external. I was HAPPY being, and looking, here. It wasn't even New York City, just across the Hudson, but I was happy every time I looked out my window, stepped outside of my door, made a 5-minute walk to the grocery store, hopped a gypsy bus for the 15-minute ride into the City.

I think I just made the worst mistake of my life coming back to Austin.

I want my Weehawken apartment back. I want my elm trees back. I want my fall leaves back. I want my snow back. I want my beautiful, beautiful towns -- Weehawken and New York City -- back. I never fully understood the power of either nature's or architecture's physical and psychological presence until I lived amid such beauty.

What in the godforsaken fuck did I just do?

And how to get back there?

If you don't know me by now

2 Ways of Leaving

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
By Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.



LEGENDARY LEAVING
by SS

No warning, no farewell
Simply leaving
Without a word
No notice or words
She’s gone
Out the door
It’s easier that way
No embraces or words of love
Just get up and go
See if they notice
Your way of saying don’t like saying good bye
Another way of saying how much you care
And not wanting them to know
Saying good bye
Brings back the sound of train’s whistle in the night
Dog's barking in the night
Ice tinkling in a glass carried in the night
Voices crying out for help in the night

Another way of leaving, quietly
Like a legend never told

Bussin' it!

After about 10 weeks (!) I finally got off my ass last week and made an appointment with my hairdresser for today. (What was I waiting for? I always feel like shit when my hair gets raggedy, which it does after 5 or 6 weeks. I guess since I was moping around for the past month anyway, thought I'd just add my crappy hair to my list of woes!)

I must say that usually Haircut Day is a good day. For one thing, you get to drive home tossing your hair and feeling cute, and then get to spend the rest of the day and evening feeling cute whenever you look in the mirror at home. UNLESS, THAT IS, YOU HAD TO WAIT FOR 55 MINUTES IN 101-DEGREE HEAT TO CATCH A DANG BUS AFTER THE HAIRCUT AND BY THE TIME YOU GOT HOME YOUR HAIR WAS A SOPPING WET MESS, THUS RENDERING INEFFECTUAL THE JOY OF HAIRCUT DAY!!!

[Serenity Now!] I must say, though, that my bus trip TO the salon was a pleasant one. I actually checked the schedule ahead of time, arrived at the stop 10 minutes early; the bus was exactly on time, and I got to the salon in 15 minutes. Delightful! But I was just BORED with the idea of checking the schedule for when the bus would be returning home. It runs, allegedly, every 30 minutes, so I thought I'd just gamble post-salon; prolly it would come after 10 or 15... HAIL NO.

And the stop where I was waiting was absolutely shadeless. Wait, I take that back. The shadow cast by the sign-post on the corner was about 6 inches wide. And I actually angled myself sideways so that I was partially covered! So full of ingenuity!

And yet still so completely sweaty after the 55-minute wait. I did enjoy the bus driver's conversation, though. (Still not sure who she was talking to exactly; there was no one up front near her...) I learned that she'd once gotten cussed out by a passenger -- IN WRITING! (Apparently by one of the deaf/dumb/blind/crippled and/or State Hospital folk who seem to be the primary bus patrons in this town.) And that one time a woman in a wheelchair was afraid the driver wouldn't stop before the woman made it to the bus-stop...so she wheeled on out into the street IN FRONT OF THE BUS and toodled along in the street at 2-miles-per-hour, just to ensure that the bus wouldn't pass her by...

It's The Bus Life, Baby! ;p

Joel Osteen says...

... connect with people who understand your destiny.

Joan / Flashdance

Anne Carson's "Nox": No Voice

I've never read Anne Carson, but after this article in the New Yorker about her latest work, "Nox," I want to.

"Nox" (Latin for "night" and also the Roman goddess of night, "the mother of sleep, fate, and death") is what Carson calls an "epitaph" for her dead brother, whom she'd barely spoken to in the over-20 years since he'd left home.

Interesting to me, first of all, is the format of the book: "The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box... Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook [that Carson had begun to keep about her brother after his death in 2000], which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson...A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one, and traces of that scrapbook's physicality -- bits of handwriting, stamps, stains -- add testimonial force: this person existed."

The theme of loss itself is also very powerful for me. It's, sadly, played such a huge role in my life, been more of a presence than any actual presence. Reading this article about Carson's book made me feel relieved: someone else knows what it's like to live with lack.

"Catullus...wants to memorialize the dead, but [Carson] also wonders why she does -- why we feel the need, as Catullus says, to speak to silent ashes, to assemble trivial remnants of a lost presence."

"'The poet is someone who feasts at the same table as other people. But at a certain point he feels a lack,' Carson has written. 'He is provoked by a perception of absence within what others regard as a full and satisfactory present.' In 'Decreation,' she asks, 'When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty."

"[Carson writes in her first book of]...the Greek notion...of Eros as a form of 'lack' that offers both pleasure and pain. The geometry of desire, which we usually take to be a two-way street (I love you; you love me), is actually a triangular circuitry of lover, beloved, and that which comes between them. 'The lover wants what he does not have...All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies...Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this."

"As Iris Murdoch once wrote, 'The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.' Because the dead person is absent and voiceless (the word nox both rhymes with the Latin word vox, or voice, and contains the English word 'no'), the bereaved is always experiencing the lost through other things: books, ideas, language, memory. A sense of this is what Carson's memory book provides; its process of assemblage dramatizes the way the mind in mourning flits from pain at the specific loss to metaphysical questioning about what, exactly, constitutes a mortal life."

"...the mourner's secret position: I have to say this person is dead, but I don't have to believe it."

---------------------------------------------

The above is important for me, but also even moreso for Sandra and her love for Jim. Both an acknowledgment of her feelings for him and their historical context, and an idea of how she can pay homage to him and her feelings. (I would have sent her the Carson book directly, and e-mailed her directly about it... except that she's recently cut me off! Oh, the irony!) :)

Adrienne Rich (not Plath or Sexton)

I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly and not to use her
I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence.

1.

My body opens over San Francisco like the day –
light raining down each pore crying the change of light
I am not with her I have been waking off and on
all night to that pain not simply absence but
the presence of the past destructive
to living here and now Yet if I could instruct
myself, if we could learn to learn from pain
even as it grasps us if the mind, the mind that lives
in this body could refuse to let itself be crushed
in that grasp it would loosen Pain would have to stand
off from me and listen its dark breath still on me
but the mind could begin to speak to pain
and pain would have to answer:
We are older now
we have met before these are my hands before your eyes
my figure blotting out all that is not mine
I am the pain of division creator of divisions
it is I who blot your lover from you
and not the time-zones or the miles
It is not separation calls me forth but I
who am separation And remember
I have no existence apart from you


2.

I believe I am choosing something now
not to suffer uselessly yet still to feel
Does the infant memorize the body of the mother
and create her in absence? or simply cry
primordial loneliness? does the bed of the stream
once diverted mourning remember the wetness?
But we, we live so much in these
configurations of the past I choose
to separate her from my past we have not shared
I choose not to suffer uselessly
to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me
flashing its bleak torch in my eyes blotting out
her particular being the details of her love
I will not be divided from her or from myself
by myths of separation
while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me
than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burning on these hills

3.

The world tells me I am its creature
I am raked by eyes brushed by hands
I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head
in the space between her breast and shoulder
abnegating power for love
as women have done or hiding
from power in her love like a man
I refuse these givens the splitting
between love and action I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly and not to use her
I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence.

Precious

The precious jokester says "go home"
The nagging scourge: "come back, come back"
Of course, of course, which horse you'd ride
To where, how far, what end, what lack...

It's the Dad Life

How cute and clever is this!

My favorite lines:

"Gas station glasses, don't care what the masses think about me and my sweet goatee..."

"Hydrangeas, begonias, crepe myrtles, ornamental turtles!"

"Yo, the greens got nothing on my manscape!"

"My whole entourage hops out the mini-van..."

"I got dozens of dollaz..."