1970s Good Times

"Faces look ugly when you're alone"

If only potential rapists/serial killers/mass murderers could be a little philosophical like this, they wouldn't get quite so... upset. "Women seem wicked when you're unwanted" -- Get it? It's a fleeting "thing" that EVERYONE feels at some point when they're not being paid attention to. Your "righteous anger" is only based on your own current feelings of emptiness. When you let such ephemeral feeling solidify into some sort of code, that's when you've crossed over into CRAZY. There ain't no "code." Everything is constantly fluid and ephemeral.

I've never surfed in my life, but I imagine that what we're all going through is like riding waves -- the utter vastness of what we're confronting, then within this vastness, our internal creations/projections of sporadic little victories of catching a wave and sporadic little disappointments of getting wiped out. None of it matters to the sea, yet we're all completely dependent on the sea as Antagonist, as a source for our stimulation. THE SEA DON'T CARE, PEOPLE. Just ride whatever fuckin' wave without taking any of it personally.

Life, Briefly

While watching a "Twilight Zone" marathon on January 1 of this year, I saw this "After Hours" episode from 1960. I've been thinking about it sporadically for the past 7 months and recently realized... It's exactly what each individual existence is about! We briefly emerge from the dumbness of the ether and get to experience colorful, organic life... when we sense (aka "get broad hints") that it's time to go back into the ether, we're extremely (understandably) reluctant to do so. Yet those of us who ain't willing to be tortured ghosts DO ultimately return to The Void, accepting the natural scheme of things, fairly giving others their turn.

Warrior at Rest, Briefly

Tempest in a B-Cup

http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2014-08-01/anatomy-of-an-understanding/

This on the cover of Austin's weekly paper this week. Pre-op tranny Kylie Jack was denied an intimate measuring at an Austin lingerie store because of her penis. I'm taking the sales-clerk's side on this one. Below is the online letter that I just wrote to the Chronicle:



What a tempest in a B-cup.

First, kudos to Petticoat Fair owner Kirk Andrews for going above and beyond good customer service in his extremely kind and sensitive response to Kylie Jack. (I was disgusted to read that his good intentions were dismissed by some because he used the term "transgendered" rather than "transgender." Can't stand this type of Orwellian language-police.)

Second, I question Kylie Jack's handling of the situation to begin with. In all of my years of clothing/lingerie shopping, I've come across a few sales-clerks that I considered rude. In almost every such case, I've simply asked to speak to the store manager on duty, voiced my complaint to him/her directly, and was uniformly immediately issued an apology and an assurance that the clerk would be talked to. Did Jack follow this common-sense route? Nah. Instead, rather than handling the situation one-on-one, she took the coward's way out and went on an Internet vendetta that led to the store and its owners "receiving threats of continued harassment and, in some cases, implied violence." (Who was the bully and who the bullied here?)

Third, as the article made absolutely clear, EVERY member of the female sales staff at Petticoat Fair had at one time or another been subjected to "men with nefarious intentions" (aka "creepers," aka men coming in to the store dressed as women and trying to get off on having the female clerks intimately measure them). Given this fact, why is a female clerk's being wary of someone with a penis asking to be intimately measured in a close space considered questionable? Her reaction seems perfectly logical to me.

Lastly, there's the ignorant comment of Lisa Scheps of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, who hosted a "Trans 101" "sensitivity training" course for the staff of Petticoat Fair. When owner Andrews tried to explain the store's reality of "creepers" to her, Scheps replied, "Yeah, how many times does that really happen? When an impostor tries to come in here?" When Andrews pointed out that his entire staff said that they dealt with the issue "all the time," Scheps' glib reply was: "Creepers gonna creep." Who's the one needing the "sensitivity training"?

My July of '85

By early July after a few weeks back in my home-town of Azle from college, I'd written nearly 50 poems in a deeply unhappy, yet somehow receptive, state.

My mother has always been incredibly blatant about how much she doesn't like me --- she didn't like me at 12, didn't like me at 19 (and still doesn't like me). I'd been living in the swamp of her hate, not knowing any differently, until I went off to college in the Fall of '83. After that, coming home for summers was difficult for me psychologically, since I'd been elsewhere and been interacting with people who actually LIKED me! :)  Being back in her presence meant re-conditioning myself to feeling like shit.

In the Summer of '85, after a few weeks of being again immersed in the Hatred, I finally couldn't stand the overt negativity any more and "ran away from home" (if you can call leaving home at 19 "running away"), back to my college-town Austin with my Ford Pinto loaded up and no place to stay.

I got in town, read the college newspaper ads for apartment rentals. An efficiency just a few blocks from campus was $315 a month --- still pretty high for 1985. The landlady was a canny elderly woman whose dead husband had been a real-estate mogul and had left her various properties. I had my Azle-summer-job K-mart money with me, and so I could pay the first month's rent and deposit right away, but... it would take a couple of days to get the electricity in the apartment on... She saw my panic, saw my fully-loaded Pinto, and gave me a place to stay for free in one of her other properties for a few days until the utilities situation kicked in. (A garage apartment, too expensive for me --- I still remember how pretty the leaves outside the windows looked.) Also, she called my mother! I obviously looked too-frazzled upon my arrival, and my apartment application did include my home phone number back in Azle... Once it was determined that I wasn't dangerous, just a desperate kid, I was allowed to move in.

The Summer of '85 in this furnished efficiency with avocado-green shag carpet and burnt orange couch and chair... Right after I arrived, I went to the Government Department on campus, where I'd been a work-study student the previous school year. I asked if they needed anyone full-time during the summer -- they did! Every weekday, 8 to 5, I went to their office, then came home and drank wine until I was drunk until precisely 10 o'clock. I was young and still-disciplined, and made myself stop at precisely 10pm so I'd be able to get up with the 6:30am alarm.

Between 5 and 10pm for the next 6 weeks until the Fall Semester at UT started, I didn't see another person aside from work people. All I did was come home and get drunk and listen to Simon and Garfunkel (on album), and write poems to Ginny, like this one:

Oh! to have you
on my doorstep
in the cloud
and through my hair

What fun
with you here!
the roaches for laughing
orange and green
the height of art décor

Come! and make me Picasso
these walls I tame
and will paint for no one else.

Beatles Royal Variety Performance, Nov. 4, 1963

What I think is cool.

 

This picture reminds me of when I was 15 and a Sophomore in high school (1981) and proudly brought my just-bought John Lennon solo album "Walls and Bridges" (from 1974) to school to show off to the few friends who were even mildly interested. (Maybe one girlfriend, and several guys who were either Stoners or on the Math Team.) During lunch, when I was excitedly showing off how the album art had strips that flipped over to show different views of Lennon's face, a 2nd-tier "popular girl" walked by my table and said, "How immature. You need to get a REAL boyfriend." That was initially deflating. In her eyes, being excited about a work of art was trivial and suspicious. Instead of admiring a 15-year-old boy from our school, I was admiring an older, far-away person's representation of himself via his music and accompanying album art and finding that art and vibe far superior and far more meaningful to ME.

 

Over 30 years later, I'm apparently still as "immature." I am deeply moved by both Joan Crawford's image and her art. Moreso than by the thought that I need to "get a REAL girlfriend." When someone in real life comes along on the John Lennon or Joan Crawford level of meaningfulness to me, perhaps I will.

 

 

JC Bittersweet Symphony

'Cause it's a bittersweet symphony, this life
Trying to make ends meet
You're a slave to money then you die
I'll take you down the only road I've ever been down
You know the one that takes you to the places
where all the veins meet yeah

No change, I can't change
I can't change, I can't change
But I'm here in my mind
I am here in my mind
But I'm a million different people
from one day to the next
I can't change my mind
No, no, no, no, no, no...

Well I never pray
But tonight I'm on my knees yeah
I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, yeah
I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind, I feel free now
But the airways are clean and there's nobody singing to me now...

Young Man with a Horn: Rape and Pedophilia

Watched 1950's "Young Man with a Horn" on TCM Thursday night, for maybe the 3rd time. Movie-wise, I always like Lauren Bacall's character in this film.

Real-life-wise, whenever I see Kirk Douglas in a film, I always think of Douglas raping Natalie Wood. (Douglas and the teenaged Wood once went on a "Hollywood Date" -- he forcibly had sex with her, as she later told several friends.)

Glad to later read, in Kirk Douglas's own autobiography, that Joan Crawford jumped on HIM the second they entered her foyer. (She had bad breath, he wrote. But... you still got raped yourself, asshole. Karma.)

TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, when, pre-show, describing "Young Man with a Horn," said that the movie was based on the life of early jazz great Bix Beiderbecke, who died at age 28 (in 1931) from alcoholic complications. Since I like the movie, despite Kirk Douglas, and hadn't known anything about Beiderbecke beforehand, I looked up more information about Beiderbecke today...

In the "Young Man with a Horn" movie, the main character was abandoned by his parents and had to live with his sister and was generally neglected, until he discovered jazz and the extremely noble (in the movie) black men who played it. In real life, Beiderbecke had extremely solid parents in Iowa who encouraged his musical ambitions. Until he molested a 5-year-old girl:

On April 22, 1921, a month after he turned 18, Beiderbecke was arrested by two Davenport police officers on a charge brought by the father of a young girl. According to biographer Jean Pierre Lion, "Bix was accused of having taken this man's five-year-old daughter into a garage and committing on her an act qualified by the police report as 'lewd and lascivious.'"^[28] Although Beiderbecke was briefly taken into custody and held on a $1,500 bond, the charge was dropped after the girl was not made available to testify. According to an affidavit submitted by her father, this was because "of the child's age and the harm that would result to her in going over this case."

Beiderbecke died of extreme alcoholism at age 28 in a Queens apartment. Between ages 18 and 28, he'd alternated between his parents' home in Iowa and traveling with various jazz bands.

Just dug this out from a 1985 writing workshop

I was 20 when I wrote this.

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

...and she felt a silence so complete and deadening that she would furtively pick the phone from its hook and hold it to her ear so she could hear the familiar annoying drone and thus prove herself still living. It was proof, which calmed her somewhat, but in her state of paranoia, she could imagine a voice suddenly emerging from the hum, first barely distinguishable from it but soon becoming clearer and louder yet without gaining any human characteristics and it would say her name with a quiet assurance and she would be forced to go with it, and, worse, to love it...

She told me this and I wanted suddenly just to hold her and tell her she was safe, that I would keep the ugly dead things from her -- I would kill them if need be, kill all the horrible things that couldn't comprehend such fragility, that strove to suck the life out of her and draw her into the void they inhabited. I wanted to grab Alan, and her mother and father, and scream into their worthless faces, scream until I had driven them crazy, driven them to see what they had mutilated in her with their carelessness and their useless remnants: her mother's stupid minks, her father's oil leases, her mother crawling naked on the floor, bits of glass still clinging to her bloody forearms, screaming for someone to please, please slit her throat; her father standing silently, poking the glass shards and her mother with the toe of his boot, saying calmly, "I would if I had the time." And the little brown-haired girl in her candy-striped pajamas, crouched in a ball by her door, ear pressed to the cold wood, drawn unwillingly, guiltily by the sound of glass shattering. The unadulterated waste of this 28-year-old whose own desk told her to die, who had to write "live" on her mirror with lipstick, like a reminder for something that shouldn't have to be remembered.

"What have they done to you?"

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

And December 19, 1987, I wrote my first REAL poem (at age 22):

Devil Drives
(for Joan Crawford)

The darkness drives me far from where I must be
my knuckles bare in bone-white urgency
clutching the stringent moonlit wheel
that turns without swerving toward mercy

Roadside,
the sweat-stained fools of late
sip their beer and bet on
who I might be

There are roads running earthwise
undestined for divergence
stopped stone-cold in tracks that
vanish at some point

Such things I cannot flee:
the vortex forcing me
toward life without lights,
my name on each marquee,
the search for an existence
that didn't need to be proven

This haunted sky, the moon
I will outlast

Just ask the garden that once bloomed upright
near my back door, cut by my cold hand
and carted away in night's deadness
by babies oblivious to the pain of thorns

Ask it what prevails, the bloom or bane
of shears and let the silence be your reply, something
to live with, or not.

Bloody, I await what newness may arise,
fulfilled by a fury purely mine.

That is enough.

There is no leaving me.

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

Many years later, post-grad school writing program, I sent the Joan Crawford poem, among others, to the Poet Laureate of England, Ted Hughes: In June 1997, he wrote back: "...I like your poems -- a real language, real inner momentum."

Whatever else happens to me in my life, whoever does or does not love me... I was/am a fucking good writer. Oh yeah, and Ted Hughes read, and liked, my poems. (Anybody else out there with a Poet-Laureate-of-England Stamp of Approval? OK then.)

I'd much rather be with the boys

"Wagner in the Desert" by Greg Jackson

Started reading this on the bus today, from the 7/21 New Yorker. At first, theme- and voice-wise reminded me of a more-muscular Bret Easton Ellis and Raymond Carver, i.e., the literature of my Youth and also of how I partially felt then (only partially, since Ellis/Carver, though the settings of each could not be more different, also managed to be similarly non-emotively engaged, i.e., unnecessarily "cool").

Jackson, on the other hand, writes about ennui the way that the hyper/verbal Norman Mailer would have written about ennui had he felt it and had the late '60s/early '70s world and publishing world asked for it.

At this passage by Jackson, I stopped thinking about Ellis/Carver/Mailer and started thinking about Jackson:

When I say that I was visiting old friends, friends from whom my life and sense of life had diverged, I am not trying to set myself apart. Marta and Eli had lived in Los Angeles for a number of years -- long enough, I suppose, that whatever logic connected immediate impulse to long-term goal to life plan to identity had slipped below conscious awareness and become simply a part of them. I was by no means innocent, either, of the slow supplanting drift by which the means to our most cherished and noble ends become the ends themselves -- so that, for instance, writing something to change the world becomes writing something that matters to you becomes publishing something halfway decent becomes writing something publishable; or, to give another arbitrary example, finding everlasting love becomes finding somewhat lasting love becomes finding a reasonable mix of tolerance and lust becomes finding a sensible social teammate.

And then:

But in retrospect it wasn't really about Lily, this sense of being cheated. I needed something to happen. Something new and totalizing to push forward a dithering life. I needed to remember what it felt like to live. And drugs were not just handmaiden or enabler but part and parcel of the same impossible quest, which you could say was the search for the mythical point of most vivid existence, the El Dorado of aliveness, which I did not believe in but which tantalized me nonetheless, a point of mastering the moment in some perfect way, seeing all the power inside you rise up and coincide with itself, suspending life's give-and-take until you are only taking, claiming every last thing you've ever needed or wanted -- love, fear, kinship, respect -- and experiencing it all at the very instant that every appetite within you is satisfied.

And:

I wanted to read a poem that had recently moved me. I'd been trying to read it every night, as a prelude to dinner or a coda to dinner, but things kept getting in the way. The mood, for instance. It wasn't a very poem-y poem, but it was a poem, and I guess it had that against it. Still, it was funny and affecting, and I saw it as a sort of moral Trojan horse, a coy and subtle rebuke to everything that was going on, which would, in the manner of all great art, make its case through no more than the appeal and persuasiveness of its sensibility. The others would hear it and sit there dumbfounded, I imagined, amazed at the shallowness of their lives, their capacity nonetheless to apprehend the sublime, and the fact that I had chosen a life in which I regularly made contact with this mood.

Then there's the passage from Lily's POV re why she doesn't particularly feel like having sex with him:

"The thing is," Lily said, "we could and I'm sure it would feel good. But we're old enough now to know some things, to know what happens next, to know that we have sex and then we text and e-mail for a bit, and then you come visit me, or I come visit you, and we start to get a little excited and talk about the thing to our friends, and then we get a little bored because our friends don't really care, and we remember we live in different places and think, Who the fuck are we kidding?, and then we realize that we were always just a little bored, and the e-mails and text messages taper off, and the one of us who's a bit more invested feels hurt and starts giving the whole thing more weight than it deserves -- because these things become referendums on our lives, right? -- and so we drift apart and the thought of the other person arouses a slight bitterness or guilt, depending on who's who at this point..."

At the very end of the story, the 4 friends (the couple, plus Lily and the narrator thrown together) visit the Joshua Tree area while on drugs:

We were listening to a late Beatles album very loud, finding folds within the music that seemed never to have been there before and unlikely to be there again. Lily, every few minutes, burst out laughing wildly, I don't know why. We petted each other a little, sensually, asexually, then we passed into the Coachella Valley, swept down, down into the vast grid of lights, so many colors, all communicating with one another in a lattice of shifting and persistent harmony. And as we returned to the valley floor, where the windmills blinked red and the stars through our open windows were small rounded jewels in the great velvet scrim of night, Lily spoke:

"It's like... it was all choreographed for me," she said, her voice hushed and marveling. "Like everything was arranged for me. To experience just like this."

It took me a second to realize what she was saying and what it meant, to gather my thoughts and say the only thing there was to say.

"But that's what it is," I said."That's what being on drugs is."

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

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-greg-Jackson
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/21/wagner-in-the-desert

The time for wearing white is gone...

...we grab our steeds and learn to pray
while spider sound hovers, blade itching our palm
and we find only steel for reflection.

by me, circa 1987

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

That said, today was indeed the first day this season that I got up and felt like wearing WHITE PANTS. White Pants aren't something you just get up and put on. You've got to feel a certain way about it. If you're hung over, you certainly don't feel like wearing them. If you didn't have a good night's sleep and woke up cranky, you're not going to feel like wearing them. If you're simply not in the mood to strut around sassily that day, you're not going to wear them. With White Pants comes a burden of assumed attitude that you must attempt to fulfill..

Aside from the psychological burden, there's a physical one: You get dirty during the day when you wear them. When you wear jeans or any other color pants, you have no idea what you've either sat on or brushed up against during the day. You don't think twice when you're on the bus about hauling your bag onto your lap. White Pants will let you know. They will make you think twice. 

And since with the White Pants come the White Shoes, you can't just walk through grass and dirt paths where the city hasn't bothered to put down sidewalks, as you normally do. Last year, the only accompaniment to White Pants that I had was one pair of white CANVAS espadrilles. White CANVAS shoes are just stooopid to own. One stain, and they're done for. The stain never comes out, despite your wishing, despite your attempts at applying liquid Wite-Out stolen from your office. 

After THAT fiasco, this year I invested in one pair of white LEATHER shoes (that you can wipe off). And I have a nice white purse...(More psychological stuff: It's not a BIG bag like I have to carry work-stuff in. And still no white belt; hate to waste money on that, since I never tuck in shirts and it will never show, but I KNOW when my belt doesn't match...)

Nonetheless, I wore White Pants today for the first time this season! Even after my horrible depressive/lonely/hate-filled episode displayed on this very blog Friday night (that kept me in bed all day Saturday), I rallied Sunday BECAUSE I HAD SOMETHING TO DO!

The Thursday before, an editing job for a 40-page proposal with a potential $7 million at stake came across my desk. I'd been expecting it to come in that previous Monday. When I finally got it Thursday, I was irritated that it had arrived that late, and more irritated that I was supposed to have the thing finished by noon Monday. You can't really carefully edit 40 pages of dense text in 2 days. Nonetheless, it was due noon Monday. So I had to work at least 8 hours over the weekend... Like I said, after my spiel on this blog Friday night, I woke up Saturday with a huge sense of loss and hopelessness about the entire world and my relations with everyone in it. Which staying in bed all day Saturday re-reading Raymond Carver's stories certainly did not assuage! :)  I knew Saturday was a mental recuperation period, but then I also knew that I HAD A TON OF WORK TO DO, which only added to my sense of malaise.

When I woke up Sunday, I immediately popped out of bed and started in on the day's worth of work. Worked focused, only water and cigarettes.. E-mailed the doc in by 4pm. An hour or so later got the following e-mail feedback from a 2nd party:

Just finished going through S's thoroughly edited document. (I am truly impressed. Brings back fond memories of S---- and L--- [2 previous editors, who'd been in my position for the 40 years before me], and honestly, S might just outdo those two pros!!).

My parents might not love me (which hurts), the woman I'm still in love with might not love me (which hurts), but... BY GOD, SOMEONE OUT THERE APPRECIATES ME!  

I got up Monday morning and went to work with White Pants on.

Cher, 1971

My favorite Cher song of all time: "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves." (25 years before Cher got gay-icon'd to death, she was, in her prime, an actual mainstream American icon.)

Mary Karr in The Paris Review

KARR

You have constantly to question, Is this fair? No life is all bleak. Even in Primo Levi’s camp, there were small sources of hope: you got on the good work detail, or you got on the right soup line. That’s what’s so gorgeous about humanity. It doesn’t matter how bleak our daily lives are, we still fight for the light. I think that’s our divinity. We lean into love, even in the most hideous circumstances. We manage to hope.

INTERVIEWER

But we remember the bleakness.

KARR

That’s mostly what we remember.

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

 

 

And: "The fury that I thought protected me from harm actually sealed me off from joy."

 

Full Karr interview.

"What It Used to Be Like"

Have recently been on a Raymond Carver kick, ordering the "Library of America" edition of his stories (which I'd owned and read in various cheap paperbacks back in the '80s), plus the 2009 bio, plus the 2006 memoir by his wife of over 20 years, Maryann Burk Carver: "What It Used To Be Like."

I'm now halfway through his wife's book. (It's 1961: The Pill has just become available, and Maryann is understandably relieved after two kids in three years.)

Maryann was a college-prep kid with a future when she met Ray Carver. Carver was a working-class kid who didn't like to study (even at a junior college) or work. He got very, very lucky in that someone like John Gardner "discovered" him during one of his brief stints at a state school (Humboldt). Not "lucky" in the sense that Carver wasn't a great writer, but "lucky" in that: How many other potentially "great" writers get  hyped by a minor academic and then such hype takes hold in the literary industry? Very rare. Carver's taking off was very much the exception and not the rule.

Good for him. But the "bad-for-her" Maryann part is that after over 20 years of her supporting him (and providing first-hand emotional intelligence and, most importantly, ENERGY for his stories), he decided to leave her for some peace. Tess Gallagher, an academic that he met in '79 and officially married only six months before his death in '88, I don't consider as much of anything except an executrix of his estate.

Maryann Carver's reminiscences are a counter to the idiocy of a professor that I had in grad school at San Francisco State in the mid-90s: This professor, in a Melville/Dickinson class I was taking, was certain that Herman Melville's wife had been nothing but a drain on his creativity.

Oh really? Melville had been fucking about on odd jobs and as a sailor, with one publication, "Typee," to his credit in 1846, the year before he married. AFTER the year of his marriage in 1847, the ENTIRE rest of his work was published, including the now-famous novel "Moby-Dick" and the story "Bartleby the Scrivener" --- and again, not just those, but EVERY OTHER THING he ever published.

Melville not only had a home base but also had a willing cadre of women (his wife and daughters) there to transcribe his every word. Melville wasn't operating in a vacuum. Neither was Carver.

During my time in academia in the late-80s-to-mid-90s learning about various literary men, I can't tell you how often the female life partners were dismissed and denigrated as somehow being nothing more than "balls and chains," as local girls that the guys had gotten pregnant... I'd like to see a history of art/literature sans such women (aka, "muses" and/or in-house secretaries).

That's Someone You'll Never Forget

My crying jag about Ginny...

...that started Thursday night carried on into Friday and the subsequent calling in sick for work/lying in bed weeping all day Friday.

As I was remembering more and more things about her, I was remembering more and more things about someone who really LIKED me and wanted to be around me! (Until she didn't, of course, but while she did, she really did!)

In subsequent years, I've had "lovers," but no one that I could get lost trying to find a Fort Worth Unitarian Church with; no one to "shush" me when I innocently blurted out "What's a MUFF DIVER?" in her parents' car while viewing downtown Atlanta graffiti; no one to share a parents' hotel room with while simultaneously trying to get off on "Endless Love" with the sound turned off. :) 

That parentally-shared hotel room would have made a great story 20 years later had we survived.

My first love on Find-A-Grave

Find-A-Grave is a website I've up 'til now associated with celebrities; I've looked up "Joan Crawford" there, for instance, and left a couple of "in memoriam" messages on her death date over the years.

Today was a slow day at work and I randomly typed in to "Find-A-Grave" the name of a girl I loved in 1983, when I was a Senior and she, a Junior at our high school.

In our 8 months of knowing each other in the Spring/Summer of '83, we:

saw "Frances" twice together (we later went to Fort Worth's Ridgmar Mall and had T-shirts made: "Frances Lives");

played the White Album backwards and listened to Lennon together (she was not that into solo Lennon but kindly went along with my excitement over finding the "Some Time in New York City" album -- also at Ridgmar Mall -- and then put up with my insisting on listening to it OVER AND OVER AGAIN);

wrote a punk song together ("He's a Geek [of the Pencil-Necked Variety]" -- the title of which she later paid to have immortalized on matchbook covers and sent me dozens of once I'd gone off to college).

There are dozens of other things, some of which I've written about here before. (A favorite memory will always be when I spent the night at her house one time and I, wearing a big, floppy T-shirt, accidentally stood over an upstairs air vent, which blew my shirt up... "I feel like Marilyn Monroe!" I said. And she laughed. Getting the reference, getting me.)

At the time, at 17, I thought such a connection (though new to me at the time) must be commonplace among adults... I thought I'd find exactly the same feeling over and over again. Once I went off to college; once I had sex. I did not.

I remember her showing up at the doorway of the stock-room of the K-Mart where I was a part-time teen worker... She'd greased her hair back with Vaseline (this was '83, pre-gel) and had on a "punk-looking" shirt and a shy smile on her face, peering around the corner to see my reaction... That look on her face is a permanent snapshot in my mind.

I also remember us wearing our then-trendy "Japanese-looking" off-the-shoulder sweatshirts when we went into our town's 7-11. The cashier said to us: "You ain't from here, are you?" We got a big thrill out of that.

On my way to the state competition for editorial-writing, we tried to sneak her onto the bus... At the last second, our sponsor discovered her and kicked her off.

At my high-school graduation, I had no white shoes to wear. She lent me hers. She played in the school band that was situated to the left of where we graduates were marching to the stage. As I passed her, I lifted up my robe and flashed a leg/white shoe. She laughed.

It all went bad once I went to college in the Fall of '83. We didn't argue or anything; she just met a new "best friend" pretty quickly a month or two later. I'd left for Austin in late-August 1983, and by Christmas 1983, she was completely removed from me emotionally, though we still exchanged Christmas presents that year. (In October 1983, she'd run away from home -- by bus -- to me in my dorm room in Austin; that's a whole other parental-trauma that I had nothing to do with. I had no idea how her reaction to her parents' upset would afterward affect her thinking about me. We were never the same after that, though I continued to try and she "ran off to Austin" a couple of times after that.)

There are hundreds of other things... As I said above, I didn't know at the time WHAT this was. I thought this type of feeling and awareness of another would be a Given for the rest of my life, especially once I got to college, started having sex, etc. After 30 years, I can honestly say that there's been nothing like this.

What was I initially saying? Oh yeah --- the Find-A-Grave site. Which I'd thought was only for celebrities... Not so, apparently. Someone posted there in 2012 a photo of my friend's grave, which I found by accident today. She's buried in Georgia, where her family's from; I'd never seen the grave before: 1966 - 1988. I started crying at work and couldn't stop.

I had been worried about my unhappiness in Austin while she was worried about dying. We'd argued in the past about the existence of God, and while she was dying she wrote me that she now believed. And that she was reading Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet." She wrote me that she, though I might not believe it, loved me.

Not in regular contact, I didn't find out that she had died until I called her number around Thanksgiving of 1988: Her father answered, and when I asked for Ginny, he had to tell me that she'd died 6 months earlier. He thought he'd already notified all the "Azle People."

Here's the addendum: Songs that Ginny particularly liked in 1983 but that I never wanted to listen to...





Plus any Heart, plus any Prince.

And here's what I made her listen to again and again after my mall discovery ("Fweedom, oh Fweedom!" and "Aye, aye, genocide!" she sang back):




I didn't know what all of this was at the time. I didn't come out until 1989, a year after her death, and then to a simplistic, dumb club dyke "into vampires" who owned a total of 2 books and didn't like the Beatles. Sex, though: I was desperate for it after all of the years of yearning and wondering. But what I got was textbook (as I later learned) S-and-M --- nothing imaginative or sexy or interesting about it, just a lot of dumb posing. No songs shared (except for maybe Depeche Mode's "Violator" album and Siouxsie/Banshees' "Peek-a-boo.") Couldn't have been further from what I'd earlier felt. But this was officially "gay," right? I was supposed to LIKE this, right? If I was to be gay, I couldn't love or be with the girl I wanted to love, but rather had to go with the extremist scumbag -- who was one of the only ones then willing to be gay publicly. Right??

Obscenely Reductive and Fundamentally Evil

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jul/09/world-cup-2014-big-losers?commentpage=2

I've been semi-avidly following the World Cup this year (Team Deutschland!), especially enjoying the UK Guardian's online live blogs and commentary.

The above-linked Guardian opinion piece by Paul Doyle posted Tuesday really got on my nerves, though. Enough so that I created an account with "The Guardian" just to respond thus:

Two things from this opinion piece struck a bizarre chord with me:

(1) "The happy paradox of the World Cup is that while it has proved that international football remains relevant, it has also helped show that nationalism is an anachronism. Insisting that players attach their identity to one country and one alone could be construed as obscenely reductive and fundamentally evil..."

A player representing "one country and one alone" is somehow "obscenely reductive and fundamentally evil"? Obscene? Evil? On the contrary, I find the concept of a player representing his country rather refreshing and unselfish --- as opposed to the mercenary quality of most football, each team an utterly meaningless random collection of men bought and paid for.

(2) "Also, it is a shame that the main protagonists, the players, do not get to fraternise with counterparts as much as everyone else. Perhaps the tournament organisation needs to be reviewed so that in the future all players stay in an equivalent of the Olympic village? They could still travel to various cities for matches but return to a shared base with shared facilities, an arrangement that would surely foster love and humanity and also, indeed, level the playing field a little."

Writer Paul Doyle, are you a 13-year-old girl living in "Hello Kitty"-land? The World Cup is a serious COMPETITION. Not a day-camp for troubled teens (sorry, Brazil). The World Cup is neither a place for "fostering love and humanity" nor for "leveling the playing field a little." It's where the best of the best come head to head to prove themselves against each other. This sense of raw competitiveness has been steadily expunged from our everyday lives --- and now the honesty of the impulse can't even be exhibited in the football arena?

One Nice Bus Thing

One thing I really don't like about Austin's bus-taking population: Since I take the same buses at the same times in the morning and the afternoon, I pretty much know exactly who's going to get on at every stop. For some reason, that really gets on my nerves. (In NY/NJ, buses and subways ran every few minutes instead of every half-hour --- up there, you just stepped outside or down a tunnel and got on when you got on; in Austin, you really have to go by the planned schedule. And so... the same old faces every day. My own Same Old Face being one of them, of course --- I don't like THAT, either! I actually do prefer being an anonymous traveler --- and not seeing the "Plath Girl" or the "Wild-n-Crazy Eastern European Guy with the Striped and/or Beatles Shirt" at the same stops every dang weekday morning!)

Anyway, one repetitive afternoon bus-person that I think is, nonetheless, a bit interesting: A black guy that I was bitching about here weeks ago for ALWAYS pulling the cord for the wrong stop (he wanted the stop I was transferring at, but he seemingly ALWAYS (at least 3 times) pulled it too early, and so the whole bus had to stop and waste precious seconds, during which the second bus he/I were trying to transfer to often PULLED AWAY in front of our very eyes---the timing was THAT close!)

So now, the guy has apparently figured it out. He doesn't pull the cord at the wrong stop any more. He and I get off at our transfer stop. He goes and sits down on the bus-stop bench; I go off the city-requisite 15 feet in order to smoke my interim cigarette.

After the 8 minutes or so, our 2nd bus approaches. I put out my cig and go stand near him by the bench. It's usually just us two there at this time. Sometimes the bus pulls up directly in front of me; sometimes it pulls up directly in front of him. But whichever, for the past 5 or 6 times: Even if the bus pulls up directly in front of HIM, he elaborately gestures for me to get on first. I just think this is so gentlemanly and kind and sweet.

And here's what this guy does on the second bus we get on together: The first route has been obnoxious and jam-packed, but the second is always just 1/3 full so we're not all rats fighting for space. On the second, I've got my spot that I always get to sit in, and he's got his spot at the back. Once he's settled in, he takes out a notebook and his recording phone and starts working on raps! When I first heard him practicing out loud, I -- fed up to HERE with assholes on the bus -- was initially thinking, "Jesus Christ, enough with obnoxious dicks blurting out random shit!" But then it turned out when I listened more carefully that he was really practicing his rhymes! If he'd mess up a line, he'd go back and start over to try to rework it... It was really a treat to listen to -- the rareness of getting to hear actual creativity in progress.

Joan Crawford on the set of "Untamed," 1930

Sleeping with Paul McCartney

Yes, I would find sleeping with Paul McCartney pleasant but, no, I haven't actually been fantasizing about it during the day. A couple of nights ago in a dream, though, I was hanging out as his house and fucking him AND giving him head (I've actually given head probably twice in my life and gagged both times and then stopped doing it) and moving from bed to bed trying to avoid various dead/ex-wives who were coming in and out. I kept wanting him to come to bed with ME so we could sleep through the night, but all of his other women were constantly there. Finally, I told him, "It's like Dickens--the Ghosts of Wives Past!" (In the dream, I felt very clever for this, since there had been 3 showing up: Linda, Heather, Nancy.)

When I woke up, I though about the pleasant things that I know about Paul McCartney: After reading several recent bios about him, I like the fact that he's constantly THINKING and CURIOUS. In one case, he was saying that he was waiting in the car for Linda to come back from an appointment and was bored to death, and then decided he'd create a "task" for himself -- to write a song before she got back... Years later, in another case, he decided to drive across America on the famous Route 66 with his new girlfriend Nancy Shevell. Now, this British guy doesn't know America or its highways; he can barely drive. But... he knew "Route 66" from his boyhood rock songs, and then when he was grown up and bold enough to attempt driving the actual route just for the hell of it, he attempted it, and asked his girl along for company.

That's what kind of boyfriend I want: Someone from Britain to drive across America with.

Below: Paul McCartney at a Springfield, Missouri, gas station during his 2008 Route 66 trip with his girlfriend.

 

 

Bruce: Star-Spangled Banner/Born in the USA

End up like a dog that's been beat too much
You spend half your life covering up

Hey Jude

On my bus route to work for the past year, there's been an attractive young woman constantly toting along a little boy named "Jude," who is sometimes cranky, sometimes cherubic. His mother usually tries to get him to sit up front, but he, the Big Boy, usually tries the stairs up to the back seats. The young mother has seemed cute in relation to her cute child.

But in the past month, the young woman has shown up at the bus stop with only her husband, no "Jude." At the bus stop, she holds his coffee container for him and tilts it to his lips. She strokes the back of his neck. The husband is 30-ish, like she is. And he has been wearing, EVERY SINGLE TIME I'VE SEEN HIM, a straw hat, white shirt, khaki pants, and sturdy earth shoes. Like a 60-year-old man on an archaeological dig in Egypt.

Here is a picture that I found online of what this young husband dresses like:

Why? My only guess is that he is a doctoral student at UT, not from Texas, who has taken on a costume that he assumes (wrongly) is suited for Texas... And yesterday on the bus when there was an empty seat, he went and sat in it, and left his wife standing. I think he's a creep for these reasons.

Nails + Oven Burn

 

My nails haven't been this long since I was 13 years old (35 years ago).

Shelf Rescue

The black shelf on the right was set out by my apartment dumpster a couple of days ago. Luckily, my brother and nephews were able to come over and help move it within an hour after I called (before some other dumpster-diver snatched it up).

 

Stuff IS getting kinda squushed in this one-room apartment; but I'm planning ahead for when I have TWO rooms! :)

 



 

Oh, Vienna

I can't stop looking at this GIF -- Joan as Vienna in "Johnny Guitar" is incredibly cool and sexy to me. I love the panther-y way she moves here. And the way her expression goes through about 3 subtle changes in 3 seconds -- I have never seen another actress able to do that. (I like also, cinematically, how the light darkens as her expression does.)

 

I've been in bed most of the weekend not just recuperating from my tense Friday but also mulling over about 4 scenes of a new screenplay that're still in my head. It's been over 10 years since I wrote my first and only screenplay, but for the past several months these 4 scenes have kept replaying themselves -- I can tell it's almost time to stop embellishing mentally and get around to writing them down and then fleshing them out. That's exactly how the first screenplay began -- with a sex scene, to be honest, and then trying to work out why those two people were in bed to begin with.

 

This new one has Joan-as-Vienna as Muse. Also takes place in a Western saloon (this one also a whorehouse in addition to a gambling den), but no other characters or plot are similar to "Johnny G."

 

 

 

 

 

And then there's this video from YouTube accompanying the 1980 Ultravox song, "Vienna"... I have no idea what movie this is from, but this is how it feels. (Whatever this is, I'm guessing that it's famous and that "Johnny Guitar" director Nicholas Ray must have seen it -- the rope-pulling, the ending images...)

 



Dig a Pony (cover)

This guy is amazing! He has dozens (hundreds?) of songs on YouTube, him doing ALL the parts to Beatles songs.

Joan Crawford in "A Woman's Face," 1941

Hell hath no fury...

...like someone who just stayed 2 hours late for work on a Friday, afterward hoping for nothing more than a less-crowded (and thus slightly more pleasant) bus-ride home.

The #3 Austin bus down Burnet SUCKS. Other bus routes are mainly fine, but on the #3, something shitty happens maybe 50% of the time. That percentage is way too great. (I think 10% is within the realm of reason.) This afternoon, after being at work for 10 hours, I just wasn't in the mood for it. A couple of stops after me, one of the usual plethora of fucked-up homeless people got on. I can handle the smells, I can handle the tilting over, I can handle the muttering to themselves... And I have usually been able to handle when they're loud and obnoxious. But maybe the conversation I had a few days ago with the young guy on the bus asking me why I didn't report the obnoxious guy pestering me was still fresh in my mind...

This 40-ish white guy today gets on, sits a few rows behind me at the very back of the bus, right next to a group of 3 foreign students, two guys and a girl, who had been busy chatting amongst themselves. At first, he starts loudly bellowing lyrics from some song (I have no idea which, but the lyrics involved being "MAD" and "BAD.") And then he turns his attention to the kids: "Am I BOTHERING you?" (They hadn't stopped their own conversation to pay any attention to him whatsoever.) When they don't respond to his "bothering" queries, he starts loudly asking them for $20. Since they must think he smells, they should give him $20 so he can go to CVS to buy some socks. Just give him $20, man. He knows they have it. Where are they from? Huh? (Switzerland, as it turned out.) He don't care where they're from, but he does know that in Texas in the summer, people's feet sweat and stink and so he needs new socks. Give him the $20.

At this point, the kids' chatter has petered out. When none of them volunteers any money, he then addresses the girl: "Are you fucking one of them?" (gesturing toward her 2 male companions) No answer. "You know they just want to fuck you, right?"

I'd been silently stewing up until that point, pissed at yet another goddamn disturbance on the same bus route. And feeling bad for the foreign kids who probably took buses all the time back home, sans incident -- and now Austin and Texas were looking like stupid, backward fucks for allowing this kind of crude behavior on their public transportation. (And as the Indian kid a few days ago asked me, "Why didn't you do anything about it?")

Once the guy started in with the sexual comments, I snapped. (Also shades of a couple of years ago when I lost it--on a different route--with the 2 gang-bangers bragging loudly about what all they'd done to some "ho" that weekend.) When the bus came to its next stop, I marched up to the driver and said at the top of my lungs, WANTING everybody to hear me: "See that guy in the back corner?" (pointing) "He has been bothering people the whole time he's been on the bus. He's bugging people for money. He's making sexual comments. I'M SICK OF IT!"

I didn't know what the hell the driver would do. I felt like The Crazy Person at that point. The driver immediately got up and went to the back of the bus, me following and pointing: "THAT GUY! RIGHT THERE!" I just Did Not Care what the repercussions for me would be. Luckily, the driver was very authoritative, addressing the man: "Do you have a problem? What's your problem, Sir? Either you get it together, or you get off right here. Which is it?" VERY luckily, this particular loudmouth wasn't completely psycho -- he surprisingly, and anticlimactically, answered, "I'm gonna get off." And he did, without punching me on his way out. Whew. (When the adrenalin's flowing, you don't give a shit. Afterward, though, reality kicks in: "Jesus. I could have been punched in the face, or worse." Honestly, though, at the Time of the Adrenalin, I was almost WILLING him to DARE touch me. I know for a scary fact that I would have gone off on him physically in response, I was that pissed off.)

Paul-fucking-McCartney, 1976

I initially posted because I love the song. But the utterly sweet smile he gives his wife (@ 1:43) in between trying to look cool also gives me great hope for love/humanity.

Sally G (1974)

I'm a Paul McCartney fan, but I'd never heard this song until tonight. (It is, indeed, authentic Nashville/LA 1974, which was then briefly in the throes of "Gram Parsons, Poster Boy," who had just died.) Here's McCartney writing a song just to prove he could write such a type of song.
 

Keep the Lizard

In the office I just moved into, there was a crushed baby lizard stuck to the wall. (The guy before me had been in there for 30 years; lord knows when/how the lizard got crushed.)

I wanted to leave the lizard there. A co-worker who was helping me clean stuff out wanted to scrub it off of the wall. My argument for keeping it:  "When I lived in a 1930s house for 7 years, a vine decided to grow in through a crack in the wall. I let it be, just to see where it would go." By the time I left the house in 2007, the vine had stretched across the room.

The woman helping me didn't know what the fuck I was talking about. She actually said, re my vine story that I so helpfully shared with her, "What are you talking about?"

Don't think about it. Keep the Lizard.

Illusion never changed into something real

Union City, '09: Trudging blocks inland to Bergenline at 7am in search of more beer after a long night of drinking alone and someone at dawn e-mailing me that she didn't want to see me for 6 months. This favorite song from '97 surprisingly spewing out of a Bergenline shop at that hour... I was post-drunk and horribly drained, but then all of a sudden... "I'm wide awake and I can see the perfect sky is... torn." Such exhilaration in the midst of my momentary misery!

"I am the sheet...

...that makes the ghost look normal."

The bus-system that I soon will no longer be a part of had the above line as part of their student poems posted publicly on placards.

"I am the sheet that makes the ghost look normal."

I can't get over how REALLY interesting/profound that is...

With a Little Luck

Sometimes, shallow things can bring you very up or down if you're feeling that they're "representative" of your whole place in the world at the moment. (See The Doors: "People Are Strange.") For instance, a couple of initially negative eBay buying experiences I've had in the past month. (Full disclosure: I've got 100% positive feedback on eBay, after maybe 500 buying/selling ventures over the past 11 or 12 years. So I'm a regular, not a flake, etc.)

In the first case, I ordered a print on photographic paper. The seller sent it in a tube that was nearly, I swear, as thin as a paper-towel roll -- you could easily squeeze the tube with your fingers. The tube was (not surprisingly) crushed during shipping, the photo torn and dented and undisplayable. I checked eBay rules: Even if the item is damaged during shipping, you get a refund. (In this case, it wasn't just the PO carelessness, though; it was also the flimsiness of the tube.) I e-mailed the seller , explaining the condition of the photo and offering to pay the new postage (but not my original $25 for the print) if he would send another copy of the print.  (The picture wasn't an original, just something he was selling copies of.) He initially admitted how much it cost him to make the copy/mail it --- with what I'd already paid + the extra postage I was willing to pay, he still would have made a small profit. Both of us would have been satisfied. But NO. When he asked for, and I refused to pay, another $25, I said I'd have to take the case to eBay to get a complete refund. The response? In brief, I was "what was wrong with America today"!! And if I took the case to eBay, he would sue me for libel. Etc. etc. (I kept getting increasingly nasty messages from him for the week or so it took eBay to review the case.)

In the second case, I ordered a tube of liquid hair product. I had various small packages arriving at the time, and this one showed up in a small padded mailing envelope. Not knowing what was inside, I cut the very top of the envelope off, no more than a third of an inch from the top. Well, there wasn't any extra room in the envelope, so when I cut the top of it, I also cut off the top of the tube inside! Hair product spewed everywhere! Had I been carelessly slashing away at the package? No, I had not! Was it stupid to pack a liquid in a padded envelope? Yes, it sure was! I e-mailed the eBay seller and told her what had happened; and I asked for what I thought was a completely reasonable partial refund of $5 (out of the $17 total) for the product spilled and the odd packaging for a liquid. Initially, the seller was quite honest: "I've been mailing my stuff that way because it's a lot cheaper." (!) And she said she'd refund $5 if I FIRST left her a positive review...  Whoa, Nellie! When I got that "offer," I checked with eBay policy... which said in black-and-white, "Don't leave a review until you receive your refund." By instinct, I KNEW that if I were to leave a positive review (which I didn't believe in), I'd have no leverage whatsoever if the seller decided to subsequently ignore the refund. So I e-mailed her back, citing the eBay rule, asking again for a $5 partial refund to officially "close the case." And then things changed from her end: I was careless in how I opened the package, there were a lot of untrustworthy people on eBay and she couldn't trust me since I wouldn't leave the positive review as a "gesture of good will." (Me: "My gesture of 'good will' was e-mailing you first before opening a case with eBay. And I in good conscience can't leave a positive review since this whole experience has been such a huge hassle!")

So both of these had been hanging over my head lately. I was actually low-levelly DISTURBED by the reactions from each of these sellers on eBay. A crappy mailing tube, a crappy envelope for a liquid --- while neither method had ever, apparently, "gone wrong" for these particular folks in the past, in my particular case, they DID go wrong. And once I called them on it, and asked for only a partial refund in an attempt to be fair, I started getting weird stuff like "You're what's wrong with America today" and I'm "untrustworthy."

Long story short: I got full refunds from eBay in both cases. A small thing, but it made me feel happy, like there's some sort of order and fairness in the universe...

And here's something else nice that just happened earlier this week: I've been ordering cigarettes from Eastern Europe for the past few months. The first time was a pure gamble, finding a random site online and then paying via PayPal for one carton. I had no idea if the carton would ever arrive. It was an experiment, and if I lost, I lost. I was prepared for losing some money. But no, the carton arrived in a couple of weeks. So the next time I ordered TWO cartons. They also arrived in a couple of weeks. But then... I ordered THREE. Thinking, "Hey, they've been completely reliable so far; I can trust them in the future with my monthly cig orders..." Over a month passed this time, and no cartons. My first e-mail of inquiry went unanswered. I was bummed out: I'd just lost $100. It had been a scam all along, as various message boards had warned. (The $100 loss was bad enough, but then there was also the worse future prospect of having to pay $70 a carton here in the US -- just as bad a ripoff, except PERPETUAL, since I haven't been thinking about giving up smoking.) But then, a week or so after I sent my first inquiry e-mail to the Eastern Europe company, I received a kindly, human response -- apologizing for the non-reception ("sometimes the mail is bad") and offering to re-send 3 new cartons. (!!!) I haven't yet received my replacement cigs, and I may never. But at the moment I feel hopeful. I could have heard nothing from the random online company. I could have been told in so many words, "Well, sorry, sometimes the mail is bad; you'll have to send us a new payment if you want us to try sending new cartons." But I wasn't told that.

And one last thing:

On the way home from work on the bus today, I got caught next to a "Crazeee." When he first got on, he sat at the back, and I only HEARD him bragging about his roll of money and bitchin' about how slow the bus was. He quickly got into a loud argument with another guy in the back and then moved up to the seat next to me. I was reading my "New Yorker." In response to his immediate insistent questions: "Yes, I like to read. No, I'm not from New York. Yes, it's called 'The New Yorker' but it's not necessarily about New York -- it's about art and books and politics and whatever. No, I haven't seen anything about Obama in this issue..." At this point, he starts going on about Obama, and I said I didn't care one way or the other, and he said he'll leave me alone to read, and I said "Great." Silence for about 10 seconds. Then he said he's sorry for bothering me and I said "Yeah, I really AM trying to read." He got out his roll of money again and said he was going to show some girl a really good time tonight. And I said, "Great." And then he started reading aloud from the New Yorker page I was looking at. At this point, I snapped and YELLED: "Are you REALLY going to start reading over my shoulder? Are you KIDDING ME?!"  This apparently freaked the Crazeee Guy out and he immediately moved to an empty seat across the aisle where, for the next 10 minutes until my stop, he muttered loudly about how fucking slow the bus was.

The thing about crazy (or semi-crazy) guys on buses (and this happened to me, or I've witnessed it, at least 8 times in the past 4 years): They see a white chick -- either young or, in my case, middle-aged -- and assume that we are going to be too polite to call them on their bullshit. So they feel that they can just continue to do their psychotic schtick, thinking they're scaring us or something. This time, you picked the Wrong One, you dumb fuck: Mean German/East-Texas Redneck who's been around the block a few times? G'head.

All of this wasn't the "With a Little Luck" nice part of the story. THAT came once I got off at my stop and was waiting for my connection to the next bus. A 20-ish Indian guy and his bike got off at the same time as me. I retreated the required 15 feet to smoke a cig (Austin bus-stop cig rules), and the Indian guy stayed for a couple of minutes at the curb, and then dragged his bike over to me...

HIM: Excuse me. Why would you let that man talk to you like that?
ME: [puzzled look]
HIM: I was sitting in front of you the whole time. Why didn't you tell the driver?
ME: That loud guy?
HIM: Yes! I couldn't believe you would just take that. Why didn't you tell the driver?
ME: Oh, I've seen so much worse! That wasn't even really a problem.
HIM: If the Austin transportation system wants to get professionals to ride, they're going to have to watch out for that kind of disturbance.
ME: [in short: No, really, I've seen a lot worse --- relaying the time last year that the gang-bangers were going on loudly about their sexual exploits the night before and I yelled at them to shut up, leading to a scary bus-standoff, where the driver finally had the guys get off]
HIM: Oh, I see.

We ended up chatting for several more minutes about how Austinites and Texans come from a car culture and don't yet know how to act on public transportation (as opposed to NYC residents, who for the most part view the public transport as a way to get around, not make personal statements). And how the #3 bus was so much worse than the #21 we were about to get on. Etc.

This conversation was a very good thing psychologically for me, because I'd previously just taken for granted that there were going to be creeps on the #3. If I felt that my space was invaded either physically or verbally by guys in seats nearby spewing out "Fuck this/Fuck that," then it must be something about ME that couldn't handle riding a public bus. What this young Indian guy helped me see from a fresh perspective was that it was the obnoxious people who were in the wrong, not me just sitting there reading.

A "Break in Service"

My freelance experience over the past 7 years hasn't been that great. I don't like it. I don't have a middle-class safety net (i.e., a male partner with a tech job) or an upper-class safety net (i.e., a sugar daddy) and so freelancing has been stressful for me.

My "7 years" means the 3 years I lived in New York City (2007-2010) and the years since I've been back in Austin (2010-2014).  During which I have done nothing but freelance and temp jobs -- excitedly so in NYC until the market crashed in '08, and ever since then, desperately.

Since 2007, I've written about my temp woes online. Some online creeps I know (like Bryan Johnson, for instance) made a point of publicly telling me what a loser I was for not being able to "get a job."

Aside from the online creeps, I also felt embarrassed whenever my nephews asked me why my apartment was so small. Unlike the creeps, the kids were just asking me out of honesty -- their own parents had a house, and so why didn't I?

Long story short: I'm now an Editor II. After 7 years in the wilderness of temping/freelancing "because I wanted to go explore," kiddos. The 10-year-olds will understand one day. I'm sure the bar-back never will. Below, again, is the Paul McCartney song that's been in my head for the past 2 weeks and that is right now my soundtrack for feeling absolutely GOOD.

Ibsen on the Bus

The last New Yorker issue was a double one, so I've read it by now and as of last Friday have had nothing to read on the bus. (Friday afternoon at work, I desperately printed out articles from Vanity Fair, et al -- any online place that would let me read and print so that I wouldn't be forced to stare blankly into space for the hour trip home after work.)

Today, Monday morning, there was still no bus-reading material... oh, well, except for the thousand books that I have in my apartment. Grabbed the paperback of Ibsen's "Four Major Plays: Volume 1." I was jazzed up after just the foreword, reading the editor's puzzlement when trying to discern why Ibsen painted, at age 17, the biblical prophet Elijah, entitling the picture: "The Prophet Elijah under a juniper tree in the wilderness, I Kings, 19, 5."

The foreword says: "The text referred to reads: 'And he lay down under the juniper tree; and behold, an angel touched him, and said to him, 'Arise and eat.'" And then the text dumbly asks, "What is there in this passage, we wonder, that Ibsen should want to paint it?"

Turns out the preceding biblical verse (what I pretty much suspected was about to come) was: "But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree; and he asked that he might die, saying, 'It is enough now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am no better than my fathers.'"

And all this before 8:30am! :)  What a great, mind-blowingly intelligent way to start the day! Reading nothing but the New Yorker for the past few months, I've missed this kind of REVELATION (as opposed to mere "upper-middle-class Conventional Wisdom"-- the New Yorker is smart, but it's usually completely "of the moment" as opposed to "of the ages"; there's very little depth there, more often a compendium of social trends. I didn't used to know this).

The World Tonight

I saw you sitting at the center of the circle
Everybody, everybody wanted something from you
I saw you sitting there

I saw you swaying to the rhythm of the music
Caught you playing, caught you praying
To the voice inside you
I saw you swaying there

I don't care what you want to be
I go back so far, I'm in front of me
It doesn't matter what they say
They're giving the game away

I can see the world tonight
Look into the future
See it in a different light
I can see the world tonight

I heard you listening to a secret conversation
You were crying, you were trying
Not to let them hear you
I heard you listening in

Never mind what they want to do
You've got a right to your point of view
It doesn't matter what they say
They're giving the game away

I can see the world tonight
Look into the future
See it in a different light
I can see the world tonight
I can see the world tonight

I saw you hiding from a flock of paparazzi
You were hoping, you were hoping
That the ground would swallow you
I saw you hiding there

I don't care what you want to be
I go back so far, I'm in front of me
It doesn't matter what they say
They're giving the game away

I can see the world tonight
Look into the future
See it in a different light
I can see the world tonight

Look into the future
I can see the world tonight
See it in a different light
I can see the world tonight
I can see the world tonight

World Cup

On my bus to the supermarket this morning, I passed a large blue "Forza Azzurri" banner hung on the front of a neighbor's house. I actually got goosebumps, happy that someone was so excited about the World Cup (and loyal to their "Old Country"). The picture below is just one I found on the Internet, after searching a while to figure out WHO EXACTLY the banner was referring to: Italy! I'm not at all a big soccer fan, but I do pay attention when the World Cup comes around--rooting for my own "Old Country," Germany! USA? Eh. I never feel anything for the soccer team. Kind of bland and personality-less. It's the other countries that are the funnest to watch. I also enjoy hearing the style of their national anthems. And seeing the country-personality-quirks of their FIFA slogans this year:

 

Algeria

Desert Warriors In Brazil

Argentina

Not Just A Team, We Are A Country

Australia

Socceroos: Hopping Our Way Into History!

Belgium

Expect The Impossible!

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Dragons In Heart, Dragons On The Field!

Brazil

Brace Yourselves! The Sixth Is Coming!

Cameroon

A Lion Remains A Lion

Chile

Chi Chi Chi!, Le Le Le! Go Chile

Colombia

Here Travels A Nation, Not Just A Team!

Costa Rica

My Passion Is Football, My Strength Is My People, My Pride Is Costa Rica

Ivory Coast

Elephants Charging Towards Brazil!

Croatia

With Fire In Our Hearts, For Croatia All As One!

Ecuador

One Commitment, One Passion, Only One Heart, This Is For You Ecuador!

England

The Dream Of One Team, The Heartbeat Of Millions!!

France

Impossible Is Not A French Word

Germany

One Nation, One Team, One Dream!

Ghana

Black Stars: Here To Illuminate Brazil

Greece

Heroes Play Like Greeks

Honduras

We Are One Country, One Nation, Five Stars On The Heart

Iran

Honour Of Persia

Italy

Let's Paint The FIFA World Cup Dream Blue

Japan

Samurai, The Time Has Come To Fight!

South Korea

Enjoy It, Reds!

Mexico

Always United, Always Aztecas

The Netherlands

Real Men Wear Orange

Nigeria

Only Together We Can Win

Portugal

The Past Is History, The Future Is Victory

Russia

No One Can Catch Us

Spain

Inside Our Hearts, The Passion Of A Champion

Switzerland

Final Stop: 07-13-14 Maracana!

Uruguay

Three Million Dreams ... Let's Go Uruguay

U.S.

United By Team, Driven By Passion

 

 

Getting Through

One thing that's gotten me through my really, really dark past week is continuing with the Paul McCartney bio by Barry Miles. Paul is really an Innocent, a Dork, like me. Here's what Paul had to say about a conversation with John Lennon in the last days of Apple, when John was charging too many expenses to the company:

Someone warned me that he was going to get into a real problem and I remember saying to him, "Look, I'm not trying to do anything, I'm really trying to help you..." and as I said it I heard my devilish voice, like "I'm trying to trick you!" I said, "Look, John, I'm right." And he said, "You fucking would be, wouldn't you? You're always right, aren't you?" So to be right was wrong! He admitted I was right but to be right didn't bring any rewards, it brought scorn...

That's pretty much how I usually feel! :)

Later in the book, Paul talks about living with Linda in NYC for a few weeks in '70. He gets to walk around incognito in beard and army jacket in Harlem, until one day...

I was watching a playground full of little kids through the railings. They were skipping rope and playing all their games and whereas we would have done "Salt, vinegar, mustard, pepper...," theirs were all like rhythm and blues; they sounded just like lyrics to me! I was beguiled. I was watching it for just a few minutes, really loving it, but this black guy just happened to be walking past and he said, "You a teacher?" I said, "No." He said, What're you watching those children for?" I said, "I'm from England, this is fascinating for me." He said, "If you ain't off this block in a quarter-hour I'm going to put you off."

So now I'm walking alongside him like Ratso out of "Midnight Cowboy," trying to keep up with him, and he was walking stronger and I was walking, trying to keep his attention, saying, "Look, this is what gives you guys a bad name." I said, "I'm a tourist, I've come here, I love this whole place, I love the Apollo, I love these kids. I'm not a pervert, don't you try making me out a pervert, don't go jumping to conclusions..." He said, "Just get off the block, man, just get off the block." And he peeled off.

Paul goes on to complain to some nearby shop owners about what the guy had just said to him! :)  (1) I thought the local guy was great for protecting his neighborhood kids. (2) I thought it was hilarious that it was "Paul McCartney" being taken for a pervert. (3) I thought it was even more hilarious that Paul McCartney ran after the guy, trying to convince him that he wasn't a pervert, and THEN went and complained to local shop owners! :)  INNOCENT! DORK!

Heavy, heavy

The utter heaviness I felt Sunday night drained into Monday, unfortunately. I got enough sleep, but I woke up Monday morning on top of covers with whole face swollen from crying. While I usually sleep on top of covers in the summer months, this time when I woke up, I still felt so barren and desolate and grief-stricken, I knew I couldn't handle the whole trudge to the bus-stop, etc., and needed a whole lot more time to myself, this time UNDER protective covers. So I called in sick to a job I really like, then turned up the AC and got more sleep under sheets and a thick comforter. Stayed there all Monday.

On Tuesday, I, out of guilt at being absent the day before, really kicked some editing ass! :) The stuff I've been doing is academic and difficult. Usually about 10-15 pages per day is the norm on a regular day. Today, I did 34 pages! Not only being "laser-focused" out of guilt at missing yesterday, but also because of a conscious decision to not LOOK at ANY personal online stuff: no e-mail, no Facebook, no Amazon, no eBay... no bullshit! Amazing how much you get done when ALL you are thinking about is your work.

Also today, my boss beckoned to me an hour or so into the day. "Oh, jesus," I thought. "She's going to yell at me about how I can't be absent if I want this job..." Instead, she led me to my new office. I'm no longer in the supply room! :)

Lonely

When I was a kid, my idea of marriage was formed by my parents' mutual psychosis/hatred and then things I read as a teen, like the below, by Sylvia Plath, who confirmed literarily the utter awful absence I was witnessing in my daily life:

How the elements solidify! —
The moonlight, that chalk cliff
In whose rift we lie

Back to back. I hear an owl cry
From its cold indigo.
Intolerable vowels enter my heart.

The child in the white crib revolves and sighs,
Opens its mouth now, demanding.
His little face is carved in pained, red wood.

Then there are the stars - ineradicable, hard.
One touch : it burns and sickens.
I cannot see your eyes.

Where apple bloom ices the night
I walk in a ring,
A groove of old faults, deep and bitter.

Love cannot come here.
A black gap discloses itself.
On the opposite lip

A small white soul is waving, a small white maggot.
My limbs, also, have left me.
Who has dismembered us?

The dark is melting. We touch like cripples.

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

I witnessed "starkly lonely" in real life and then I read about it in literature. There's been no escape from it.

My father continues to call my mother every year on her birthday even though they've been divorced for 37 years (and even though he doesn't speak to either his kids or his grandkids). And Ted Hughes wrote "Birthday Letters" for Sylvia Plath.