Think I'll be a Jr. Frogman

I really must get this school thing together but, there are so many issues at work here.
I had come to a bit of an epiphany. By going on hunches and doing things without knowing why I have set up a good plan and base for my first career.
I continued studying ASL even though my Dad bailed on me, and I just learned the other day that indeed if I become a therapist specializing in in addiction and abuse, if I speak ASL, I will likely be able to find work easily.
I can have my own practice and work part-time for an agency. Sounds good.
However the idea of succeeding in school is so very intimidating that the act of even applying is tainted through and through. I am essentially paralyzed.
I had thought by taking classes and succeeding for the past 3 or 4 years I had broken the pattern and overcome the bug-a-boo.
Wrong. No matter how much I called taking classes school, something in my psyche knew it was classes. Now that I’m facing real school all the old shit has come flying out and is swirling like some ghost ridden miasma over my head, freezing my bones and brain.

Clearly we're Swedes

I am informed by my cousins husband that I look like my Aunt Gunhild. I mention this to my Father and he says “Oh yeah, I’ve always thought that” Well its news to me. This is she. I’m not totally seeing it. I’m told its especially around the eyes.
I will cop to the forehead. I have frequently looked in the mirror and asked myself "WTF? Where did this come from?" Then consoled myself with the thought that perhaps it's a sign of big brains.'
The people on that side of the family all seem to have these amazing lips. People pay big bucks for the likes now. I didn't get lucky on that front.
I'm also told I look like her mother, my grandmother. I hope so, she's smokin', at least in the photo's from before the 20's. And her taste in hats WOW. When my scannners fixed I'll post the ultimate picture of ladies of the 'Teens.

It's a big ass sky

When I asked My Dad to look in upon my web log his reply was
“I haven’t really looked at any yet, my impression is that they’re like shouting down a deep well”
I suppose that’s a definite possible.
But this is just my journal and the well I’m always plumbing is my being. I just have to know everything about me and then hopefully by extending outward, will learn everything there is to know about the human condition. I am someone who WOULD like to be the fly on the wall even though I know full well it would hurt my feelings very much.
But even the act of hurting is so very educational that I seem to frequently throw caution to the winds and choose some of the most painful and idiotic approaches to situations and life in general. Just for the experience of it. Just because I can sometimes dredge up that puzzle piece that makes the picture ever so much clearer.
When I used to study Magick I would often follow this exercise: When I walked or skated somewhere I would just let the traffic and streetlights decide how to go. Just to see what arose. I followed impulses and I think some of that is still ingrained. I tend to go on hunches and from gut feelings instead of logic. The analyzation comes afterwards.
Most of the newer magickal books deal fairly straightforwardly with intuition. The classic instruction is that it is essentially a muscle, and it gets stronger or atrophies depending on how you develop it. They instruct to listen to the inner bell in order to learn to distinguish it’s own sound from the static and the death knells.
OK that flowery part is me, not the books.
This society doesn’t offer much instruction for the leap before you look-ers. It counsels prudence, careful scrutiny, wise investments, and never, ever spend the capital.
So that even when one knows, just knows, that something is true, good and real we will hunch past because the voices of reason are clamoring in shrill fear, drowning out that little kid voice saying “I wanna ride the roller coaster”.
Sometimes little kids DO die at Disney and sometimes they die like my cousin, alone in a trailer full of beer bottles, and sometimes they die like Amelia Earhart pursuing the ridiculous impossibilities.
They none of them don’t die, but they some of them don’t live.

“It’s such a gamble when you get a face”

My friend Lizard Breath had gotten me thinking about faces several weeks ago when she was telling me about her experience of meeting her biological family. Apparently for the first time in her life, (other than her own child) she was able to see faces that held reflections and variations of her own face.
I reminded myself to really study the faces around me at this impromptu reunion. Some of my cousins I hadn’t seen for close to 30 years. Our family has become scattered physically and ideologically since the 70’s. We are not even so close within the nuclear family.
To first jump in a car with my sibs and only parent for 6 hours, then walk into a room where myriad pieces of dead Aunts and Uncles faces kept popping into view was really interesting.
The other interesting part is that a lot of the women in our family have not been able to, and/or have chosen not to, have children. There are a lot of adoptions in our family. So theirs are faces that originate from a completely different set of faces. Yet those are some of the people I have seen more frequently along the years, so they are actually very familiar to me.
Note: The above pictures belong to my family not me, I did not take them, there will be more of such in the future.

"I see the city's ripped backside"

Pheewwww!
If you have happened to have read the Amber books you’ll know somewhat what I mean when I say that was a hell ride. It’s not that it was bad, it was that we shot through so many emotional and physical worlds so fast, that it became quite dizzying. Add altered sleep and food schedules, the sights, sounds and smells of childhood memories and its a bowl of surreal stew. I have so much new historical, intellectual, insider, and heavy information that the chewing process should be going on for several years.
That seems to be my process. Information is like a good wad of Bazooka. I chew it and chew it then blow a bubble of conclusions. I hold that until it collapses, then chew it over some more. Bubble after bubble forms and the viscosity of each is informed by the previous ones.

Flowers to infinity for Aunt Eunie

Well Im off at the gaddafull hour of 6:15 AM for a road trip to Buffalo. My best and favourite and only remaining Aunt has died and we have to be there for a 2:00PM service.
Now before we do the whole polite society thing of “I’m sorry for your loss” and all that, let me say that she is mostly glad, I am mostly glad and the rest of the family are mostly glad. She has been suffering miserably for years. Had we lived in a different age she probably wouldn’t have been forced to pay rent on the old worn out apartment her body had become, where the plumbing and wiring no longer worked adequately at all.
I am not a complete fan of modern medicine, keeping suffering people suffering for years till death, keeping horribly deformed babies alive when they should be allowed to pass off and try again, etc. etc. No sir, I don’t like it.
However I also know that some friends and relations would not be here living good lives without it. So it’s a bit of a trade off.
I am a supporter and advocate of the Hemlock Society, Marian’s Friends and Planned Parenthood and all that that implies.
And just to make it more interesting, I don’t believe in suicide as an available choice personally. But I darn well believe it is an inalienable right for those who choose it. I don’t believe in war, (well, clearly it exists, I mean I don’t agree in engaging in it). I’m adamantly against capitol punishment. I try to avoid violence and killing.
However if someone wants to do violence to themselves, as long as it is only to themselves and it doesn’t leave a hideous mess for someone else to deal with, it’s their own trip.
That hideous mess issue is a really big issue though. Hideous messes can happen in people’s heads too. That is a really good reason not to kill oneself, the likelihood of it leaving a huge smear of trauma over a lot of people is really good.
I keep a list, People Who’ve Died (ala Jim Carroll). I keep track of how they died. Natural, murder, suicide and slow suicide, I think are my categories. There may be one other, I don’t wanna look right now. The suicides and slow suicides do tend to make me mad though. Yes, it is their right, but I tend to get angry anyway. Most of them left really huge messes literally and figuratively.
That’s a bad choice in my view. But it just keeps happening anyway.
I hope when I die to leave not much icky but lot’s of little bequests that make people happy I loved them and happy I died and thought of them. I want to be burned to a crisp and I want a speaker for the dead. I hate those funerals where they ignore the reality of the person, the good, the bad and the completely silly. Instead choosing just platitudes.
Recently I went to a church funeral for an old, old friend. Being at a church funeral I expected the worse. I was so relieved when the minister just jumped right in and in a very kind and loving way, acknowledged the suicide and that our friend was a dual-diagnosed schizophrenic, drug addict who was also a wonderful, kind and sweet being. Everyone felt able to speak their real feelings then. The result was one of the most cathartic and beautiful funerals I’ve ever been to.
And to think that sweet Brucifer who lived mostly on the street, who owned virtually nothing and had no money, had such a beatific and restorative send off is so very heartening. That thing about the meek, maybe it does come true.

"What is real?"

the killer queen and the real bunny

I just love making up words

Dreamed this morning that I was trying to buy a house on the “country” part of Woodward. Does such a thing even exist? I doubt it. But man, it was a very cool old rambling ranch with real dirt and trees on a real lot. If I could find such a house in real life that was affordable, I’d consider it. My current one is more Charles Addams-ish. Which is wonderful but I’m looking at all those stairs and down the line will it all be so wonderful when my knees really go?

Anyway, I want to say something about politics. Which is that I have nothing much to say about it in this venue. This is not to say that I don’t care or vote. Or that I don’t have extremely strong feelings about it. Therein lays the problem, my feelings are just that, very strong intuited feelings. I don’t read the 8000 kajillion books about it. I can’t watch the news or I’d stick a fork in my forehead. I get my news from the web and the Daily Show, which in my view is at least better than the lady my classmate met, who gets hers from EWTN channel and Fox.

I was raised by staunch Democrat, ethicistic, atheist, liberal, intellectual parents who slaved us out to the party as envelope stuffers and lickers for months, nay, years, at a time. But I myself am not a Democrat, or a Republican, nor a Libertarian, or an Anarchist or really anything clear or easy at all.

I am someone who looks at the candidates faces and their eyes and says: “oooh that one sleeps with Satan, that ones a huge liar, that one opens the gates to the pit when he/she opens their mouth. (If you’ve ever seen L. Ron Hubbard on film you may notice that very same phenomena.)
Or conversely,
“Hey I may disagree completely with what that ones saying, but I’ll be damned if they’re not completely sincere”

Since I hate lies with a fury and a passion, I don’t favour many politicians at all. Or religious leaders. Or salespeople. Or addicts. Or players. Or military leaders. Or corporate people. Or PC nazi’s. Or extremist’s. Or Fundamentalists. Heck the list goes on and on. I could be a misanthrope, but I’m really not quite, I call myself anthrophobic indicating my uneasiness with and generalized fear of humans. But it’s their words and deeds and not themselves that raise all the issues.

So if you want to talk politics in a learned fashion, and discuss in depth articles, I again refer you to:
http://www.markmaynard.com
Those folks are funny, very learned and sincere and just a little over the top which I end up enjoying.
I just wanted to get that whole politics schmear out of the way, because as you may have noticed, my posts have been and are likely to remain, self serving observations about my relationship to myself, the people around me, and the world that I experience in my head and on the physical plane daily. And not much more.

I am the bunny killer

Ok that's it, I have killed the bunnies, I've done shiteloads of laundry, and this is my Bela Lugosi Lily. After never getting to see it last year when I broke the buds off planting it, it was spectacular this year.

Wow

The energy MUST have really changed, I actually started cleaning, a lot. My meditation room had been a wreck ever since I stored a desk in the middle of it, then the cat puked in a festive cascade from the very top of my altar, and I cleaned out a closet in the only out of the way floor space in the house. But no more, the altar cloths are clean and fresh, its almost all dusted and vacuumed and its totally walkable, sittable, whatever.

The cat looked a little crazed sniffing about. I broke her water dish in the process, she was unhappy about that. ( I got her a new one no fear). Then the hallway got vacuumed and now I’m about to hit my room.

Or maybe it’s because I would rather do anything than fill out my student financial aid forms.

The cars, the bars

"I’m going to Detroit and I’m never coming back
Ya I’m going to Detroit and I’m never coming back
Ya I’m going to Detroit and I won’t be back
I won’t be back"

Borax

I learned recently that my neighbor, Radiolady, has to sell and move because she just can’t afford this area as a single. She just put so much work into the house and garden it’s a damn shame. But for the kind of money she’ll then have available, she could move to New Center or Hamtramck and have a huge house with only a 400 or maybe less, monthly. I’ve got to say this is tempting stuff.

I could get, outright, a cool old house in Hamtramck and pocket 200 grand. I wouldn't need to work for a while with that kind of change. So it wouldn’t actually matter so much that I’d be nowhere near anything I know and love. The other tempting option is the same trip only in a different direction, out into the country. But then you’re much more car dependent, and everybody knows my feelings about driving, I frickin’ hate cars. But I don’t like big cities either. Face it, I'm an Ann Arbor girl.

I guess it’s just the lure of making that money off the house. While I find it pretty gross and wierd and creepy that the value has just about tripled since I bought it, (in better financial days obviously), being REALLY poor other than the house, sucking the money out of it seems like good, clean American fun. This place costs an average of ten thousand a year to keep up, and thats just keep up, not doing anything major to better it.

Maybe I’m just dwelling on it today because it’s the first day of art fair here, and no, I’m not going to capitalize it, it doesn’t rate it in my opinion. The traffic in my neighborhood just septupled. I can hear the goofy suburban ladies inane conversations from my bedroom window as they sojourn into the thrall and if Oliver wasn’t sleeping I’d probably open the windows and put on very loud Black Sabbath. For her pleasure.

Then I’ll go down and look at my kitchen floor with the holes in it and the 4 layers of linoleum that I’m trying to get stripped off to get to the wood to make the repairs. Then go to take a shower using robogrips to turn on the broken faucet in the really slow draining tub and I am so very tempted, so very tempted, to just move to Niles or Watervliet where there’s no traffic or commerce or alleged art at all, and I bet I could get a fabulous house for REALLY, REALLY, cheap. Probably with an inhouse plumber thrown in.

I changed my mind...

I do have something cheery to say, and that is, that I’m so proud and excited for my three friends, Karl LaFong, F. Rhetoric, and Cheddar, some of whom were really down in the pit swimmin’ with the darkest of angels when they decided to get into the prickly embrace of sobriety. Between the three of them they have over six years in. As expected they all turned out to be bright, sincere, sweet, sensitive people. And a couple of them, hilariously irascible.

So this is how it’s just gonna be...

So tired, the store job kicks my ass. When I first started it kicked my ass also. Then I started getting stronger and stronger. I got some decent shoes. I started getting some muscles and stamina. I did better and better as the years went by. Then I had a couple surgeries the first of of which went kinda wrong, the next of which went really wrong. The horribly expensive shoes wore out. Now if I do a four hour shift I have to sleep 3 hours.

On Mondays, cuz I’m a homework slacker, I get off work then play drums until I’m really, really tired and usually quite frustrated. Then go to drum class. Then I can crash for awhile. While I tell myself its for just a quick, rejuvenating nap it invariably turns into a long stupefying nap, then I spend the rest of the day being a schlub.

This last month adds to the stultifying mix, extreme tension in my home life. The result is the house is dirty, the energy levels are all fucked up, and it doesn’t seem worth it to get up and do a damn thing. However something has to change the energy, I can no longer sit and stew. (I am so good at stewing, I meant what I said about grudge holding.)

So while I didn’t go about solving the problem the super high road way, I also didn’t take the lowliest low road. I, at least, addressed an individual face to face for the 15 seconds requisite and decided to skip the “preserve the friendship” part. I got some support for that approach from a few people who said if I didn’t want the friendship to just go ahead and remove the pain source.
Done.
Its not like I had zero interest in the friendship, but when alcoholism is the factor, what’s the point?
This is something like the 10th friendship of some significance that has terminated in the last 10 years or so, where I trace the real source of the problem to addiction. Not mine, someone else's. If we went back farther in time, the numbers would grow exponentially.

It’s just getting so very old. But when there is little or no return for your energy, so little actual dialogue, just boozy, stale monologues repeated over and over while someone breathes alcohol in your face what's left anyway? It won’t change until it changes and that's nothing you can control at all, so rather be done.

This whole giving your whole life to a THING is freaking me out. You just hand over everything you are, could be and will do, to an inanimate object. What the hell is that? I’m not saying I haven’t had my skirmishes with such slavery, but I seem to have a finely tuned sense of personal freedom. When a stupid thing starts requiring my very core self and values, I turn and run. I don’t care how much fun it’s promising. I don’t care if its a substance or a job or a relationship.

The other part that's bugging me, is the age of these people. I can see how in your twenties you haven’t figured it out yet, but the people involved are in their thirties, forties and fifties. One of them had already done over 20 years in prison as payment and just took another twenty to pay for just a couple months of getting high. Yet it’s his primary relationship and he’ll apparently never, ever, put anyone or anything ahead of it. It, an inanimate object, a thing.

I can’t think of a goofy, cheery, twist to end this on, everything about this is so annoying. I suppose the the best I can do is mention that at least I’m mostly over the furious and into the sad.

"Who knows what evil lurks in the mind?"

Because I have Diabetes I have a really weird syndrome. Apparently every diabetic has their own glucose release cycle from the pancreas, So at some fairly regular time during the day there is a release, and a time when they are running a little short just prior to that. Ok that’s the part I sort of, understand. We think we’ve figured out that mine is just around dawn based on 2 things, one being that I always have really high morning sugars, which then somewhat normalize throughout the day. The other being that I usually have really fucked up dreams right before I wake up. They are not exactly nightmares but are usually full of stress, aggra, and anger. A lot of the time there is a lot of me yelling at people who I’m fairly pissed off at in real life.

Today it changed from weird to furious in short order, something about freaky dogs, a creepy basement and a refrigerator box, moving quickly to me fighting with a whole group of people I’m having an issue with, and I’m pulling hair, slapping faces and calling people pussies and jerks. I’d like to try to be philosophical about it, and say to myself;
“see, this is a great example of how NOT to handle this situation and how it accomplished NONE of your desired outcomes.”
But I have to admit that what it mostly does is make me kind of depressed that I still have these kinds of situations in my life needing to be handled at all, and that the shrieking, bar brawling, kicking ass and taking names, Stella is still right here, uncomfortably nearby, ready to go it. It seems a little ludicrous that she should be so close to the surface as it’s been years since I’ve been in a physical altercation.

People express such shock and disbelief when I say I’ve been clinically depressed since the age of six, or that I just got out of the hospital again, or that I’m a person just brimful of hatred and anger. And that, man, I am just an evil, grudge holder.
I’m always hearing the likes of;
“But you look so wel"
"But you’re always so cheerful"
"But you’re always trying to be helpful, kind and funny.”
I’m not wanting to be thought of as a big fake or two faced Janus type. (Who would?) But I’m certainly not about love, light and unicorns. I'm just trying really, really hard to not take it out on say, the retail public, or the people nonchalantly hanging round when the jerk almost runs me over in his SUV, on the cell phone, when I had the walk sign and he was turning. Because expressing it as rage, out loud, is cancerous and I know it. Given the chance, that shit spreads like lymphoma. We all know it, and we all live examples of it everyday.

So I guess Im just wanting to acknowledge that when you are polite, friendly and reasonable to me, that I really, really appreciate it. Because I SO very well know how difficult that can be to keep up. And that, my friends, is why I so loved it when Kosmo Kramer said;
“Manners are the oil that greases the wheels of civilization.”

This isn't working right....

Well this is supposed to go into my profile, but me being who I am I can't make it work correctly. Maybe I can get the nephew over to help me including making the URLs in the previous posts into hyperlinks. Clearly I can talk the talk but I can't walk the walk.
Note: This art of me is by Lissa Pederson

"Don't stand so close to me"

“I live off you, you live off me
and the whole world lives off of everyone
ya really gotta be exploited
ya really gotta be exploited
by somebody, by somebody, by somebody,
La la la la”

Poly Styrene


Lately I’ve been infuriated. This is not exactly an unknown condition in my life. I mean I live with roommates. I own a house. I have some really annoying health problems causing me to become somewhat disabled. And the politic shenanigans going on, I can’t even begin to speak about or my head will pop, just freakin’ pop.

But right at this moment I’m on about exploited children. OK, lets face it, I was an exploited child. I’m not going into detail here at this time, I don’t know you well enough yet. I will probably talk more about my own experiences at some point but let me say this, at least my own parents didn’t sell me down the river.

I’m talking about so called child & preteen modeling. This can be some sick ass shit. Don’t think there’s a problem?
http://childsupermodels.com/
(Warning - not work safe and in my eyes, truly obscene.)
Now tell me there’s no problem. A 13 year old is not supposed to be photographed with her/ his ass hanging out and the hand down the pants. Not to mention, I’m told by Mark Maynard, http://markmaynard.com, that one of the ways some pageants make extra money is by selling all day passes to “amateur” photographers.

Where is the parent? Probably behind this 100%. They will say “But they want to do it”. Well they’re children, what do they know from exploitation? What did I know?

Talk about your slippery slopes. And that my friends, is why I’m so incensed, I FULLY realize that there are children who are in stolen into, and sold into, bondage and slavery in brothels and are in the hands of sexual predators at this moment. I am quite aware that small living beings are being bought and sold in this country as we speak. And that compared to little Tiffany or Vanessa up there, their lives are ceaseless torment as sexual slaves. But I defy anyone to tell me that parading children in such a fashion in such a venue as “child supermodels”, is not directly contributing to the per view of children as sexual OBJECTS which is wrong, wrong, wrong.

I don’t actually believe in evil but that is as close to that edge as it gets. The idea that any parent is making one dime off this, is infuriating. Especially in light of the stupid shit people are willing to put their lives on hold to champion or denounce. You can all insert here your own version of something useless, non-constructive or idiotic you’ve seen on TV in the past 6 months or more. I’ll give the example of, furor over Janet Jackson’s (a full grown woman, purported to be in full command of her faculties) nipple. The gianormous red herring factor at the very least.

But lest you think that I, a full grown woman, am in full command of my own faculties, let me state for the record, that I also find NASCAR to be completely obscene.

I love the smell of old canvas in the morning

Oooh, the cicadas are out now, to me that is the sign of serious summer. The sound is both nostalgic and foreboding. On the one hand, it causes me to instantly recall growing up in Ithaca and sleeping out in the yard in an ancient, funny smelling tent. Brownie watching, (shooting stars, if you haven’t been exposed to that particular colloquialism) and the first time I found an abandoned exoskeleton of a cicada clinging to the sticky sap of the Gaylor's massive blue spruce and being fairly freaked out by it.

Then again, it also reminds me of laying awake, drenched in sweat, not being able to sleep for hours. Or having to crawl way down into the roots of the privacy hedge and sit there with the spiders just to get some deep shade.

There is a god awful black and white polaroid of me, about age 3, bent over in a bucket of water, having stripped off my offending wet bathing suit (which I’m told was my wont). It was taken there in that yard which had been (in my view) ruthlessly re-landscaped the last time I nosed around there. I guess that's OK, I guess it has to be, the cicadas are here too.

Note: Not the exact picture I was lookin' for but damn close

"And everythings a dollar in this box"

“besides, I never talk to strangers anyway”
Tom Waits


When I was first starting to write songs I prayed that I could be like Tom Waits. Please tell me, if Leonard Cohen has a pulitzer, why doesn’t he? Recently I was making a Tom Waits collection for my friend/lawyer/employer Lizard Breath and I realized that between David Bowie and Tom Waits, just the 2 of them alone, have written probably 40% of all my favourite songs.
If I had to pick one song each, this year it would probably be “A Soldiers Things” by Tom Waits and “Eight Line Poem” by Bowie.

I used to wish that I could ever do anything remotely as genius as Tom. I was deep in the throes of “A Foreign Affair” and the “Tom Waits Anthology” at the time and “Burma Shave” and “Somewhere” were just slaying me. To this day his version of “Somewhere” will break me down on the spot, (I’m not much of a weeper, I’m more a leaker). For some reason, which is as muddled as any of those evocatized memory triggers we all have can be, it makes me think of the relationship I both had and didn’t have with my Mom as she was dying for 13 years. Tell me that wouldn’t kick anybody's ass.
Anyway, as I was wishing, praying and cogitating on just what made him so very exceptional, I began having great difficulty singing. In retrospect I know that the most likely reason is that I was working a phone job, as well as performing and rehearsing a lot without having had any formal training. I get this, but I find it really amusing looking back, that for all that wishing, what I ended up with was - singing like him. For two years I had chronic laryngitis. Luckily Evil Pete had been on the road for the Vertical Pillows and had learned a remedy for when the show just had to go on.

Here tis:
Separate an egg
feed the yolk to the cat or something
Stir the white and add a few drops of peppermint or wintergreen oil
Sip whenever necessary to vocalize clearly, it really works.

Here’s the drawback, as can be surmised, it tastes like holy hell. Also, I can assure you that throwing a little dark beer in only makes matters worse. For two years I had to steel myself to it on a regular basis. Gahhh. It also gives you the most peculiar peppermint burps. Of course nowadays most people are sensible enough to NOT EAT RAW EGGS on the advice of some TWIT on the inter web AREN'T THEY?

So there you have it, and I think its worth a dollar, my advice is to NEVER, EVER eat raw eggs except when you’re eating raw eggs.

"It’s a thin line between love and hate"

“She opens up the door and lets you in,
never once asks where you‘ve been”

Here’s the thing about me and caffeine.
In the early 80’s I was, among other things, a serious tweaker. I have noticed this trend, ecto-morphs who use tend to become Junkies, meso-morphs who use tend to become tweakers. Cerebretonics seem to be fair game to all kinds of things but frequently it turns out to be sex.

Why did I become a tweaker? Well, I always suspect it was due in large part to my relationship to caffeine. I adore caffeine. I am highly allergic to caffeine. To this day I have not been able to kick caffeine right out of my life. Imagine my dismay when in ‘93 I went to visit my dying Grandmother in Seattle, and found a cappuccino machine in a Burger King. This was my first foreboding of the caffeine culture soon to reach across the country and now the world. It feels very much the same as being a nondrinker in this alcohol fueled culture. (Which is, for the most part, also one of my struggles).

So, given that I needed to work 3 jobs and party incessantly, and that caffeine compromises my immune system and severely aggravates one of my genetic illnesses, what other recourse did I think I had at the time?
Needless to say it was another in a series of really bad ideas.
I had no idea at the time that crank is the very devil, that one only has to smell it to know that it comes straight from the pit and that putting something in your body that looks, smells and tastes exactly like you scraped it off the bottom of the cat box is inestimably stupid. But it wasn’t caffeine, and it was so much stronger! How exciting was that?

I did gain one, single, boon from it, in an indirect manner, I met Uncle Bunny because of it.
I was sent to him by my friends who said to me;
“Stella, darlin’, you’re psychotic, and we think you should go talk to this guy who can help you. Tell him what idiot shit you’re up to and he’ll sell you some supplements to counteract that and you’ll feel and behave ever so much better.”
They were right.

I probably can’t get away with saying what he suggested, and what worked for me or the FDA will arrest me or something. But once I was assisted to stop being psychotic, I realized that caffeine, for all it’s problems was at least a known toxin. So I gave up the other and never went back. However, it didn’t end there, as I discovered that among other things my metabolism was now supremely fucked. It takes years to recover from that stuff. I still have some issues and its been what, over 20 years now.

So given those extremes I have decided that known toxins are generally the better choice. Like sugar. I happen to be a chocoholic diabetic. How pathetic is that? Its the caffeine thing again also, only in chocolate its the double whammy. When I work at the store, I stand right next to a huge stack of super-fudgy, chocolate-chocolate chip brownies, some of which I’ve found to weigh over a half pound, made at the restaurant by the fantastic baker. And, they just reek of chocolate. It’s like being madly in love with a married man, that you have to see socially, who doesn’t love you, but who occasionally uses you for sex.

But, in my distrust of Nutra-sweet, Splenda, other chem-sweets and chemicals, at least I know where I stand when I go back for more chocolate and tea. I’m making that perfect cup of properly brewed, black tea with milk, with my eyes wide open.
Someday I'll get what I want out of this relationship, someday it won’t hurt like this.
Then there’s tobacco.....

On laziness and creativity

Yummy, porch sitting whilst a thunderstorm carouses. Here is why I wanted this laptop, so I could hang out on the porch in the all too brief summer of Michigan and play.
One of my most favoured and all too decadent activities is to lay on the couch out here, play solitaire or psuedo-intellectual blog lurker, and just lean over to flip the burgers.

So, I was reading someone's latest entry and they were questioning the ”how to” of song writing.
I thought that rather than respond in their comments thus taking up a ton of their personal space and time, that I would discourse here, as it was something I would’ve addressed eventually anyway.

It’s been really exciting to have found someone that I can write well with. It took a long time as I never thought to define what I was actually seeking when I first started out. I was then mostly, just viewing myself as a singer. I didn't actually believe I could be a "real" songwriter. It turns out that that was stupid, because I’m not that great of a singer, and have really only vastly improved over the last 5-6 years. In spite of having been born with a decent voice, singing, for me, has become a means to an end. The end being able to put my writing to music. Which, it seems, is one of the only ways to get heard if you are not fond of, or suited to, the new word salad, poetry slam type of performance art. I am vastly unsuited to that, by writing style, temperament and probably, sadly, age.

When I first started writing with “real musicians” I was overawed and naive about what a singer/lyricist means. I thus believed what people thrust upon me, that as the two former, in addition to being a female, I was on the bottom on the pyramid. The mere canary. Throw fat girl into that mix, and I emerged with a fairly serious inferiority complex. I think this is potentially why I sometimes preen just a tiny bit too much when I’m cranking out some decent stuff.

During my years with Skinflower I put out a few good songs, I did a lot of vocal arrangement. I wrote a few songs with a few other folks, writing to their music. Sometimes sizing something I had already written to fit. It seemed OK but it really wasn’t.
I realized later that I was constantly having to try to fit preconceptions of what was cool. And not surprisingly I couldn't seem to get the juices flowing at any constant rate for any length of time. I feel I was viewed in a patronizing, owner/ master fashion and was severely critiqued constantly.

I started writing with Oliver, everything was different. He handed me about 200 hundred songs and lyric ideas, then left it primarily up to me. So over the years I’ve been able to just listen to a bunch of different music he’s written and work on whichever tune grabs me at that very moment. Sometimes he’s been taken aback at my completely changing the idea and meaning of something. Sometimes we’ve had to argue for several days about whether he’s going to write me a hook or not. We’ve had creative differences, absolutely. The real difference though, has been that if there is an issue, it’s actually about what’s best for the song itself. Not whether the words are creepy and/or sarcastic enough for the misanthropic guitar player. Or whether the wannabe hipster gets it or not.

I also feel that maturity has really redefined what I think is important enough to write about. Not that we don’t write some goofy stuff. I’d just like to think that the humour is broader and more subtle. Now, since I've had the opportunity to find my very own voice, I can write fairly easily to other peoples music as well. I had also recently worked with another composer and we had written some positively stunning pieces. Unfortunately Junk reared its ugly head and he’s no longer in my life. Very sad, I hate that shit with a passion.

Which brings us to another facet of the creative process that I’ve been debating with some of my much younger musician friends recently. Drugs and creativity. My stance is that the whole “it’s a really necessary part”, is pure bunk, hogwash and myth. Probably perpetuated by Junkies and drunks who seem to love nothing more than taking people down with them.
My view is that time spent pursuing drugs is time lost to creativity, time spent attempting to reach “just the right buzz” is time that could be spent practicing scales while you wait for the muse to show up. I feel that the Kurt Cobains, Billie Holidays and such would have been able to bless our existence at least equally and probably far better without. I don’t believe drugs illuminated them, other than for an evanescent moment or two. And those few moments are swallowed whole by the years of misery.
And I say this from the perspective of someone who is pretty sure they know of what they speak.

Wow, sure like the feel of my favourite soapboxes, I might get mighty comfortable up there, I could probably just go right ahead and take a nap.

Working over the weekend

I feel like while I have a tiny break from work and the network is actually running the way it’s spozed to, I should get in here and rewrite my lost entry or say something salient.
However as its still early and I havent had my proper cuppa tea I just don’t feel inspired.
You would already know how I like my tea, my relationship to caffeine and about Karl LaFong and Charlie Daytona who are coming over later to play music, had I not lost that other post.
It’s so painful and I feel so wistful because I am a classic three finger typist and losing something I typed away at for an hour makes me daggers mad.
But the teapot awaits, the dogs need to be sat, Im sure there’s plenty of filing to do, and Oliver just sleeps blissfully on, like the world is just prepared to wait for his attentions.

Holy Shit

I lived in London in 2000, I rode the Jubilee, Circle and Bakerloo lines 2-6 times a day. I have had to evacuate for bomb threats but there were never any actual explosions and this was in the middle of the Jubilee year.
I cannot imagine what sheer fuckitude and mayhem must be going on, Kings Cross has like at least 6 lines running through it.
My brother has already spoken to former co-workers in London and the entire transportation system is down and the troops are out in full force and they're just beginning to pull out the bodies.
Londoners are somewhat used to the whole bomb thing in a way that that we are not yet, but this is really massive and far reaching. I dont think they've had something this insane for a long, long time.

Accchh

Ok I have learned several new things about this process:
1. That I must write off line and then post it or risk losing the frickin' post I JUST spent an hour writing, through some stupid manuevre on my part.
2. That there seems to be no counter nor anyway to get one that I can find, this makes me a sad panda as that is one of my favourite things, to see comments and stats.
3.That I really am such a massive computer tard, that its a wonder that this is happening at all.
4. That it is better to publish then edit, than to try to act like I know what I'm about.

Untitled

As I live in America, and therefore it was a national holiday (which we don't have enough of, look at those countries with all those Bank Holidays), I, of course, rather than take my day to myself, invited people over for food.
A lot of my life is centered around food, in my house I'm the only one who cooks. It also happens that I'm a fairly superlative cook. I'm not just saying that to brag, its pretty widely believed to be true. Sometimes, you just have a talent and thats that.
There's not really any arrogance necessary because you didn't actually have much to do with it other than develop it or deny it.
I tend to think of barbecuing as a really good way to prove your skills. Cooking over an unregulated heat source you have to adjust your timing, attentiveness and be really flexible. You must also have good prep work and theories. One of my theories is marinade the shit out of things. I like to push the envelope on marination. Because I love Jerry and Sylvia Anderson I think of it as Super-marionation. I try to keep the meat in sauce as long as I can before the guests, were they to ask how long it sat in there, would refuse the food from knowing.
My current favourites are my recipes for teriyaki flank steak, and my version of Tandoori chicken. The Tandoori is really an imitation which involves lots of onions, yoghurt (I make my own), Garam Masala, Hing, Sea-salt, and paprika for colour. I would use cochineal but its a little harder to find. Uncle Bunny suggested a little saffron, he may just have something there.
I also specialise in what I call poverty cooking, which is to take any ingredients at hand and make them into something good. So I cleaned out the fridge for side dishes.
I was only going to have one or two people over, but there was a lot of food and I just knew the usual supects would be sitting at home without having things to do and that can be annoying and/or depressing when you think everyone else is doing something fun. So I invited a crew.
The food was awesome, and not just mine. Uncle Bunny brought a fabulous Bread Salad Fatoush and an amazing fruit shortcake for which he made ginger scones as the shortcake. Uncle Bunny has the magic pastry touch that I don't have. My huge failing as a cook is that I cannot make pie crust, biscuits and scones. I'm contemplating taking a class in pastry offered by one of my favourite customers at the market where I work part-time. I must ferret out the secret of the flaky.
There was an impressive thunderstorm and a nice time was had by all. Since in the last few years I've pretty much abandoned the backyard for the porch, we were able to kick back and enjoy the weather without getting scorched or soaked.
I imagine to myself that the people that go by in their cars, watching me wield my BBQ mop with such adroitness, are really wishing they could come too.
They're too shy or conditioned to ask I suppose, I'd think it potentially could be an interesting way to meet some new folk.
Maybe they have a great BBQ chef in their own life already. I hope so.

Ahem....

So it arose and it was scary to do. But I plunged, as one must, without really testing the waters.
The actual title is "The Sunday Morning Subtle But Obvious Organized Self Abuse Swim Club". And yes, apparently I snagged it before any of the people that were there at the time did, at least around this cyber location. Not that I would mind hearing from any of you who were there, even briefly, at Stoners Blough, Michigan
I do want to make something abundantly clear:
I never took a proper English class past 7th grade, and while just recently I have been learning some grammer fundamentals, due to having taken up a new language, other than it being helpful to learn the proper names of parts of speech in order to learn a different grammer, I dont care.
My spelling is decent, my punctuation is primarily, self invented. I write a lot of songs and poetry where I get to make it up as I go along. At least in my belief system I get to make it up. If your belief system tells you differently, well, that's nice for you.
I have also never taken a proper science or math class since 7th grade, again, I'm making it up as I go along.
I understand that there are people who just have a really hard time with that, that's nice, you're entitled to be rigid or secure or confident or enjoy whatever comforts those systems bring you. I have a bit more of a "by the seat of my pants" approach.
Which is actually kind of ironic as I never wear pants, unless you're English, in which case I almost always do.
The point being if there is some fascinating discourse to be had, fun, swell, and hoopty-do, but I really don't want to dicuss my punctuation and grammer with almost anyone, the notable exceptions being my former or current English teachers.