Dream Song 29

Well, let the youtube links begin. Sometimes I get excited because I realize that things I was jazzed about 7 or 8 years ago have a Whole New Life, thanks to the internet. Ok, mainly just thanks to youtube and wikipedia.Parenthetically, did you guys realize that the Wilco album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot came out seven years ago? It's pretty hard for me to fathom. I was working at a book/music store then and I remember it was originally supposed to have been released on September 11th of 2001 and got pushed back and when it did finally come out there some passages of lyrics that seemed eerily prescient at the time. A few days ago, I moved my passenger seat in my car back and found the cd wedged under the rear floor mat. I've been listening to it again for days. It holds up.

About the same time as the release of that album was also the height of my John Berryman love. The love continues to this day, but boy was I into him back then. I was trying to remember part of one of his poems a few minutes ago and found this clip of him reading one of my favorite of his Dream Songs. Prior to ten minutes ago, I had never heard one of my favorite poets speak, so this is pretty damn exciting for me! He is also clearly smashed -- BONUS!

5 More Minutes

My approach to exercise classes and parties is strikingly similar: Just keep telling myself I can leave in 5 more minutes if I want to. And then I usually end up staying until the end for both and not regretting it.

I'm such a recovering quitter that if I don't let myself have a mental escape hatch, I'd never do anything at all. I'm thinking it was Johnny Cash I heard say "You put the screws on me, I'll screw right out from underneath you." I feel you, Johnny.

This Is Just To Say

One of the ways I used to pass the time in high school, aside from hanging out with my gay boyfriend (Hi Ryan!), reading Edie Sedgwick biographies or eating lunch alone next to the ceramics kiln in the art room, was to memorize poems out of our English class textbooks. One of my favorite poets for memorization was William Carlos Williams. He was a figure, much like Chaka Khan, John Fogerty, or Lindsey Buckingham, who I intuitively understood was famous to adults for once having been someone important, but whose significance mostly escaped me.

Despite this, one of my favorite poems of his to memorize was his This Is Just To Say. If you can't remember it, it'll probably trigger your memory if I tell you it's the short one about the plums and the icebox. Yeah, you know it. Despite my affection for the old guy, when it came time for our class to analyze his dreaded red wheelbarrow poem (memorized that one, too), I didn't just act like I wasn't interested. No, I had to take it a step further. Pejorative usage of the word 'gay' might have been involved. I'm not proud. And you know what the worst part was? Not that I chose to not be brave and not that I chose to sell out something for which I actually had deep affection. No, the worst part was that the classmate I had chosen to act cool for, that I had mocked this poem and poet to in poor taste, was actually fucking related to William Carlos Williams. He was her great-great uncle or something. Hell, her last name was even Williams. Out of a school of 2,000, out of a nation of millions, this was my luck. I completely deserved her disgusted side eye that day.

This is for her:

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
The words
That came out of my mouth
That day

And which
You had probably
Long ago
Forgotten

Forgive me
I was so young
Foolish and
Lame

I Heart My Knock Knees

....but this is not a post about them. At least, not exactly. I spent some time thinking about my knock knees today in yoga class. I've been doing yoga now pretty regularly for about 5 years and I've gotten pretty good. What has been humbling though are there are certain simple poses I just cannot do, regardless of how long I practice. For this, I blame my knock knees.

I used to position myself in classes to ensure I could never see myself in the mirror because the image I saw was different than what I felt I must look like. My anger with myself and the dissonance between how good I felt and how different I looked would ruin my mood and invariably break my concentration. I went for meditation and got hyped up on self-hatred instead.

But then things began to shift in all kinds of ways. I can't attribute the shift to a fixed moment in time or even anything conscious on my part. I just fucking mellowed out. About nearly everything; the way I looked, how other people perceived me, the course my life was taking.It didn't exactly happen when I turned 30, but damn if it wasn't close.

For a while after my mom's diagnosis with Alzheimer's, I went to counseling. It felt good to articulate my anger and voice my worries. My counselor was great and invariably pretty adept at seeing through my bullshit and calling me on it, but I do remember arguing with her somewhat over her insistence that I'm hard on myself. Having a counselor tell a woman she's hard on herself is kind of like a psychic telling you you'll have some decisions to make. Duh. Just generic enough to make you feel like someone understands you. But the thing is, I still think I'm not too hard on myself. In fact, I kind of pride myself on my resilience and my ability to laugh and say 'Man, I really fucked that up. I'll try harder next time.' And I do. And this works for me.

But it wasn't always that way. I wasted many, many years hating who I was and getting sidelined by self-consciousness. I missed out on a lot, but thankfully those times seem to be passing. I've got another birthday coming and I'm grateful that I feel the self-consciousness slipping away. A little vanity is good, but it goes a long way. I'd just rather be happy.

Backyard Boogie

I've been staring at this screen for twenty minutes hoping that something to write about will come to me and instead, all I have are the lyrics to Backyard Boogie going through my head over and over:

"Straight from Inglewood and you know that it's all good/
You can put that on your hood everyday"

While I'm ok with this, I also sense the mounting frustration that's coming with my self-imposed challenge to outblog myself this month and, in the process, sometimes sacrificing quality for quantity. Ahem. Time's up for today in an hour and a half and I know myself. If I walk away, I will sit down on the couch and watch my favorite show, I Survived, until I fall asleep with a half-drunk glass of wine in a plastic tumbler beside me and wake up just in time in the morning to go to yoga.

I Survived is great because it tells first person accounts of people's brushes with death and invariably gives me a leg up on all others who chose not to watch. When the tanker truck collides with the oncoming train, when the hostage-takers are assessing potential hostages for the taking or when an abusive ex-husband invites you into his house to ostensibly sign some paperwork, that shit is ON. I (will) Survived.

Yoga class is great because people fart and other people try not to laugh.

I know that many times throughout this week I've thought of surefire blog topics and, I'm telling you, if I could thing of a single one of those gems right now, I'd be killing it. Instead, I will leave you tonight with some sage words from Mitch Hedberg:

"Sometimes in the middle of the night, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen's too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny"

Centertown

And of course, what I remember are the things I can't take back. How, as a petulant teenager, I would tell her to stop chewing so loud. And other things that shame me and more than I care to write about. And then the helplessness that I am starting to lose hold of the threads that bind my memory to the sound of her voice. What did a sentence sound like? How would she ask me a question? Did she always call me by my middle name?

And once, on a whim, I went to a psychic and she told me not to wait around for love anytime soon but that a move may be in my future. And then she asked if there was anything else I wanted to ask about and I paused and then I said, maybe this one thing. It's not important but I carry it around with me at all times; it hangs here, suspended. And when I do something callous or foolish, I reach inside my chest, right below my sternum and I tug on it until it can be seen, point to it and say, hey, blame this thing.

I can't remember everything that came next, but it had something to do with doorways and a man with a black dog and I'm a loved child.I'm a loved child. And somehow this punctures the thing then and there inside the close room and I feel release. I had thought its pendulous weight corporal, but it was made of something different.

That night I dream of a man with my ears. His back to a darkening sky, in front of a house I've never visited. He is, as always, caught leaning on his Ford. He whistles and a black dog shakes off the road dust and trots toward him, tail wagging. The motion of his head says, she's inside;go home.

Random Memory, Pt. 2

At a Sonics game when there were Sonics games.Remote-controlled blimp hovers overhead. I see it drop something that begins to flutter down towards me.I climb on my seat to reach it and am rewarded with a $50 Safeway Gift Card.

A toddler is next to me, in her mother's arms. She turns to me and asks,"When da pwane fwies by next time, can I catch it?"

"No," I say and recline in my seat to daydream of my spoils and watch Luke Ridnour botch something easy.