I'm gonna try so hard, no one can fault me. If I crack up, at least good tunes soothed me down into the mire. Also, I managed to say exactly the right thing today, though it caused some ripple waves. No sweet bullshit.. just a succinct... "if people are stupid, I don't give a shit".
And if they have a problem with it, they can fuck off.
The cantankerous CTST is back. Let's start with some yummy gaze.
Airiel // Sugar Crystals // The Battle of Sealand // 2007
This video brings me so much joy...
Jesus and Mary Chain // Cracking Up //Munki // 1998
It's a weird thought, one that might not be widely accepted. One that might even be strange after all the posts I've shared... but I think finally there is no Good or Bad. There is no After. Bad things, no, terrible/unspeakable things happen to "good" people and blessings fall upon "bad" people. I don't believe in Karma anymore. So, I don't really believe in a God anymore. We're here. We live. We experience. So that's that.
These moments... they're agonizing and anesthetic. Insidiously small but you walk away wondering where your tribe went and when you stopped seeking them.
Listening to coworkers riff on some television show called Rugrats (which is apparently something you should have known but never did) with fervor you wish was reserved for the things you love. The moment you figure out that the person you've been hanging out with casually is someone you might actually like and the fear that comes with it. The book you read for book club, The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis and how you realize how both disgusted you are by its contents as well as how much you ironically now see yourself and the caricatures in the interactions around you. The impromptu happy hours and the uncomfortable realization you have nothing interesting to add anymore because the things you find interesting are glossed over (and rightfully so, they're all desirably younger). This makes you want the interactions you had with your Exes, the ones you see or talk to every couple of weeks, and wonder why and how you didn't work. Just like the characters in that damn Ellis novel but with more esoteric, metaphorical meaning/nonsense. Or less, now that you think about it. Or is it the Ellis logic wrapping itself surreptitiously into your mind?
The careful and solitary journey into hermitage.... or is it something else?
Maybe ennui is inevitable. Maybe this is Ellis' point. I can't say for sure.
This skin may not fit anymore but this song and others of its ilk continually do.
This, I can live with.
Chapterhouse // Come Heaven // Whirlpool // 1991
Beneath your skin, I'm swimming
In your eyes, I'm drowning
Days speed by, sleeping
Distant times come nearer and go
Into the sky, soaring
Come to me, heaven
Climbing high, melting
Distant times come nearer and go
First day of sunshine in ages, in more ways than one, and this limp gypsy soaks it up. Tadpole in the rain. Despicable dehydration, you vanishing thing. That nemesis, at best, an insatiable, terribly venomous snake retreats and with weary lips, any starving eejit worth their salt will suck its milky poison from those plump cerulean veins with a vehemence not seen in months. Clean and bright, the life blood flows again.
As one of my dearest friends remarked today after I said something about a venus flytrap vagina, "Your mojo is flowing!" Damn right, babe and it's about fucking time.
She-Devils, I'm on the fence about... moody Montreal, elements of trip-hop even...still, the fuzz is a good feel. Definitely worth a listen.
All bad work days aside, this month marks two years since my lovely grandmother passed and seventeen years since my mother left. There are plenty of posts written here about grief, love and loss on this blog, feel free to rifle through them... Crank The Shiny Tune is no stranger to drama and emotion and she's said more than enough.
Tonight let's raise our glasses to the glory of Always. Whatever that means to you.
Everyone wants to be cool; it's a pointless exercise if you ask me. So many of the music snobs are content to box themselves into very specific genres. Let loose kids... you can't take cool with you when you die.
The Stranglers // Always The Sun // Dreamtime // 1986
Alvvays // Party Police // Alvvays // 2014 Don't have to leave You can just stay here with me
Erasure // Always // I Say, I Say, I Say // 1994
This wasn't chosen for comedy or irony; adore the lyrics and the video is pretty hilarious but also sad when you think about it. This is one of my favorite bands and I fiercely stand by my choice.
With one comment on one of those social media sites, realization comes. Not like a lightening bolt or a quickening of the pulse, but a warm and still yet cold sidling into a place of truth. Like a puzzle piece coming together. She has lost a dear friend and is discovering, perhaps for the first time, the cold, burning, jagged edge of grief.
I wrote: Death
is, to use the old meanings, a Terrible and Awful transition. The irony
is that they're the one person you want to talk to about their Leaving
and the hole their absence leaves fully expresses Ache. Having felt the
loss of both my mothers I wish there was more comfort I could offer. Some say time is a help while
others have platitudes but I will just say, grief is a multicolored and
multi-dimensional creature, one that continually changes shape and
color.
Later, sitting with my thoughts, away from The Others, I felt for the first time, not that metallic edge, but something else. Something unforeseen and foreign. The grand They have always said visiting a gravesite spawns healing but I've always previously decreed it spurns it. Who resides there anyway? Formaldehyde and false retribution. Rebellion and Lionhearted fire aside, on my way to a solo visit by the sea, I detoured and sat for a spell beside both Rose and Mary's graves. Turns out, maybe there is some truth to it. Floods of tears, yes but also a reluctant sigh. It really does change shape, grief. We look for signs and rational or not, I believe the moment rang true.
The morning was rainy, I almost changed my mind a gazillion times. Why would I visit a graveyard? What does it hold for me? I was traveling through the wondering maze of headstones, thinking how stupid the whole endeavor was and thinking I would spend hours trying to find what? Buried bones? When I found the marker, the sun came and there They were. Supine in a sunny, tree-lined cemetery listening to the bees do their business, I felt Something. I am on the other side of it, finally. No longer feeling a desire to throw myself at Destruction or mutilate tender skin to escape the Monsters inside but instead a Reckoning. It's a word with so many connotations but in this moment it means not Biblical destruction, the kind found in dysfunctional families, or the tallying of Debts unpaid; those debts of Rights and Wrongs, but rather something akin to pieces matching up. This was then. This is now. That was Her. This is Her. This is Me. That is Tomorrow. This is a song that came my way quite randomly tonight; it feels appropriate but I have no emotional reaction to it. Death songs have currently ceased to captivate me. But his voice, those chords... there's something beckoning about it, right?
Sitting in a home that isn't my own surrounded by artificial light and the deafening silence of peaceful sleeping persons whilst pondering the nature of capability and its irreverent twin helplessness; a notion my lion heart does not easily embrace, I can hear only her tearful confused words uttered in a place that isn't her home, Why am I always doing what other people want? I am a good person, why am I slapped around and left? Why can't I live with you? Why can't you take care of me? I wish I were just buried in a hole, left alone and forgotten.
I sit here dumbstruck with only my limp and flaccid words... this is all I can do. Asking the same Why she asked. Why is she left alone with no one [worthy] to care for her? Why cannot I rescue her and give her peace, love and comfort in the last years of her life?
Amputated by my failures, my frailties, I cannot fix what is permanently broken. I cannot heal a mind that genetics have ravaged. I cannot maim her perpetrator. I cannot convince the legal system to move its feet and right the injustice. I cannot pray to a God, who remains so silent, asking where He's been all these years, hearing with deaf ears the cries of so many and doing nothing. The law remains resolutely certain a Husband is always the one best equipped to care...even when that care becomes a blow, a choke hold, a push. What do black eyes and neck contusions matter when the victim cannot even remember what he's done, when no one was there to see, when the legal system is so twisted it cares only to protect itself from itself?
Like a sick and twisted version of, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to here, does it make a sound?"
We are all bound by our choices, it would seem. Even when those chains become death sentences. She married an evil man. She stayed with the man. The grandmother and the grandfather that raised me. She used to protect me from him by bodily interception, her tiny frame between me and Goliath. Her sparrow heart fluttering, her bird voice becoming a lioness roar. "You will not touch her!" Will I be arrested if I do the same? My own lion heart roars at the thought. The fucking thought. What is thought? Nothing. Just mental constipation. Until then, I sit here with my erectile dysfunction words and watch my wheels of thoughts spinning in an imperfect circle. All arriving at the same point. Watch her die. Not today, not tomorrow but someday.
My mind is utterly dumbstruck. I'm scared we are all dolls, till the end and my eyes keep searching the Heavens for something resembling comfort, an answer to the chaos of nonsense. I'm left with only these words, these lyrics. Are we alone? Are we just electrical synapses firing in the dark of the night?
It's tricky when
You feel someone
Has done something
On your behalf
It's slippery when
Your sense of justice
Murmurs underneath
And is asking you.
How am I going to make it right?
With a palm full of stars
I throw them like dice
Repeatedly
I shake them like dice
And throw them on the table
Repeatedly
Repeatedly
Until the desired constellation appears
And I ask myself:
A key turning, a pivotal shift... a parallel universe. That was then, this is now and so much is healed in the microcosm. So much of what I craved and willed with angry possession is now given effortlessly and lovingly. This new language is baffling in its familiarity and yet I am so at home.
My lover is camping, with no phone or means of active communication and I've been left to my own devices. Not alone because I've spent the days in active communion with so many beautiful people and am solidifying my new being. This person that loves this person, without fear and doubt. I am stretching these new wings and muscles, feeling comfortable in this new skin of identity. She is herself. I am myself. We love each other. Trusting these truths that braid tenderly, as we grow together.
There was the night spent with the two Spiritual Healer Mothers and how their incredible energies combined to aid in a cathartic VOCAL release of so many years of pain, I howled with red hot tears on an art collector's turret patio with the skyline in attendance and was then so subsequently loved and supported my little wounded child within feels like singing, not hiding. There was Vegan Soup Night and cocktail chats spent with Skywalker laughing about the pecularities of relationships and the strange concessions we make along the way for love and how they don't bind, these loving restraints we encourage. And today's amazing four hour vegan breakfast taco brunch time with Skywalker and Christine where we covered so many continents of conversation: relationships, love, politics, geographical identity, dancing followed by wine night with Cherokee and that healing thing that occurs when you stop being retractive and open up to another person. She and I are uncovering how to better communicate with our Loves, how to stop the Angry Train and stop screaming for what you need. Stop. Think. Breathe. Commune. With soft truth.
I miss my darling One but I'm also grateful to experience what it's like to be in love and not feel desperate for them all the time. She will be with me soon, I will bathe in her warmth and share with her all that we've experienced soon enough. This is new, this precious space... I am not afraid without her, I envision her peace and happiness as she communes with her friends, with nature, with herself. I know she's thinking of me as she is loving herself and her life and I am doing the same.
Fear breeds jealous, anger, judgement, criticism and results in smallness of spirit. Manifesting in wonderful open ways, love is expansive. It grows and grows and in turn creates undulating beauty in others, rippling in perpetuity. I'm so humble and grateful, there just aren't enough words in my vocabulary to speak of this shift. Using the same sorts of words of gratitude and warmth over and over again to express such a feeling is old and doesn't really say how profoundly [ ] I actually am... I need new words. Dark and nebulous is my accustomed language, I swim in the dark and murky depths with relative ease; navigating light, love and openness is awkward and makes me... shy. My spirit and face blush, I hide my face in my right shoulder and hunch inward basking in a wonderful inward feeling [that is almost shameful in its fullness] just as my lover reminds me the peaceful rosy apples of my cheeks are beautiful and gently draws my face into hers. Drawing myself into the light of her healing being, she carefully reassures me we are perched on this limb of our love together.
Song meanings are changing for me in profound ways as my life changes profoundly. Have you experienced this? How you used to hear a song a certain way and after an undetermined time you hear it differently? It's a subtle shift but one that strikes my innards. For example, take one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite bands. I used to mantra this song while in the depths of my last relationship, pleading to the universe we could transcend and love each other the way we both needed to be loved. Oh how the lyrics of this song would haunt me in our daily interactions. Now I mantra the following lines within myself as a reminder to appreciate and worship my lover. To always consider in my thoughts and actions how to support, love and cherish mon petit cadeau.
Why do we keep shrieking, when we mean soft things. We should be whispering all the time.
The Magnetic Fields - 100,000 Fireflies
I have a mandolin
I play it all night long
It makes me want to kill myself
I also have a dobro
Made in some mountain range
Sounds like a mountain range in love
But when I turn up the tone
On my electric guitar
I'm afraid of the dark without you close to me
I went out to the forest and caught
A hundred thousand fireflies
As they ricochet round the room
They remind me of your starry eyes
Someone else's might not have made me so sad
But this is the worst night I ever had
'cause I'm afraid of the dark without you close to me
You won't be happy with me,
But give me one more chance
You won't be happy anyway
Why do we still live here
In this repulsive town?
All our friends are in New York
Why do we keep shrieking,
when we mean soft things?
We should be whispering all the time...
It's all tumbling at an alarming rate. I'm feeling and receiving so much, I don't think my fingers or brain can keep track! Gone are the quiet moments of self-reflection, they happen so quickly I can't hold them long enough to share. As fast as I pick it up, It runs away through my clutching hands. But no, sadness these days is a fickle beast... most of the time I'm the most excited I've been in a long while. Om Namah Shivaya... every day I experience a new grace, a new moment of learning and lesson and I'm so ridiculously happy and momentum fed there just isn't room for anything else.
Today my crush said, "It's okay, I'll take care of you" with a kind and meaningful glance. My heart actually stopped. I felt the ache in my chest and the blush on my cheek. I've been invited to go camping with my crush for New Years. One tent, one night.... can my heart contain such happiness??
So I've written about crushes and intrigues and love losses many many times - if anyone is interested just revisit most of my summer posts [or any of my posts really. Love is my grand motivator].
That said. I have a crush... it's something I hate bringing up in blog form or print unless it's something. It's definitely something. I didn't sleep much last night, minus the stupid neighbor's dog howling at her absence... because I'm doing the thing I do when I really really truly like someone. It's embarrassing and the opposite of poetic. Or maybe the epitome of poetic. I day dream about them, as they are not. As I want them to be, as we are together. Last night's insomniac visions were perfect, as life isn't.
So this time... I'm keeping my crush to myself, as much as I can. There is a reason one of my coworkers calls me Chismosa which basically means I can't keep my blipping mouth shut. About anything. Which isn't actually true.... I'm a vault and a volcano equally. She was lucky enough to meet me in a gregarious phase.
That's it. Almost a hidden place.... but I've not shared with anyone the incredible power of this crush. Overwhelming, I could be wrong about this one. But this feeling is like no other... it's something I want to hold in my hands and cherish, protecting it from everyone else.
A few weeks back I drafted but never posted an entry entitled "Mary's Dying" hoping to somehow share without sharing how it feels that my Alzheimer's afflicted grandmother [who raised me for most of my life] is moving further both geographically and emotionally away from me. I feel strongly about this. I'm quite bereft about this stage in her memory, this loved one's final journey. She is the last parent in my life who remembers my infancy. She is My Person. The person who has taught me so much, the Person I love beyond anyone else.
It has been quite painful to remind her, "Love, it's me
Genevieve" and to watch her tears flood her age-tissued cheeks when she
realizes she no longer recognizes my face or relation. Many times she
thinks I'm her long dead daughter, Rose [my mother].
Radiohead - Bulletproof
This ties into feelings of loss that stretch into my past, a past riddled with loss because of many things but which ultimately link to my childhood and mother who, while alive, suffered from schizophrenia and died fourteen years ago. A death I've only recently made peace with and posted about here but which has most definitely indirectly influenced much of my life's experiences [read choices] since that point... years spent running, chasing, hunting, blood-lusting for bleached bones in others. A chance to recognize another's haunted spaces. Moments spent creating and destroying. In a way I feel like much of the last decade has been spent both hungering for and pushing against these energies. The lust for home and the push against anything resembling roots. Hence the advent of a rather silly personal mantra [that my dearests have heard many times]: I don't want to be buried in a box, I fucking refuse to live in one.
Repetitiously, I've been listening to a mixed tape made about twelve years ago [you can read about why in my temper tantrum rant here] and this phrase from Nick Cave's love song lecture, The Secret Life of The Love Song begins side one and it just keeps reverberating in my mind at the strangest moments in my daily waking life these days. Life is both cyclical and sarcastic in so many ways. How beautiful the notion, that we create our own personal catastrophes and it is the creative forces within us that are instrumental in doing this. Here our creative impulses lie in ambush by the side of our lives, ready to leap forth and kick holes in it. Holes through which inspiration can rise. We each of us need to create and sorrow itself is a creative act.
It really is quite a fantastic lecture, I highly recommend a listen, several in fact. He is also fascinated with saudade [as am I: here, here and here] and his thoughts on this and sorrow speaks so closely to my own innerlings [his father died in Cave's late adolescence]. When I listen to him I breathe deeply with a rare peace. Dreaming wise, the other day I had the most visceral interlude that included Wayne Coyne of Flaming Lips. We had the most powerfully hot sexual exchange. There were lips, there was hair pulling, there were salty oral exchanges... we were hairless and slippery in all the right places. I'm guessing his Twitter is finally getting to me... still... nice dream and the feeling of buoyancy upon waking was such a relief. I don't think it's possible to separate sorrow, sex and love.
Last night Skywalker and I had loooong gloriously juicy chats about all sorts of far-reaching heady subjects like Daoism, Death & Mortality, Roots [as in family, not hair], Astrology [there I go again with the astrology] and Balancing Ourselves in Life and Relationships. So many super good things shared and learned that today all I want to do is be this fine looking lass sitting by this fine looking pool sipping a fine tasting beverage daydreaming about time travel and eating fruit.
Speaking of time travel, this delightful track Time Travel by the even more delightful Blouse has been stuck in my head for a few days. Probably because I've recently become super addicted to and can't stop watching Doctor Who and am in danger of naming my soon to be brought home beta fish, Tardis.
I know so little about her, this mother of mine. I am lucky to have been birthed by such an intelligent strange soul. We shined flashlights at planets and she regaled me with stories of the origin of rainstorm thunder
clouds. I can still see her hands, the hairs on her legs and her dark gypsy eyes. So very different from my own sea glass irises.
She was according to others an odd entity, a special one with a very private personality. They barely knew her because she never allowed anyone in. Blessed Scorpio, tender soul... she kept herself unto herself. She was her own person but she
painted, she danced, she loved, she wept. I remember well her passion she tried so hard to keep from The Others; how she cried with vehemence and danced with abandon.
I watched her... Watched her dance, paint, cry, lose it and loved her through it all.
Fourteen years ago she died. Even though I can longer remember her voice or smell, the loss sometimes reverberates like a living thing. Each passing year it changes color and depth [how do you ask your mother a question you never knew you wanted to ask and one that you know you would never ask her anyway??]. I do wish so much to hear her thoughts, her voice and what she thinks about her life. She was so silent for most of hers. I can still feel the moment on the bridge shortly after she died when her presence right behind me was as real as any embrace.
Because of her I learned to love our darkness and those deep creepy feelings. To hug, not hate, our Monsters. To wrap myself into You/Into Myself to remind you that you deserve love too despite and because of those darknesses. It never leaves, that coldness. It's always there relentless but to have love, to know that there are warm arms ready to surround with comfort and dark minds that understand... it is a small reprieve I know; this legacy to her, this gift to You.
This song Cutting Ice to Snow by Efterklang stretches and with those fabulous strings feels true, this love that has no physical output. I wish I could hold her in my arms and say, "Rose you are loved. You beautiful you, there is darkness every where and I know you feel it inside your core. I feel it too. Come to me, I love you. Let me heal you."
It's hot and sweltering and when temperatures skyrocket I get bored so it's time for distractions. Lips, hands, thoughts... mine and his. Thoughts, like temperatures, also become hot and sticky. Bat babies are born. We sleep during the day and stay up half the night surviving on dirty drinks and delicious limbs. Soon enough my focus will be intellectual pursuits but for now this summer fling must remain enjoyable, laughable and most importantly expendable.
Wild Nothing - Bored Games
* I'm not a horrible man-eater. It's just sometimes, for better or for worse, ambitions trump everything.
We [me and companions] are staying on this isle. The coast is rocky, the water blue and warm. The colors are muted, not brilliant, not grey but somewhere
in between. We are staying at this retreat type house with lots of
people for a specific purpose. That purpose is to ride the ocean
tornadoes.
The sea rises to meet the clouds to form this water tornado,
huge, epic and vast. I mean like miles and miles wide. And it is our
goal to windsurf them! We paddle out on surfboards and at this point in
the sequence I can't tell if I've ridden them myself or if I'm
experiencing someone else's memory, you know how dreams can put you into
another consciousness briefly? So I'm able to feel the tilting of the
board as it catches the whorl ridge of the tornado and my body is
tilting left as it spirals up this gigantic storm.
The catch is you
have to get out of the whirl before you reach the clouds and then you
ride the wind drafts back to the ocean. But I, myself, can never get
there. We go in pairs and my partner is this girl that I was paired
with at the house. She is determined to go. Not squeaky excited but
resolved that it WILL happen. Iron will, stoic.
But I puss out every
time... sitting in the ocean watching my companions one after the other
confront their own storm. I paddle back to the coastline to use the
bathroom. I sit on the pink fluffy toilet seat in the wood paneled
cramped bathroom surrounded by bad floral curtains. I look at myself
in the mirror, angry and scared. I go back outside to face my companion
who is annoyed. We paddle out again... each and every time I sneak
back to the awfully decorated bathroom. I wander the empty halls of the
beach house. I never ride the storm.
Glass Vaults - Set Sail
Glass Vaults is the answer. These beats are the key.
* I wrote the above to my best friend without any guile. It is pure unadulterated chat. This is me sharing with you. Sharing with love, with the understanding we have dreams and sometimes they stop us in our tracks.
I think her voice and those songs were the first time I actually felt lust. Even before I saw her face, I just knew she was a force. In my memory it is night time. The raindrops sweeping across the backseat window of my mom's Datsun hatchback are illuminated neon lightning white by streetlights and my stomach muscles tighten into a cold coil at the sound of that sultry frictioned intro.
Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams
Remember Datsuns? They went the way of cassette tapes.
Today my coworkers sneakily slipped some very electric purple tinsel into my purse without my knowing. We have a lot of fun. Witness: Erasure Singalong Dance Parties.
We all need a little sparkle in our lives. Erasure was hands down my favorite band as a preteen and I even went so far as to record [on a mixtape no less] a pirate broadcast of them playing Glasgow. I think we're talking 1992-1993 and I still have this tape people*. What can I say? My preteener self is loyal to my boys, along with Tears For Fears, Neil Diamond and oh so much Irish/Scottish folk [NO JOKE], but those are corny stories for another time.
They swim, one above and one below. The deaths - they dictate all. Her & His towels hanging just so, clean and untouched. To unfurl one means to unfurl the other and in so doing Pandora is allowed free reign. No. No. No. This can never be. There are voices that can only sing in purified spaces by purified souls.
That's the thing though, there is always a vigilant candlelight where Pandora's pulse is a deep drum beat. Thump thump thump. She viciously clamors to be heard by lost ears, have you heard her? I buried those ears long ago but the echoes haunt me always. I feel them in the words of friends, in the pulse of tunes... and the beat pulls me in.
In silence they should remain. I say do not disturb the dead but the Dead call me.
A hilarious day filled with absolutely strange laugh-aloud commentary, like naming one's conceptual children [anyone who knows me will understand this hilarity though I have without-a-doubt-don't-try-to-change-my-mind-or-stop-me ferociously picked the name of conceptual Daughter], pen pal jokes and online funny chats, tongue tied office delirium "do you have any plain claper pips [meaning paper clips], 3 hours in the salon chair trying still to get rid of the idiotic sleeping death black dye I was stupid enough to don oh so so so many moons ago while sparking snarky about Jesus/Hot Chocolate You Sexy Thing [high school movie theater job]/Kate Moss and that stupid editorial pose that has become so retardedly popular, hookah and altogether amazingly too short conversations about love, self-hood, triangulation, excepting something for what it is, stage 5 clingers, Siberian ferns, existential quicksand and the fence and flowers one must plant in order to breathe reboot and thrive, and do I really look like Raggedy Ann? I don't?? Whew, thank god. What? I look like a sombrero? My friends and days like today are the absolute best.
Breaking all the rules now by staying up way past my bedtime to post this nonsense but I know you were waiting all day on pins and needles for this fantastic, thought provoking hovercraft.
PPS. Are you impressed with my non mention of My Crush or the Love That We Dare Not Speak His Name? Dammit, you should be, cuz I've tried super hard to break the rule. Stupid because these are two of my favorite topics! In case you are curious, the Crush has deflated, disintegrated and I think disappeared though I don't really understand why. Bummed central without a doubt.
