I can see the funny weeping willow (can't you?)

Evening is the time of day
I find nothing much to say

Don't know what to

do

but I come to

When it's early in the morning
Over by the window day is dawning
When I feel the air
I feel that life is very good to me, you know

In the sun, there’s so much yellow
Something in the early morning meadow

Tells me that today, you're on your way
And you'll be coming home, home to me

Night time isn't clear to me
I find nothing near to me

Don't know what to do but I come to

When it's early in the morning
Very, very early, without warning

I can feel a newly born vibration
Sneaking up on me again

There's a song bird on my pillow
I can see the funny weeping willow

I can see the sun, you're on your way
And you'll be coming home, home to me

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Crying for the sadness

This was a case of one of dem-dar songs that gets into your head, and won't quit playing.  I knew it was from the '60s, one of those moody, philosophical things we all loved to dissect ("what do the lyrics mean??"), sometimes over a joint or a forbidden glass of wine.  I mainly remembered the lines, "From a distance, from a distance/ You can hear a crying angel sing,/She's crying for the sadness tomorrow's sins may bring."

I haven't had time to research this song, to figure out who wrote it. There is at least one other song called From a Distance, more recent and more famous than this one, which is why it took me awhile to find the original recording. I don't really know who P. F. Sloan was either, though he may have been one of dem-dar one-hit wonders.

The song is still quite pretty to my ear today, though a bit sappy, as I feared it would be. It attempts to sing of faith, which was pretty rare in those days, more rare today.  I remember another moody, opaque song called Everyone's Gone to the Moon, much more dysphoric and even nihilistic. We discussed that one to death. This one is merely melancholy, and earnest.

Looking back, everything ended almost before it began, though we thought the ethos of the '60s would go on forever and change the world. It didn't. In fact it eventually became a laughingstock. Everything reverted to crassness. The bellbottoms were put away, to be replaced by the Mint Green Polyester Leisure Suit of our worst nightmares.

Kids wear '60s tshirts now: peace, love, and all that stuff that got left behind. Now it's just sort of an affectionate (maybe) sendup, or a way to recycle old logos. I see it all from a distance. I know, that's cringe-inducing, but it's really how it is. This song got recorded in my brain so long ago and was buried so deep I didn't even know it was there. Then, some random set of circumstances, or something someone said, or even just a turn of the sky, pushed "play".


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The hate crime no one talks about

Oh yes. Oh, yes, Captain Kirk, and his noble soliloquy in perhaps my fave original Star Trek episode, Miri. The one with all the kids on that planet, you know, all by themselves coz the adults all died, and they get all gross when they hit puberty and Yeoman Rand's leg looks like a major cigarette burn. I watched it at 13, tape recording it as I usually did on our old reel-to-reel Webcor with the fan-shaped microphone. Kirk wasn't ridiculous then, he wasn't a joke, he wasn't a buffoon and to date, he had done no Loblaws commercials. Kirk was just Kirk.

But his immortal line, "no blah blah blah!" has taken on a special significance in my mind over many decades of observation.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Happens so often I want to yip with irritation. In fact it happened yesterday:  we're in Denny's eating our veggie omelettes with hash browns, when I hear a familiar drone coming from behind Bill's seat.

Umbumummm-bumbumbummm-bumdabumdabumdabuuuuuuuum.

I -

UMMM da bummada bummda. Mm-mmoom-dah! Da bomada bomada damda bom.

A -

Bum BUM DA dum dum, demda dum! Dem -

So you get the idea by now. It was one of those totally one-sided conversations you constantly overhear (without meaning to: this is hardly eavesdropping, as I would have loved to shut out all this blathering) in restaurants or theatres or other public places.

One person is blathering on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and - sorry, my hand just fell off - but as this blathablathablathablathablathablatha goes on, all of it self-referential, all of it self-serving, all of it self-entitled, all of it related to the blatherer's intense suffering at not being treated like a crown prince/ss, I can sense the listener/receiver's blood volume being slowly, slowly, and surely sucked down and siphoned out.

When they leave the restaurant, the blatherer will be hugely inflated with self-righteous helium for the next deadly gas attack, and the victim (for that is what it is) will be but a pale shadow of his/her former self. She will be so anemic, you'll be able to see through her. She'll have to go home and lie down for a month or two, maybe get a transfusion.

But the thing is, they'll still go out again next week for lunch. The same thing will happen all over again. He or she will tell the same pompous, pointless stories, the same tales of persecution. No one even notices how soul-destroying the experience is. The entitled one will be bursting with hemoglobin by now, ready to explode like some honey-forced queen bee or ruptured giant termite. The victim will now weigh 37 pounds. Doesn't matter how many pancakes she puts away.

I heard it yesterday and I heard it at the mall food fair the day before with a similar booming, thrumming, droning male voice, this time with some sort of European accent. Bom-bomda-BOMmmdaa-bommmm-daBOMmada-bonga, etc. etc.


This is not a conversation. This is a monologue. The monologuist has no idea that it isn't a conversation and in fact thinks he's a very good conversationalist, very smart and sharp. His blathering about camping equipment or the plumbing in his house or his car troubles or the asshole at work who got the promotion he should've got (or his bitch of a wife, always a favorite) strikes him as scintillating discourse sparking a lively debate, an exchange of witticisms rivalling the Algonquin Round Table in sheer witti-blah-tudinous-ness.

He doesn't know, because his brain is made out of shoe leather and his psyche is about as penetrable as a block of obsidian. I would like to start carrying a baseball bat around with me to play whack-a-mole with these characters, but there are just too many of them, and besides, then *I* would be considered obnoxious and antisocial, hitting these poor innocent guys who weren't doing nothin'.

This is abuse. The endless, boring, repetitive blathering with only the occasional squeak out of the audience/receiver/victim/codependent masochist.  This person NEEDS this sort of ego-stroking, this constant reinforcement of his (or her: one of the worst I've encountered is a her, droning on for 45 minutes about her Grade 11 science teacher and what he wore to class) innate sense that his every word is interesting and useful and even enlightening, when in reality it's a torrent of horseshit more horrific than the result of opening Mr. Ed's stable door.

There is nothing to be done. Stay away, that's all I can say to you, try to stay away and not call them friends. A friend does not stick a drinking straw in your jugular vein and begin to vigorously suck. Blatha-blatha-blathata-blah.

I don't know if this codicil belongs here, but I might as well tack it on. It's the self-proclaimed expert who charges into a room full of chemo patients and bellows, "TAKE MILK THISTLE AND YOU WILL BE CURED!" The person so sure of (his or her) convictions that they force them on others as absolute, unassailable gospel truth.

One doctor I know is a doozie. Educated, an "expert" on many things, in fact famous.

"Illness means you've repressed your emotions."

"No, you mean: I believe illness means you've repressed your emotions."

"There's no debate about this, it's simply true."

"So everybody else, everyone who believes something different from you, is completely erroneous and full of shit?"

"I didn't say that! Don't be so defensive. It's just an opinion."

"Then why didn't you say so?"

"Because it's an opinion that happens to be true."

"Jesus, don't you hear yourself? That's total arrogance!"

"Obviously you have issues with authority figures."

"No, just with YOU, asshole!"

(That last line was fantasized, but isn't it great?)

I once attended some sort of workshop (it had something to do with my sick and dying church trying to manage a last-minute, futile resurrection) where the facilitator said, "Tell me the difference between these two statements: Divorce is terrible."

(Slight tremor in the room, caused by minute vibrations from the divorced people trying not to spit at her.)

"MY divorce was terrible. Which statement is easier to accept?"

Wa-a-a-a-al.

But people don't do it that way! They stride in and say, "Everything happens for a reason/God never gives us more than we can handle/It's all in God's plan." This person has never suffered a major hardship, and in fact has led a charmed existence.  God's will has been, at least up to now, a piece of cake. (Secretly she/he thinks it's because she prays a lot and "surrenders", so God favors her.) But never do they say, "I've come to believe that - " or even, "It's my conviction that - ". No, they just take one of those thingamabobs they used to tamp down powder in a cannon, and casually shove it down your throat.

"I was about to die in a car crash, but my angel saved me."

"God must have intervened."

"It was meant to be" (but NEVER with reference to anything negative. Only positive things are "meant to be". No sense of entitlement here.)

"It was God's plan that little Timmy survive being run over by an express train 47 times."

Oh yes? What about this couple over here, dying of grief because God DIDN'T save their son? What about the man whose wife actually did die in a crash? Didn't she believe enough, didn't God love her enough, didn't she have the right mojo or put enough on the collection plate?

It's really just more BLAHBLAHBLAH, of a particularly toxic variety. It's toxic because it is so un-thought-out, so carelessly said. So smug. So entitled ("see, God loves me enough to pull me out of flaming wreckage. What's wrong with you?")

I wonder sometimes if even half of what people say is really considered, or if it just pours out of them like so much raw sewage. They snag on to jingles, axioms, homilies, catch-phrases, churn them around unexamined, and spit them in your face. They never preface these statements, just jam them up your nose as "fact".  It's easier than thinking, easier than feeling empathy or compassion or any of those dangerous things that require a little stretching of the soul.

The blatherers of the world are verbal thugs. When you see one, whether it's in Denny's or the hardware store or your local church or synogogue, whacking the palm of his hand with a lead pipe and wearing a smug self-involved smile, there's only one thing you can do.

Ru-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-n!

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Something indecent

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

Ars Poetica Czeslaw Milosz

Something indecent. The writer (particularly the poet) sneaks over the border into territory unknown, territory best left undisturbed. The writer (particularly the poet) has a way of seeing through the veils. Veils which are there for a reason, to protect us from reality, from the monstrous reality which lurks inside all of us. Watch your daily news. Be honest about your purest rage. No, don't, because even though we feed off it in other people, it's not socially acceptable and we can't stand to look.

Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother…the true self is aggressive, rude, dirty, disorderly, sexual; the false self which mothers and society instruct us to assume, is neat, clean, tidy, polite, content to cut a chaste rosebud with a pair of silver-plated scissors.

Jeanette Winterson

Is this true? Have you looked in the mirror lately? No, I don't mean Facebook. I mean a real mirror, in someone else's eyes, someone who doesn't mind paring you down to the seedy core of your soul.

Art has quite a pair of hips and is barely contained by that dress. Art slinks. Art bites rather than kisses, draws blood. Why?

Theft, armed robbery, not pleasing your mother! Which is worse? Which is more heinous? Are we aggressive, rude, dirty, disorder. . . wait. No, that only applies to "them", the ones who have all the "nervous breakdowns", the ones who don't even earn a decent living wage but spend all their time screwing around with words.

Then why do so many people aspire to something so useless? Everyone's a novelist, and everyone can sing. Anyone can "epublish" and call themselves an author. But why?

Most of what they turn out is dishwater and requires no risk. They want the revelation without the "nervous breakdown", which is just a polite term for why doesn't she just pull herself together dammit.

Nobody wants human vulnerability shoved in their faces. Nobody wants these predatory females who not only want, but insist on sex. They're dangerous because they want want want want want so much.

There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.

C. G. Jung

It's rude and not decent to climb into these caves, to curl up inside yourself, to listen. It's narcissistic to pour your lifesblood out onto the page in the full knowledge that because you will never make a living at it, it's a complete waste of time, not to mention mad.


Why's it so good, then, to have that "creative fire"? Why does everyone want to be Hemingway when Hemingway blew his brains out? Even Hemingway wasn't Hemingway, which was perhaps why he blew his brains out.

Art wears a triple-D cup and smokes too much and demands happiness and demands orgasm and demands Truth. It's much too much too much too much, much too much of everything and more, and more, and more.

"You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been."

And thus Virginia Woolf loaded stones in her pockets and waded in, convinced everyone would be better off without her. Was she right? Why does every source continually mention her multiple "nervous breakdowns"? What is a "nervous breakdown"? It's nothing, it does not exist! It's a delicate lace-doily term for somebody who just can't cut it. Who is so pale and weak that they can't poke their head outside the door, who lives on tea and those brown digestive cookies. A nervous breakdown is an indulgence, a choice, something weak people embrace when they just want a little time off. Nothing to do with raging, wrenching, gut-hollowing, soul-haemorrhaging manic depressive illness which is infinitely worse than all the cancers of the human body put together.

It was not her choice to enter the cauldron, it just happened, she had that awful stamp of greatness on her which in her case meant unbearable pain and death. She knew how indecent and disorderly her soul was. No doubt this "drove" her mad. Would it have "driven" her to heart disease or cancer? Of course not. Madness is somewhere between self-indulgence and demonic possession. This is why we tiptoe around it so delicately.

Aggressive, rude, dirty, disorderly, sexual.

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Harold Lloyd: the man with the moves

                                              

 

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Just one of those crazy things. . .

Bent Fabric and other '60s phenomena

Jonquils, jonquils. . .

". . . I had malarial fever all that spring. The change of climate from East Tennessee to the Delta - weakened resistance - I had a little temperature all the time - not enough to be serious - just enough to make me restless and giddy! - Invitations poured in - parties all over the Delta! - "Stay in bed," said Mother, "you have fever!" - but I just wouldn't - I took quinine but kept on going, going! - Evenings, dances! - Afternoons, long, long rides! Picnics - lovely! - So lovely, that country in May - All lacy with dogwood, literally flooded with jonquils! - That was the spring I had the craze for jonquils. Jonquils became an absolute obsession. Mother said "Honey, there's no more room for jonquils." And still I kept on bringing in more jonquils. Whenever, wherever I saw them, I'd say, "Stop! Stop! I see jonquils!" I made the young men help me gather the jonquils! It was a joke. Amanda and her jonquils! Finally there were no more vases to hold them, every available space was filled with jonquils. No vases to hold them? All right, I'll hold them myself!"

 

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I'd be rich

From demo tapes to Mrs. Fields: a Canadian success story

(From Wikipedia: Barenaked Ladies) The full band's first commercial release was 1991's The Yellow Tape. It was a demo tape originally created for the band's performance at South by Southwest and was the first recording to feature all five members.^[3] They spent between $2000 and $3000 on it, and sent a copy to all the labels in Canada; they were refused by all of them.^[6] The band turned to selling them off the stage, and wound up selling a lot of them. Word of mouth spread, and people began asking for the tape in local stores. The stores began asking the band for copies of the tape, and the demo tape became a commercial release.^[6] Sales began to snowball based simply on word of mouth and their live shows, and the tape became the first indie release by any band to achieve platinum status (100,000 copies) in Canada.<sup>[2]

OK den. Dis is an example of how someone can "epublish", or take things into their own hands, because the "establishment" has turned them aside over and over again as "not commercially viable".</sup>

<sup>This storylet is carved from a much larger (read: too bejesusly larger) entry in Wikipedia recounting the phenomenal success of the "alternative" Canadian band Barenaked Ladies. Essentially this was a garage band with some very talented kids on-board, and it just evolved. By the time their first "official" album came out (with the nonsensical title Gordon), their star wasn't just rising, it was skyrocketing.


More than any other music of that time, I remember Gordon because we played it to death in the early '90s when my kids were teenagers still living at home, and we all liked it, even my husband who didn't like anything. We loved the goofball lyrics ("this is me in Grade 9") and oddball concepts ("be my Yoko Ono"). We especially loved Steve, the fat guy who danced around wildly in shorts and just seemed to rule in this sublimely dorky Canadian universe.</sup>

<sup>And yes, it was a tape, just like the tapes them guys sold right off the stage. That's kind of like handing out cookies and ending up as Mrs. Fields.


What brought all this to mind? Yesterday I got fiddling around with the lyrics to a superb song, Bittersweet, by another dork-ish band of the same era called Moxy Fruvous. I don't know what MF is doing these days, if anything, but I don't hear of them much (while the Nakes, as I call them, are busy recording theme songs for the likes of the wildly popular sitcom The Big Bang Theory). Moxy Fruvous was obviously a Nake wanna-be, and as far as I'm concerned they never quite made it. The imitation was too obvious in songs like King of Spain ("Once I was the King of Spain/And now I work at the Pizza Pizza")and My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors, often played at literary conventions during lunch break to induce tea-splattering titters.  Anyway, Mox, as I call them, had one really good song and then went who-knows-where.


No, I haven't really kept up with the Nakes cuzzadafact that when Steven Page left (and was since involved in some sort of cocaine sting just before releasing his children's book), I sat there cross-legged for three days throwing ashes over my head. Without Steve and his good-natured goof persona, it just wasn't the same.</sup>

^{Gordon, as I look back on it, was remarkable because it had no duds. You could listen to all of them. Nobody was doing this, this whatever-it-was, dorky high school memories with the odd bit of poignancy around the edges.  I could post any of them, really, but I think I'll pi-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ck . . . this one.}

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