What makes you sleep so sound

Wake up, wake up darlin' Corey 

What makes you sleep so sound 

The revenue officers are coming 

Gonna tear your still house down. 

Go 'way, go 'way darlin' Corey 

Stop hanging around my bed 

Bad liquor's ruined my body 

Pretty women’s gone to my head.

I’m going across the deep ocean 

I’m going across the deep sea 

I’m a-going across the deep ocean 

Just to bring darlin' Corey to me. 

Go dig me a hole in the meadow

Go dig me a hole in the ground 

Go dig me a hole in the meadow 

Just to lay darlin' Corey down. 

Don’t you hear them blue birds a-singing 

Don’t you hear that mournful sound 

They're a-preaching Corey’s funeral 

In some lonesome graveyard ground.

Wake up, wake up darlin' Corey 

What makes you sleep so sound 

The revenue officers are coming 

They’re going to tear your still house down.

Burl Ives 1941

It took me a while to figure out why this song is such a work of genius - that is, as Burl Ives sings it, with one endlessly-sustained, finger-picked chord. It's the minimalism of it, the stripped-down quality, like a pine board silver-greyed and punched full of knotholes. He uses only the barest minimum of his incredible voice, just the edge of a single vocal cord, and whispers the ending in a way that chills the blood. 

I was only familiar with that other version, the one all the folkies sang in the '60s after Harry Belafonte made it famous. I don't remember stills being torn down and "Darlin' Cor-ray" being buried in a "medd-a" in that one. Belafonte homogenized it somewhat, tamed the lyric, took the coldness, the whiskery scarecrow quality out of it. 

Ives was a strange one, walking out of a schoolhouse one day saying he had had enough of education, then walking just as confidently into a totally unique lifelong career as an actor and a folksinger. He had a sort of effortless, artless tenor that could wrap itself around any kind of song - remember Little Bitty Tear? But then there was that chiller That's all I Can Remember (which see):

It took me a few decades to catch up with this amazing jailhouse ballad again, sung in his usual downplayed, straightforward way. But ah, the way he sings, "Then they turned on the juice, and I felt something a-burnin'. . . " Like Johnny Cash, who was never in the service and never spent a single day in jail, Ives somehow presented himself as a man who had been everywhere, done everything, and lived to sing the tale. 

Then there was the acting. His Big Daddy was downright frightening, malignant, cold-eyed, the polar opposite of his grandfatherly self, chuckling away on that wretched Christmas show he was in. I am sure I watched it, listened to Holly Jolly Christmas, Little White Duck, and that incredibly stupid song about The Whale, which my smart-ass/pain-in-the-ass family endlessly, pretentiously quoted:

I have to admit to being both drawn and somewhat repulsed by Ives, by his bulk, his scary tremorous voice, his heartiness backed by a surly rage that scares the hell out of me. He was too many things at once, but there is no beating or repeating that voice. It's one of those but-he's-not-doing-anything voices. He does not seem to be putting any effort into it at all, and chances are he wasn't. It was just a genius voice. Not a mountain voice at all, not a holler or a howl. It was actually kind of refined. Some of his oeuvre was not to my tastes - he did a lot of bland, country-ish stuff that I remember listening to a lot as a kid, the same way I listened to Andy Williams.

But then he starts whispering to us about Darlin' Cor-ray, and a chill works its way up, or tingles on my scalp so my hair seems to stand on end. This is one of those minimalist things, a few brush-strokes expressing a world. Van Gogh could dab his brush on a canvas a couple of times and paint a recognizable human figure, a person with an attitude, a mission and a soul. Minimalism has died out; cacophony is king. We have to go back to the records, because they're all we've got left.

Neon rider

Four riffs on a film leader

We could not ask for more

This is one of the most amazing videos I've ever seen. The horses are so utterly calm, perhaps due to the skill of their riders. If one of them panicked, it might all be over.

It has been, incredibly, almost two months since I lost my best friend David. Right now it's a lonesome trail indeed, for I don't even know if he will have a memorial. I have to wait to hear, there's nothing I can do. Things were complicated with him in his small community, with his relationships, with his church. He may have been excommunicated for doing some sort of bizarre healing. (Imagine, trying to heal someone!). For a while he was involved with a druggie, and had a very hard time scraping her off. Yet he was a genius in his own way, and his calm acceptance of me in my time of hell was a balm when no one else seemed to understand or care.

I hope I offered him similar solace. But the trail remains teetering, narrow, requiring or demanding a faith I just don't have. David had it in spades, and I honestly don't know how he sustained it in a too-short, too-difficult, largely solitary life. 

Some people seem to come from nowhere, to have no one, no "people". Certainly he had no roots, or else they were vague. When someone I know on Facebook finally found David's great-aunt (or someone like that) and told her David had passed, the answer was, oh, thanks for telling me. I'll pass it along to his half-brother.

Families can be, as Sylvia Fraser once famously said, "killing fields". Friends are, as the saying goes, God's way of apologizing for them. I spent Saturday at a soccer game trying not to weep, while my granddaughter, glorious Caitlin, she who had been so close to me for so many years, literally turned her back on me and would not speak to me or even look at me or say hello. Raw from the loss of David, I felt my heart drop out.

What had I done? I must have done something. At half-time I couldn't stand it any more and switched chairs with Bill, sitting next to Jim, her other grandpa. He asked me what was wrong and I told him. "Well, maybe she's not so much turning away from you as turning toward her phone." It was a wry observation, but it gave me pause.

At one point I thought I heard my daughter whisper to her, "This is embarrassing!" But you can't physically turn a 15-year-old kid around and force her to speak a few words to her grandma. And adolescent girls - you can hear them ticking, you know? Just waiting for hissing pinwheels and Roman candles to explode.

It was awful, but my husband kept saying, don't take it personally, she's just being a kid. But how could I feel so wretchedly alone in my own family, my only refuge in the whole world?

Today, totally unexpectedly, she agreed to have lunch with us (maybe, just maybe, prompted by her mother?), and for a half-hour chattered away in her usual, delightful, wry, funny way. A totally different person? Or two sides of the same person? Maybe she was just honest enough with herself on Saturday to say: I don't want to talk to Grandma today, so I won't. Most of us don't have that luxury with people.

Or she was just being a hopeless brat, selfish and inconsiderate. There's that.

There's no point to this, at all, except to say that I had to wait it out, not fuss (for surely that would have made it worse, made her NEVER want to talk to me). I had to find an atom of faith in me somewhere. With my harrowing family history, estrangement seems to almost disembowel me. I know that it is generally irreversible, and to lose any more of my tiny band of kin might be fatal.

But it was just some mood, wasn't it? Why the change of heart? Or did Shannon really take her aside and say, look, you wouldn't talk to her at the soccer game and it was embarrassing, so TALK TO HER this time - ?

At this point, I don't even care. I'm just glad this wasn't a crying day, but tomorrow might be. I just hope I hear something. I hope I get to stand with people who loved David too. The trail is lonesome, and it is long. But please, just don't let it go cold.

Outward bound upon a ship that sails no ocean
Outward bound, it has no crew but me and you
All alone when just a minute ago the shore was filled with people
With people that we knew

Outward bound upon a journey without ending
Outward bound, uncharted waters beneath our bow
Far behind, the green familiar shore is fading into time
And time has left us now

So farewell, adieu, so long, vaya con Dios
May they find whatever they are looking for
Remember when the wine was better than ever again
We could not ask, we could not ask for more

Outward bound upon a ship with tattered sail
Outward bound upon a crooked lonesome trail
Things we learn, we'll just be satisfied in knowing
And we'll tell it to our kids as a fairy tale

So farewell, adieu, so long, vaya con Dios
May they find whatever they are looking for
Remember when the wine was better than ever again
We could not ask, we could not ask for more

So farewell, adieu, so long, vaya con Dios
May they find whatever they are looking for
Remember when the wine was better than ever again
We could not ask, we could not ask for more
We could not ask, we could not ask for more

Elizabeth Holmes: "her eyes are part of her magic spell"

Just some Sunday music ( I kept adding to this!)

                     

When will this strong yearning end?

Weekend in New England

Barry Manilow

Last night I waved goodbye,
Now it seems years
I'm back in the city
Where nothing is clear

But thoughts of me holding you,
Bringing us near

And tell me, when will our eyes meet?
When can I touch you?
When will this strong yearning end?
And when will I hold you again

Time in New England
Took me away
To long rocky beaches
And you by the bay
We started a story
Whose end must now wait

And tell me, when will our eyes meet?
When can I touch you?
When will this strong yearning end?
And when will I hold you again

I feel the change comin'
I feel the wind blow
I feel brave and daring
I feel my blood flow
With you I could bring out
All the love that I have
With you there's a heaven,
So earth ain't so bad

And tell me, when will our eyes meet?
When can I touch you?
When will this strong yearning end?
And when will I hold you
Again

This is the song I almost couldn't find. It needed a post of its own, not to be tacked on to a piece about garden snails! When I set out to find a good YouTube version to post here, I heard ten-year-olds sing it on those big splashy TV talent shows, and even if they could hit all the notes (always over-decorated, as all singing is now), they fell flat because they had never experienced ANY of this. They simply had no idea what they were singing about. Most were too strident, too screamy, and trying too hard to get a "wow" effect, a thumbs-up or high-five or whatever these people get when they win on those shows. They were all getting in the way of the song.

I finally found this one, presumably by an amateur, but exceptionally well sung, so I used it. A simple karaoke version, sung by someone I've never heard of, a man who has a Malaysian accent. It came closest to what I was hearing in memory. Now that I hear it again, the sweet overtones in his voice are phenomenal, not anything that can be created by a machine. 

It was in the middle of all this listening that the line, "When will I hold you again?" triggered something, and I began to sob. It was like a cloudburst, just unexpected, out of nowhere, except that it was somewhere. My dear friend David, someone I loved for 27 years, died two months ago, and it has been a strange time as I've passed in and out of the revolving door of grief. And this is the first time I have cried.

I wondered why I hadn't, but I knew there was no schedule for it, no timetable for any of it, because grief is its own country and has to be traversed, travelled through. The ground is bumpy, rocky, with sheer drops. There are oases, green spaces. But these are only lavish memories, things which now must be stored away, without the presence of the one who meant so much to you.

So it's over.

When will I see you again? Never. It's not enough in the mind's eye. Memories are not enough. Right now I feel shredded, as if my heart has been through a mower.

He may have been the one person in my whole life who "got" me, quite apart from people in my family whom I know love and accept me with all my quirks. But he was what L. M. Montgomery called "of the race that knows Joseph", more than kindred, even though he wasn't kin. No one "got" me more than David, ever, and vice-versa, and it lasted for years, and years, and years, through everything.

This is pain, intense pain, and though I don't want it, I have known people who have traversed all of life and never once felt this, this heart-torn-out feeling, snapped strings dangling. I feel sorry for them, safely entombed while their hearts are still beating. They tend to die relatively young, and leave a bad trail, strewn with fragments from the casual damage of others.

I don't know what to do now, and the rest of the day will be lousy and I will feel tired and defeated, with raw eyes from crying so much, run over. But I'd rather have this. I'm not sure why, but I'd rather, perhaps because if he could see this, I know he would appreciate the fact that someone mourned him to this depth. I would not be without that certainty.

A garden is a lovesome thing? What rot!

My Garden by T. E. Brown

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

Rose plot,

Fringed pool,

Fern'd grot --

The veriest school

Of peace; and yet the fool

Contends that God is not --

Not God! in Gardens! when the eve is cool?

Nay, but I have a sign;

'Tis very sure God walks in mine.

My Garden by J. A. Lindon 

A garden is a lovesome thing? What rot! 

Weed plot, 

Scum pool, 

Old pot, 

Snail-shiny stool 

In pieces; yet the fool 

Contends that snails are not - 

Not snails! in gardens! when the eve is cool? 

Nay, but I see their trails! 

'Tis very sure my garden’s full of snails!

How many pests are likely to infest
An English country garden
I’ll tell you now of some that I detest
Those I miss you’ll surely pardon
Cabbage worms and spider mites. 

Things that give you nasty bites.
Snails, spiders, snakes and bees.
Aphids and locusts are really quite ferocious
In my English country garden

I will confess that I have no success
With my English country garden
I’ve thought it through and decided what to do
My result I hope you’ll pardon
Cover it with broken bricks.

Fill it up with ready mix,
Wait for it to harden.
I’ll cultivate a nice cement estate
Not an English country garden.

AFTERWORD. I know. This is sort of lame. But here's how it started. I kept thinking of the line, "My garden's full of snails!", and knew it was from something, somewhere, so I just had to chase it down. Turns out it was a parody of another poem, equally lame, about God walking along in the garden, presumably leaving some very large footprints.

Then I thought of, for some reason, a TV special I watched eons ago, with Cleo Laine and John Dankworth (and for some reason I remember Karen Morrow singing a beautiful version of When Will I see you Again?). They did a take on English Country Garden which was really quite funny, all about snails and slugs and things infesting the shrubs and eating everything in sight. I couldn't find it anywhere, but there were various parodies of it on YouTube and elsewhere. I was too lazy to write my own, so adapted one of the many lyrics (which included some rude and disgusting ones I didn't want to use), leaving half the verses out because it was Australian. Nothing against Aussies, I just don't have any wallabys in my yard. 

Because some of my thousands of readers might not be familiar with the original song, I found a lovely and very short version sung by Nana Mouskouri. So if any of this hangs together, great! 

(Later!) Oh my God! I DID find that song, the one Karen Morrow sang on the Cleo Laine special years and years ago, but it wasn't called When Will I See you Again at all! It was called Weekend in New England, of all things, and it was written by Barry Manilow. The only reason I found it at all was because I remembered the line, "When will this strong yearning end?" The wonders of the internet yielded me the rest.

So somehow or other, I've gone from garden pests to Barry Manilow. Sorry. But this one deserves a post of its own.

Stay tuned.

Alive but alone

Trump at the UN: "What's so funny?"

Donald doesn't get the joke.

No sink smog with Bab-o! (animated riffs on an old commercial)

That's why

You oughta try Bab-o

That's why

You oughta buy Bab-o

That's why

So many-many-many use

Brighter, whiter Bab-o!

NO SINK SMOG WITH  BAB-O!

A whiter shade of pale

And so it was that later

As the miller told his tale

That her face at first just ghostly

Turned a whiter shade of pale

Sci-Fi / Fantasy TV Pilots - that never made it to series

Yes, I know you've seen these before. Yes, I know I'VE seen these before. But you simply must see them again! Plus it's the weekend, and I have even less desire to write about things that depress me or just have me concerned. So watch this instead! 

Shimmyshake!

You're suddenly shapelier!

Nothing ever happens: or, my first psych nurse

Some days you may ask: why am I seldom writing long, in-depth  pieces about a particular topic of burning interest? Why instead do I resort to gifs, little videos, wacky things, etc.?
Because I have, literally or figuratively speaking, had it.

I've just had it.

Had it with trying to be A Writer and make Sales. Had it with internet popularity, followers, likes, views. Had it with  high school redux and that awkward feeling surging up my neck like a conspicuous red blush.

Had it with competition.  Of any kind. Want to just go walk in the woods,and probably will. Don't want to think about the past and all the things that sucked, and all the things that were beautiful, because all of it is over and both are gone forever. Want to dwell in Now exclusively.

Not good at this, but am practicing.

I DO look back at writing three novels after literally decades of effort, and selling nineteen copies and getting the best reviews in the world, or no reviews. So I have quit.

Quit all that effort. I am now Loose. Free. Not to be branded or categorized.

I tell myself pain is part of life, that it's all about letting go, then I think: ah, screw it, I'm NEVER letting go. Holding on is what I have learned to do all my life. Don't tell me to surrender the one thing I'm good at.

So  this is why you don't find a lot of in-depth writing from me any more. It was killing me. Don't be a writer, it will kill you unless you win the popularity lottery, and I almost guarantee you you won't.  Unless the genetics are just right, or the phase of the moon.

Killer chinchiller

             How dare they make coats out of these?

Dance, Otzi!

A relaxing stroll along the river

A VERY scary gif!

Stay tuned for the sound version of this (with special effects), which I will be posting on YouTube.

The Paw of Death! (Bentley vs. the troll)

LaurenZ and me

Weird are the ways of the internet. Weeeeeeeiiiiiirrrrrrd.

For suddenly one day, I saw one of MY videos on a famous YouTuber's channel. I don't  remember how I found out, except that suddenly my views shot up from the usual zero  to something like 800. Wowk!  I didn't know what was going on. Then in the comments, people kept saying they were sent there from "LaurenzSide", which I'm afraid I didn't know from a hole in the ground.

It took a lot of  chasing  down to actually find the video where said LaurenzSide "quoted" my stuff. It was, well, it was weird, but  so were my videos (she actually used bits of THREE of them altogether), and it was kind of a mixed feeling to see someone comment on them, being not quite sure she really liked my videos or just thought  they were quirky and bizarre.

Which, well. . . 

So I did the only thing a non-YouTuber can do. I video'd  her video. I mean, I took my camcorder and made a video of HER video, which included MY video.  So we ended up with a video of a video of a video! It went in a perfect circle.

As a YouTube-channel-having-person (NOT a YouTuber - you have to be doing ads and making money to be that), I know my stuff is pretty much in the public  domain. And yes, I've had a few comments, not always complimentary, but that comes with the territory. In fact, lately I've had a lot more than usual, and so far people have been great. I mean, sweet! These seem like young  girls, but on the internet you never know who they are.

LaurenzSide called me a "sweet woman", and I must confess I have never been called that in my life before. She cautioned her subscribers not  to be "mean" to me. I don' t know where that idea came from (except that it's the internet.)  But no one has been mean, and in fact, so far it's been warm and cozy.

When I get five new subscribers in a week, and four hot-cocoa-and-fuzzy-slippers comments, it makes me think that maybe-just-maybe I'm not doing all this in vain, that somebody actually sees it, that - 

Oh hell no. But I'm going to keep  doing it anyway.

Short takes from my YouTube channel

Suicide: in the jaws of the dragon

Since my readership is very slim, to say the least, I feel relatively free to talk about a subject no one seems to want to mention. It's tiptoed around, or recoiled from, both from fear it will happen to someone they know, or from the kind of entrenched stigma that buries certain topics due to intense shame.

I heard of a death not long ago, and it was not someone I knew. I read the announcement on a friend's Facebook page, and even though I am removed from the situation, I found it disturbing. It pertained to a 42-year-old man, a teacher, who died suddenly and shockingly, leaving the family "devastated". There was a very long passage about what a beloved figure he was among his students and colleagues. All through this description of the man's life, I kept thinking, suicide. I could not be sure, but it was written all over the passage, the shock and despair that seemed beyond a more natural death. Certainly no other cause of death was listed anywhere, which was unusual for one so young. Even the long passage about his achievements and his status as a much-loved figure carried a faint sense of "we don't know how this could have happened to a man like this". Not homeless, not a drug addict or an alcoholic, but the kind of person who would never think of such a thing because he was so  accomplished and well-liked.

Then, a couple of weeks later, there was a sort of updated statement, saying that the family had thought it over and decided to talk about the fact that he had committed suicide. One of the first things they said (which was also included in the first notice) was how gentle his passing had been. They insisted "he felt no pain". I was stunned. I have experienced suicidal depression, and it's like trying to pull yourself out of the mouth of a dragon before you are ripped apart or immolated. There is no peace. It is never painless. How could it be, if you've just decided to destroy yourself and deprive the world of a totally unique human presence - forever?

I assume they were referring to his lack of pain AS he committed suicide, or lack of pain AFTER he committed suicide - neither of which make sense to me at all. No, you don't feel pain when you are unconscious. Or dead.

I don't blame the family for all these tortuous twists and turns. Obviously it's important to them to think he didn't suffer, which after a suicide is as incongruous a statement as I have ever heard. I cannot be too judgemental, however, as they were reacting the way 90% of people do. But it does point up how people struggle with this raw fact, that people do, yes, DO commit suicide, even if their anguish and despair isn't obvious to others. ESPECIALLY if. This man had been, apparently, acting for most of his life, and one day he just couldn't do it any more. Or so it would seem.

More odd things struck me. The fact that his memorial is taking place in a bar shook me, because then I wondered if he was an alcoholic. Perhaps not, and I am sure the family would vehemently, even angrily deny this. But surely, somewhere in academia, someone else might be - statistically, even! - and perhaps a recovering one. Someone who can't or must not drink would have to sit around with people who are drinking, perhaps rather heavily because they are in so much pain, supposedly in their colleague's honor, and the alcoholic at the table - even if sober - must sit there smiling with a gut full of unexpressed grief. 

The expectation is that everyone will sit around sipping scotch (they even mentioned this specifically) and heartily sharing funny and fond reminiscences and anecdotes about a man who JUST KILLED HIMSELF BECAUSE HE COULDN’T STAND BEING ALIVE ANY MORE. Of course, if you cry and feel agony at such a gathering, it’s completely inappropriate to express it, and you have to leave. What are you supposed to do - sit at a table, in a bar, in a public place, and put your head down on the table and sob with raw anguish? Or is raw anguish completely inappropriate these days?

Your choices are to leave and run to the bathroom (meaning someone else at the table is in the awkward position of having to run after you while the rest of the party looks at each other uncomfortably), to stay and bring the rest of the party down and completely kill the atmosphere of heartiness and humor, or - 

The only option that is socially acceptable is to just swallow your grief and pretend you're all right, even enjoying the evening. Everyone else is, after all - aren't they? If they aren't, who is going to start talking about it and ruin the occasion? You can do your crying  at home.  

But when you get home, you find it has all turned to stone. 

Does this set of impossible choices have anything to do with the social dynamics that lead a man to take his own life? Does it have anything to do with agonizing loneliness, with a sense of being set apart from everyone else, afraid of your own feelings? Of having to "keep it up", swallowing it continually for years and years and keeping the act going until one day it fatally implodes?

Memorials are “celebrations of life” now, with no tears or grief allowed unless it’s “happy” grief (whatever that is). At very least, you are expected to run to the bathroom and do it there, along with other bodily functions. I don't know what the answer is, but when I heard about the memorial in the pub, even in the first announcement where cause of death was mysteriously not mentioned, I winced. The idea of a "wake" may still be around, and I'm not against it, but I don't think these generally take place in a public space. 

There is no suicide rule book, no etiquette, but I am alarmed at how quickly people jump to hide the scars, even to minimize what has happened or reassure everyone that it was, after all, a painless event - at least for him, a man ending his own life. But painless only in the unconsciousness that leads to death, a conundrum I will never be able to resolve.