Sunday, March 18, 2012
Saturday, March 17, 2012
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!"
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.[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".
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.
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.
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.
Friday, March 16, 2012
This life is bittersweet
Now all of the planes have landed
The soldiers are in their beds
The soldiers are in their beds
Smoke rises from their clothing
And sweet dreams through their heads
Truth faced leaves a strange taste
When joy and sadness meet
A country rain on a city street
This life is bittersweet
The boy with the bloated belly
Hears today's trucks arrive
He puts down his baby sister
And makes his way outside
Truth faced leaves a strange taste
When joy and sadness meet
A country rain on a city street
This life is bittersweet
Everyone's a novelist
And everyone can sing
But no one talks when the TV's on...
The lightning flashed, and the thunder rolled
Dark clouds filled the sky
A country rain on a city street
This life is bittersweet
Moxy Fruvous
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
You'll never get off the playground (short fiction)
She knew it was ridiculous, she knew she was obsolete, and most of all she knew she was alone.
There were days when everything just seemed to be in spin. Not that it was exciting or anything, in fact she could barely see or remain upright. A person her age? Should be able to see by now. Or make sense of things at least.
It was the computer, no, the way things had changed, no, the expectations on her, no, the way you were just supposed to know things without any learning process at all.
Did she really need to review all this again? How many times was this, anyway, the fifty-thousandth? Didn't she remember when she couldn't skip double-Dutch and was thrown off the team and then after a while stopped trying and hid in a corner of the playground?
That was where she was spat upon. Literally, some boys from the other side of the playground. They banded together and held her down. Because she was such a loser. Loser loser loser loser loser loser loser. She stood there hunch-shouldered and crying, looking like the thing she was.
Years later, and oh yes this was in public, a woman she knew old biddy really, stood behind her and grabbed her shoulders and began pulling and yanking and pulling and yanking. "Stand up straight! I can barely stand to look at you."
That, too, was her fault.
So she wondered why, no, she didn't wonder why certain things just ripped the top off, ripped off the carefully-constructed facade she lived behind and exposed the raw unhealed flesh beneath. The unacceptable her, the real her.
The thing is, you're supposed to just know how to do these things. You're born knowing. Boy, I got to the party late, very late, so late that everyone else knew each other already and was proficient at things, party games and the like, that I knew nothing about and would never know anything about because it was too late.
She has been writing and deleting, writing and deleting for several days now, trying to get rid of feelings she doesn't want to have. She can only talk about a tiny fraction of them now, because she is beginning to realize that the internet is just one big stage, a protracted performance and a huge popularity contest. Just like back in school! If you're a good performer and have lots of "social skills," you do great. The more Facebook "friends" you have, the more successful you are as a person. But it must be a bare minimum of 300. That's the quota, don't you know? If you
(No, strike that, it was "bad" and someone would see it.)
I was always rotten at all of it. What makes me think it's going to be any different now? I constantly have a feeling of being hopelessly out of my depth. I came to the party late, far too late, and everyone knows each other already - wait, I already said that - and has no interest in talking to that odd person standing awkwardly in the corner with her head sunk between her shoulders like a dog that has been treated very, very badly.
When did this start? Probably before the egg met the sperm. Laugh now, laugh like the therapist did, not once but twice when I was trying to express a pain beyond language. "Oh, Sarah!" she exclaimed, and threw her head back. She thought I was being witty, entertaining and ironic. Or else performing, which for once I was not. Or else so outrageous, I had no right to be that way. Oh, Sarah!
Not that anyone's listening, but, see, I learned to be entertaining and I learned it young because it was the only way I could survive. If I didn't constantly play the court jester I would be almost literally thrown on the scrap-heap, so I kept on frantically performing. I got especially good laughs when the mask fell off and some of my pain slipped out.
I will never forget. It was the time I was really teetering, and for once I just could not wear the mask. Someone close to me said, "You're just faking this to get attention." It was a double-twist, one of those deliriously sick half-nelsons that may have caused all this insanity in the first place. I was faking being sick, when it was one of the rare times I was NOT faking. The rest of the time, I was faking being well, but to almost everyone I knew, it was "real" and this self-indulgent whimpering was "fake". When your brain is twisted around into a corkscrew, can you help being in pain, can you help crying out? Yes, you can, so SHUT UP.
Anyway, back to more important things. This Facebook stuff, everyone else gets it, but all she gets is blunders, criticisms, awkwardness and more pain. Like double-Dutch, she does't even know how to do it. There are no instructions, and everyone is too embarrassed to show her any of it because you are supposed to know. This doesn't just damage her self-esteem, it reminds her once again that she doesn't have any.
(A few weeks ago she was publicly ripped apart on someone's blog in a way that was truly breathtaking. But it was HER fault, for putting her stuff out there! Everyone told her so, especially people who "loved" her. If she actually had those mysterious social skills that everyone else seems to have been born with, it never would have happened at all)
So she ruthlessly cut two paragraphs. Then three more. What am I going to do with this? But it was only her diary. Her diary? Why was she editing a diary no one would even see? She didn't even read it herself. Because it was just too bloody difficult. Even if no one ever saw it at all.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Lovely Erica
Sometimes, when you're having a sucky rotten day, you just have to try to focus on what is good in your life.
I have four things. Well, five. Let's not forget that I've been married to the same man for nearly 40 years.
I just feel bruised, and off my base, and hurt and angry because of something someone posted on Facebook, someone whom I thought was a friend (and used to be, years ago). Did I take it the wrong way? Whatever it was, I felt like I was back on the playground again being spat upon.
Something I was very proud of was mocked and made fun of and demeaned, as if it was stupid of me to put any time into it and as if I had nothing better to do.
There are times when I think you never do get out of the playground, that it's fate, kismet, whatever, and all your efforts to escape are so many headlong runs at the brick wall.
I did try to get all this out of my mind, to delete and delete, but it's more than bothering me, it hurts with that deep howling hurt that makes you wonder if you really can keep on living. If there is in fact any point.
Do I need to explain my feelings? I shouldn't have to. But I have been in exile too long. Perhaps for my whole life. There is no cure for what you are.
Meantime, I have this.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Ever knitted a dinosaur?
I knitted these guys for my dino-loving grandson Ryan for his 6th birthday. NOT life-sized!
The flight attendant from hell, part 2
The more
things change, the worse they get, it seems.
Yesterday I
wrote quite a long post about that incident involving an American Airlines
flight attendant who “went berserk” on the plane, ranting over the PA system
for 15 minutes about 9-11, the plane crashing, and other bizarre possibilities
(screaming, at one point, “I’ll kill them all”).
Yes, this was
an extreme case, but a few details have come out that I think are VERY strange.
The public are
understandably “concerned” (read: terrified) about the possibility of something like this
happening again. Flight attendants are supposed to keep everyone calm no matter
what the situation, so this hellish rant was more than disturbing.
But in the
aftermath, certain facts are emerging.
Alarmingly, it turns out that airlines do NOT screen flight attendants
for mental illness. Pilots, yes. But pilots have an important job. I think the
old idea that “stewardesses” are just there to keep everything jolly and mildly
sexy still hangs around.
So if this
woman is bipolar, as she claimed she was, she would not have been required to
disclose it in applying for the job. Even if the airline knew about it, it
would not have been grounds for letting her go.
I am all for
hiring people with mental illnesses, given the fact that the huge majority of
cases are manageable with medication and a regulated lifestyle. But how
regulated is the life of a flight attendant? Sleep deprivation, constant major
time zone shifts, meals coming sporadically if at all, meds accidentally left at home (and
where do you get lithium if you’ve forgotten it?) – and add to this the current
level of job uncertainty as American Airlines teeters on the verge of
bankruptcy – and you have a potential recipe for disaster.
But there are
no safeguards in place here. It seems to take a traumatic event like this one for
hiring practices to come to light. Failing to screen flight attendants for ANY
kind of medical disability is negligent and potentially dangerous. In this age of
lurking terrorism, the stakes are even higher. Flight attendants are, as the
airlines are now scrambling to tell us, “first responders”. To say the least, they need their wits about them at all times.
Whenever
anything weird and scary happens, other weirdness leaks out. Many of the
headlines for this international news item referred to the woman as a “stewardess”, a
term I haven’t heard in decades. The police report about this strange event said she was experiencing “mental lunacy”, a term that hasn’t been used for about 100
years!
Someone else
described her tirade as a “word salad”, a way of containing and distancing the
terror with an obscure, clinical term most people have never heard of.
Then we have
this bestselling author, Heather Poole, a veteran flight attendant who just
happens to have written a book called Cruising Attitude, popping up and
saying, “It could have happened to any of us.”
Oh, really?
So any
“stewardess”, at random, just picked out of the crowd, could have gone
completely berserk and screamed for 15 minutes while on the job? Any flight
attendant, perhaps stressed by job uncertainty, could have flipped out into a state
of “mental lunacy”, needing to be carried off the plane in restraints?
We still have
a deep dread and horror of mental illness, a put-them-in-shackles mentality.
This buried unconscious reflex is what causes us to lapse into language
that is shockingly obsolete. On the one hand, bipolar disorder has been
sanitized as a kind of diabetes of the mind – and in the vast majority of
cases, it is something like that. On the other, we see people who are
experiencing a serious episode as “demonic” and “possessed”: attitudes that go
back to when humankind was preverbal and terrified of any behaviour that
threatened the safety of the band.
Back in the
day, “stewardesses” traditionally took care of men’s needs, all the way up to (or
down to) sexual release. Thus, the “Fly Me” advertising slogan that was popular 50 years
ago. On the (best ever!) TV series Mad Men, a retro look at Madison
Avenue in the ‘60s, Don Draper is practically accosted on a plane by a “stew”
taking an aggressive sexual stance. They were all there for the picking, it
seems. Even the title of that book, Cruising Attitude, has a suggestive
tone: cruising for what, exactly?
And will this
bizarre episode help Heather Poole’s sales? I can’t see how it could hurt. She
just lucked out, I guess.
I believe all airlines
should change their policy immediately and begin to rigorously screen
flight attendants for mental illnesses, especially major ones like bipolar. I
don’t think this is discriminatory, and in fact I believe it would ultimately protect applicants from getting into situations like this that they cannot
control. It’s unlikely this woman will ever work again in her chosen career. If
the airline knew about her condition but turned a blind eye, what does that say
about them? Did they pretend it wasn’t there? Did they think not hiring her
would violate her civil rights? Do her civil rights trump public safety?
Why are
pilots so rigorously screened, when (according to the airlines) flight attendants also carry huge
responsibility for safety? I think it’s the remnants of the “Fly Me” attitude.
“Stews” just squeeze up and down the aisles in tight skirts, serving cocktails
with a smile. They’re really not very important, subservient to the real crew,
the guys who fly the plane.
You say that’s
not true? That things have changed? Then where does this “mental lunacy” label come
from? Will we now begin to call mentally challenged people “idiots” and “imbeciles”?
We have a
problem that could have crashed that plane. Had it already taken off, had she
been armed, had she been packed with explosives like a terrorist (and do you
think it couldn’t happen? How carefully are flight attendants screened, if
their mental health problems are being routinely ignored?), we would have had a
disaster on an almost unimagineable scale.
Will there be
a response to this obvious weakness in the system? I don’t think so. I think
the policy will stay the same, because we don’t like to look at mental illness.
We look away at the first opportunity, as if it isn’t really happening.
It’s lunacy,
after all, a term that reverberates with an ancient and even primal terror.
Cruising
Attitude by Heather
Poole (hot off the presses, girls!)
This synopsis/blurb appeared on the Amazon.com web site.
Flying the not-so-friendly skies...
In her more than fifteen years as an airline flight attendant, Heather Poole has seen it all. She's witnessed all manner of bad behavior at
Heather's true stories in Cruising Attitude are surprising, hilarious, sometimes outrageously incredible—the very juiciest of "galley gossip" delightfully intermingled with the eye-opening, unforgettable chronicle of her fascinating life in the sky.
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