Sunday, December 25, 2011

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

and heave ho the Eighth of January, and get that last quarterly 1040ES in by 1/15, and then more weeks will come and go, and in them the dogs will get loose again, and a neighbor will scream a stream of undecipherable invective. At me. And I will not kill the dogs. They got baths yesterday.
And a bit of a hair touch-up for the girl dog. (I know what you're thinking.)

I was invited to a party which takes place today, the day on which, annually, I (mostly we) threw a party 32 years in a row. One after the other. Until there was no party that needed to be. Just a walk in the woods, a howling neighbor, an orange soda (HEB brand), anti-depressants, and wavering, shimmering knowledge of my failings and failures. (I worked about 30 hours on ad music Dec 30 and 31, 2011, and may well fail to sell any of it. At midnight last night, I was adding a mellotron track. Happy New .....? !). For more than 32 years there was so much music in my life, it was almost entirely forbidden, absent from the New Years Day party. I have no music playing now. I have my mind, in which are still swimming melodies. These are not helpful in the current minimalist music world --- perhaps my melodies are just too maximal....... sorry, self-indulgent digression))))))))------------->

My body aches from nothing in particular. My list of deceased friends lengthens every week, it seems. Pneumonia (never had it), cancer (might, haven't really checked) ((Fight Cancer with a CheckUp and a Check!)). Heart attack? Not many. More: drug overdose. Liver disease.
Auto incident. Gun.

The new New Yorker Talk of the Town opens with a piece by R. Angell on letters v. email. Nostalgic. Check my blog of 10/5, my first on email. And its dangers. Angell spends more time recalling the inimitable intimate life-giving aspects of the post card, the letter. Angell is limp. Not a right Angell, not a wrong Angell.
I like to think of the New Yorker as about a week ahead of Jon Stewart, 2 weeks ahead of Time/Newsweek, a month or so ahead of the gov'nment. I recall a story of successful job hunting in the wonk world, success achieved by promoting as ones own the US communist party line of about 1955. We had one then, illegal, but alive.

An illegal party. There will be gumbo.
These are my choices. 1 Reclusion 2 A party in which the wind picks up from the cold north 3 Close my eyes tightly and repeat "There's no place like home...there's no place like home...."
That's for sure. Do you have a way to get there from Oz? or perhaps this Bermuda Triangle?
(And what exactly is triangellation?) ((March Fourth! I go east then.))

Friday, December 16, 2011

why I DON'T love you means I Love You

and a bit of personal history

I may be wrong in my central thesis. I have had another one of those days where I feel like that Beetlejuice fellow, my head spinning on its acts as though something important is going one, but no nothing really important just a dozen things the details of which overlap, wag into each other, and then disperse, leaving just a touch of sewer gas. (Is the toilet leaking? How? When? Who to fix it? Is it really leaking? What is that brown stuff?)

The day didn't center around any one thing, but one thing it centered around was a gig -- "we'll just play 6-8, maybe 8:30. In Brenham. near Brenham." I like Brenham. The gig was further east, in Chappell Hill TX, a Really Charming small town. The fancy nice people threw a party in a cold barn using only small candles as space heaters in 40 degree F weather. Not f'in. Just F. Finally over.

And on the way home, after loading in EARLY, and playing 7:30 - 10 (how did that happen, my head was turned, well spinning). I drove the Civic home, having forgotten nothing, not even my Stetson. Podner. The whole show was computer driven. I had to wear head-phones (really hard with a spinning head) and play air fiddle, air piano, and air cello. Million Vanillion. I nearly left the highway a dozen times, my body experimenting with napping while travelling west at 73 mph, a particularly soporific speed.

Someone who says I Don't love you has loved
or has been thought to love you, though he/she loved you, thinks he/she really does/might.
saw at the very least that you were highly lovable (would, in odor words find a replacement for him/her in the time it takes my head to make half a rotation)
My personal use of the phrase ( if I ever used it) would be the result of years of pain in love.

There may be a very few people on Earth with us who just say what they mean (Hey, pass me the 3/8 inch socket) all the time. And of course there are troubled or sick people who don't know how to say what they mean EVER. They don't know what they mean. They may be thought to mean nothing. Sociopaths, and the otherwise mentally ill. Drug addicts. Some people I love may fall in or near the tree of this category, the mean nothing category. Doctors, for instance.

I'm talking here about utterances as performative in an odd way. The utterance which is uttered in order to elicit a response and then (important) study it! How does that idea look out in the world? Hmmm. Wow. Weird. Uh oh.

Because "I Don't Love You" elicits some bad stuff. It hurts. Even I can't turn it into a fun thing to hear like for an instance -- that turquoise color looks AWESOME on you, MADE for you.
Not really turquoise. A strange blue. You should have a shirt made out of that!

So, the performative as exploratory. "I Don't love you" would denote "I do love you, I am confused about it, I feel negative stuff too, and sometimes I just don't seem to FEEL it, and it's hard to love you (you are an animal! in a bad way). Or, maybe you're NOT an animal in a good way. But kids, it ALWAYS means I do or have and expect again to love you. It's a dance move that twists your arm hard behind your back. And hurts.

It's a song. You always hate the one you love. Oh wait (then check the Spike Jones famous rendition....

You always hurt the one you love,

The one you shouldn't hurt at all.

You always take the sweetest rose,

And crush it till the petals fall.


You always break the kindest heart,

With a hasty word you can't recall.

So, if I broke your heart last night,

It's because I love you most of all.

Unfortunately one good turn (of the head) deserves another.


Saturday, December 3, 2011

CRISIS!!

Certainly there are crises. Things come to a head. Someone dear (or not so dear) is very ill. It will no longer do for [everyone concerned] to remain inactive, to just watch it unfold. Or will it? When people use the word "crisis" at a rate exceeding 3 times per minute, it's a fair assumption that they are feeding the "crisis," probably causing unnecessary suffering, and there's plenty more to this which I will leave as etc., etc., since it is so insulting I must refrain... Let's just leave it at some recognition of the value of a calm head in a storm. And one more: The tough times are our teachers. EW!!! Didn't want to hear that.

A crisis can also be a good excuse to get out of class for awhile. "There's this crisis, and I have responsibilities, and I can't make cookies for the book discussion group Monday. Of course, I won't be there anyway. So sorry to miss it. I loved the new (mediocre but of course well-written) Tobias Wolff book. Hey and
I'll be back soon because: #1 the true depth and breadth of this crisis are as yet unknown by me but are finite #1b the true depth and breadth of the crisis are as yet unknown but are probably infinite, #2 I can only interact effectively (?) with my family of origin for a relatively brief period, #3 The amount of learning and growth I will have to endure may kill me if there is prolonged exposure, and #4 I have to make cookies for the next discussion group meeting."

PS "Please do not presume to set foot in my crisis. I will call you when I need a little input, mostly when I am so exhausted I won't be able to hear or understand what you are saying."
"Sweet dreams.
Good night.
Oh what did you say? Hey come on! Isn't it obvious I have exactly zero energy left to even begin to consider any problems you may need help with. Don't lay that on me now. Got a crisis going here!" (for crisis sake)