I am still in mourning for my dearly departed dog Betty so I want to do another song about her.
According to this song, now that Betty is gone I am free to end it all. I no longer have to worry about Betty’s fate, sans moi, and I no longer have her — or have anyone — to take care of and to protect. No one would be left alone without me.
But I’m not ready to end it all. There are too many things I still want to do and to learn and to accomplish. I want to ski Jackson Hole. I want to get fluent in French. I want to be a hero. I want to fight for what I believe in. (First, I need to find something to believe in.) I want to help. I want to see Bhutan and northern Africa and the Greek Islands and Israel and Moldova. Yes, Moldova. I still haven’t read “Gravity’s Rainbow” OR “Ulysses,” though I own them both. (I’m so embarrassed.) I want to see Dungen live in concert. I want to make a great album. I want to write a great book. I know I have made albums and now I have written a book and some of you might say that I already have written a great book and I already have made a great album/great albums, but I haven’t made a GREAT album, know what I mean? I am still working toward that. I want to paint more paintings, including more portraits of Betty (from photographs). She was so pretty, with such nice colors and such an expressive face. I want to have an out-of-body experience. I want to karaoke. I never ever have. Never had the guts. I have already chosen the songs I will sing first: “Moonshadow” and “Nobody Does It Better” (the theme from “The Spy Who Loved Me”). I want to know what happiness feels like.
Mostly I just want to be understood.
I forgot to explain in the last post that the whole idea behind “Stars In My Dreams” was that I dreamt — and still do dream — about Betty all the time. She was a symbol, in my dreams, of good things and of strengths in me that were maybe hidden a lot of the time, or not easily accessible. Unselfconsciousness, generosity and freedom of heart/spirit, honesty, instinct, patience, faith, directness, openness. I was often terribly worried for and about Betty in my dreams — worried she would run into traffic and get hit by a car or worried she would run away or be stolen, never to be found, or get into a fight with a big vicious dog — but by the end of every dream I would discover that I had had nothing to worry about. Nothing really bad would ever happen to Betty in my dreams. Nothing could hurt her. By “her” I mean all the best qualities in her and in me and in all of us. She may be physically gone but she lives in me.
What I have learned through my Betty dreams is that in my waking life, I worry way too much about things that haven’t happened yet, and probably won’t ever happen, and the worrying never does me any good. It isn’t helpful; it is harmful.
Betty helped me to de-stress. I first got her when I was going through a horribly depressed — the worst, ever — phase, fantasizing about jumping out of windows. I thought a puppy might help me feel better, and might take me out of my own head. I was correct. She was part of the cure.
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January 4th, 2009
7287pwkr
So much of what I know about love I know from living with my dearly departed dog Betty for almost thirteen years.
This is what I think I know: Love is wanting to give the loved one what she needs. Love is rejoicing in the other’s happiness. Love is enduring, through hard times, through worry, through everything. Love is no fear that it will end or go sour. Because love is forever.
Love is not about making promises; it’s about living day to day, month to month, year to year, with no question of the reality of your unwavering and unquestionable devotion and compassion and loyalty. Promises are extraneous and unnecessary.
Love doesn’t have to be complicated when you love like this. It is actually very simple.
Betty and I had our occasional differences but our mutual respectful, gentle love overrode minor annoyances and arguments and bad moods. When I was at my ugliest and most pathetic and weak and impatient and petulant, she never bailed on me. She tolerated me with no complaints. She never thought of leaving me and she knew I would never leave her.
Whenever she was sick I took care of her as best I could. But she also took care of me. She took my loneliness away. When I was “alone” (without people) I wasn’t really truly alone because Betty was by my side. Or in the next room. Or in the backseat. (When I had my 1968 Chevy Impala, with its big beautiful long uninterrupted front seat, she would lie with her head in my lap when I drove. But with the VW she usually lay down in the back, since she couldn’t stretch out over the gear shift in the front. And she liked to be comfortable.) It was always me and Betty. We were solid.
I talked to Betty all the time. Here are some of my expressions of endearment: “baby girl,” “my baby girl,” “sweetness,” “Betty boo,” “boo boo,” “booda booda boo,” “boody boo,” “Betty bumpers,” “you’re the best girl,” “ah my little boo boo.”
(The ex called her “B” and he bought a big blue metal letter “B” from Urban Outfitters and nailed it to the wall just above Betty’s food bowl. That “B” will stay there for as long as I am here in this place.)
I have never addressed any biped in this sort of cooing way. I call people by their given names. It feels weird, to me, to not.
I picked up Betty’s dog doo every single day, sometimes multiple times, and I didn’t mind at all. (In the city you kind of have to pick up after your dog because otherwise you are kind of an asshole.) I was simply doing what needed to be done in order to take care of my sweet baby girl properly — and to respect my neighbors (do unto others…etc. Am I too moralistic?) And I cleaned up her vomit willingly, gladly, with affection and with no blame (vomit, like shit, happens).
And later, when she could no longer walk and could in fact barely stand up and couldn’t always make it outside and she had accidents on her bed, I had only sympathy and words/sounds/expressions of comfort rather than anger or irritation. I thought, “The poor old girl.”
She farted — audibly, pungently — in my presence with no shame or embarrassment. And it only made me love her more. I have always thought that this is the definition of true love: when the loved one passes major gas next to you — like, say, in bed or on the couch while watching a movie — and you don’t think it’s gross.
Betty never complained. Ever. About anything. She endured pain and discomfort (and a softball-sized cancerous tumor on her spleen [which led to the subsequent removal of said tumor along with the spleen to which it was attached] and hot spots and infections and gastritis and two bouts of laryngeal paralysis [and two laryngeal tie-back throat surgeries to correct the problem each time] and most recently, a bad urinary tract infection and kidney failure and a blood clot which was cutting off blood flow to her back legs) with grace and patience and silence and calm. She was beautiful in every sense of the word.
She was a great role model. When I sang, “I could learn from this” I meant that if I used Betty as an example, maybe I could learn how to become a better person. I wanted her to take me under her wing, so to speak, as a student of life. She was my guru, without meaning to be.
Betty was born good. I have had to spend my whole adult life learning how to be good. No one ever taught me. But Betty instinctively knew. Me, I have to constantly read books and observe other people, and dogs, and watch movies and talk to shrinks and experiment with various medications and meditations and diets and discipline myself and practice practice practice, trying to slowly oh so slowly figure it out before I am old and my life has passed me by and I have screwed up every last human relationship.
Betty was like Buddha, living always in the moment, never judging, always taking everything as it came, always up for anything, always kind, never ashamed, never doing or saying anything to be ashamed of, never beating around the bush. At one point I contemplated changing her name to “Buddha.” It was close enough to “Betty,” I thought, that she could adapt quickly. (Dog/God — so close in sound and meaning.)
Betty didn’t play games with my head. If she wanted or needed something, she would let me know, forthwith — such a relief from dealing with peoples’ secretiveness and confusion and inability to tell it like it is. Betty was unfailingly honest and direct with me. Resentment was to her a completely foreign concept; not a part of her life, or of my life with her.
Whenever Betty saw a motorcycle she would go nuts and lunge at it, pulling at the leash or pressing her nose up to or out of the car window in a frenzy, barking like crazy at the bike, without stopping, until it sped off away from us. I think she thought motorcycles were dangerous beasts of some kind — the shape, the loudness and the velocity with which they revved up and blasted away — and she was trying to warn people, or to protect us, or herself; to drive the monster away. Or maybe she was excited by motorcycles; maybe her wild hysterics were a kind of lusting after something big and strong and powerful and brutish.
I miss the feel of her fur under my fingers. The softness of the backside of her ears. The wave-like tufts on the sides of her neck. Her pink belly. Her wiggling, tail-wagging excitement at seeing me come in through the front door, every time I came in through the front door, even if I had only been gone for two minutes to take the trash out or get the mail or something.
At the end — when she could no longer walk and could barely stand on her own, without my help — on the night before she died, I watched her running in her sleep (lying on her side, legs kicking at the air spasmodically) and it made me so happy. She was running again, like she did when she was younger; running after a rabbit in the grass in the yard, running into the water to fetch a tennis ball I’d thrown out as far as I could. She was so happy when she was running.
And we were so happy together. God, I loved her. She was an angel.
Long live Betty.
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December 29th, 2008
7287pwkr
These are a few of my favorite things:
floating on my back in natural bodies of salt water (bays, oceans)
being alone
silence
Betty
Freda
my two new guitars (Martin acoustic and SG electric)
writing songs
recording songs
apples
napping in the afternoon on my couch
not answering the phone
downhill skiing
snow
rain
fog
the sound of foghorns
Bill Evans
sleeping
dreaming (I never have nightmares!)
birdwatching/birding
forgiving and forgetting
“Dexter”
Samuel Beckett
not knowing what’s going to happen
Carl Jung
tennis (watching and playing)
moderation/temperance
valium/diazepam (in moderation)
Jameson (in moderation)
the little metal Buddha coin that I just got in Chicago and which lives in the right front pocket of my Levi’s jeans which I never wash
Lucian Freud’s nudes
Kate Moss’ face (gets more beautiful as she gets older)
my bed
my apartment
“Let The Right One In” (Swedish vampire movie)
Sweden
the original “Rollerball” and in fact all science fiction movies from the 1970’s
the 1970’s
Tarkovsky
dogs/puppies
Kenneth Mars in “What’s Up, Doc?”
poker
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December 20th, 2008
7287pwkr
He probably assumes that I will now write bitter pained breakup songs about him, but I would not want to hurt someone who has already suffered enough to last a whole lifetime. I choose to remember him and document him as he was and as we were when things were beautiful.
Every light in my mind goes shining on. He was — we were — a star in my dark night. And when our dawn came, I did not let the star fade away into the morning light — it glows and glitters in my memory as something good, precious and so worthwhile.
I can’t help being sad, though, now and then, quite sad and regretful of all the things that maybe could have gone differently. But then again things could not have gone any other way:
“No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” Evan used to say that. Or something like that. (It was so long ago.) Was he quoting someone? Who? It’s a good way to look at things. Evan was so much smarter than he ever got credit for in most of his press. (Evan also used to say “Tell the truth — it’s easier to remember.” More wise words, and words I have always instinctively lived by, maybe to a fault. For example I have to tell the truth about my feelings even when what I am feeling scares people or makes them uncomfortable.)
I want to be a monk. I want to be like Buddha. I wish I didn’t get so down sometimes, that I wasn’t so very affected by so many people and things, that I wasn’t so so sensitive.
“Why couldn’t I have been more like Buddha?” I asked my shrink. Why couldn’t I have just let everything be and let him be and not wanted or needed anything from him, other than what he chose to give me, when he chose to give it to me? Why couldn’t I have been content with whatever gifts and scraps he threw to me once in a while, and kept my mouth shut and realized how lucky I was to have anything, anyone, at all? And he wasn’t just anyone; he was someone extraordinary. Why didn’t I just accept everything as it was and stay in the moment and have patience? Why couldn’t I have let it all be and let it unfold however it was going to unfold?
“But Buddha didn’t have a girlfriend,” my shrink answered. Buddha didn’t have to expend all sorts of energy trying to maneuver a complex new relationship with a complicated significant other of the opposite sex. He was able devote all his time and energy to being Buddha and to being Buddha-like. To sitting. To having a clear mind.
Yes, yes, I thought. She’s right (my shrink).
Maybe I was on the right track (the Buddha/monk track) before — before him — when I was alone (and had been for four years) and okay with being alone, and even sort of happy with it, and resigned to be that way until the end of my life. To be content alone, like Buddha, and on the way to being enlightened. And believing that other people only got in the way of my path to enlightenment.
I remember now: I am perfect. By that I mean I am not perfect. So please allow me to have my doubts. Doubt may be the enemy of art but we are not talking about art here. My doubt is and was — in each and every historical instance — totally justified. Besides, doubt is human. And so is faith. It’s not simple. I am not simple. You are not simple. He was not simple. I accept this.
No fantasy can hold up under the weight of reality. At least not for very long.
But I’m not saying that fantasies don’t come true sometimes. They do. And it’s pretty fucking amazing when it happens. It’s almost worth it to have it fall apart. Just to have had those fleeting moments of fantastical mindblowing wonderfulness. (Life is really just a series of moments, anyway. I sometimes think that one might as well train oneself to find sufficient sustenance in the various random evanescent moments rather than hope and strive for anything sustained and enduring.) Do you know what it’s like to find one of your heroes falling in love with you? Do you know what it’s like to experience one of the fantasies you’ve had in your head for years play out in real time, in real space, in the here and now, pretty much exactly as it played out in your fantasy? It’s a total mindfuck, but in the BEST way. (I’m not talking about him — I was not what you would call the hugest or most knowledgeable fan of his recorded work before I met him. I am a big fan now, after having gotten to know him and witnessed his estimable, enviable work ethic [he puts my lazy ass to shame] and really listened to his back catalogue, finally. [I did always like him live, though. He always kicked ass in concert — no matter what phase he was going through — and that is one true test of a musical artist’s realdealness, right? I believe so.] )
It may not be easy but we need to forget all the mistakes, disasters, and words that should never have been spoken.
Every light in my mind (you, you, and you, and him) goes shining on.
I have had a good life. I am so lucky.
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December 17th, 2008
7287pwkr
I played in Lexington, Kentucky a couple of nights ago. In a bar before the gig we met a local man who deals in reclaimed wood from old buildings — horse stables, barns, etc. — that have been torn down. We invited him to the show and he came. He had never heard of me or my music and at the end of the night he approached me and he seemed genuinely and visibly moved by the whole thing — by the performance — and he said the most wonderful thing to me: he said,”All of your songs are about me,” in a sweet deferential humble voice. (I may be paraphrasing him — my memory is notoriously not good.) This from a man who had not heard a note of me before that night. He listened with brand new ears and he let it all move through him and into him. Oh if the whole world could be so open and receptive. (Or: Oh if the whole world could love me.)
Then my new fan/best friend took a harmonica out of his pea coat — the pea coat that he’d inherited from his dead grandfather whom he never met — and played for me “My Kentucky Home” on it. It touched my wounded heart. I almost cried. Gosh, those Southern gentlemen. I have always been a sucker for them.
Anyway, “Going Blonde.” “I don’t want nothing means I want something,” that’s a little English lesson for you all. Just in case anyone was confused about what the double negative (“don’t want nothing”) meant, literally. When I am grammatically incorrect in a song, it’s usually on purpose. Like when I sing, “Don’t say nothing” in the song “Oh,” I really mean “don’t say anything.”
Joe Keefe played the lead rock guitar on here. He’s a brilliant guitar player and totally unknown. He takes direction really well. I would tell him, like, “play something kind of repetitive and masturbatory and fast and super duper Rawk here” ( the end of “Going Blonde”) or “Play something trippy and British here (“New Waif”)” and he would give me exactly what I wanted, every time. It was great for when I was too lazy to play guitar, or just couldn’t be bothered with it during the “Made In China” sessions.
Joe is quite good at skipping rocks, too. He’s from Martha’s Vineyard. Working class Vineyard. Did you know that not everyone on that island is wealthy? And neither is everyone there Caucasian. It’s a pretty progressive place, as far as islands off the coast of Massachusetts go. Sure, there are rich white people, but there is also a town there that has a large black population (Oak Bluffs [ever heard of the Inkwell?]) and all over the island there is scattered a not-rich population — the fishermen (sorry — fisherpeople), the construction workers, housepainters, the town hall clerical staff, restaurant/bar workers, etc.
Back to the song: In it I think I am calling out the vanity and shallowness and dumbness and superficiality of American celebrity culture, and of Rock N Roll, and of myself — my need for attention (“Tell you my problems”— that is what I am doing here, right now, with this whole bloggy thing.), etc. — and also just generally being kind of self-consciously petulant and recognizing how needy I can be, and how perpetually unsatisfied I am. But I can’t be 100% sure what I am singing about, since I don’t recall what I was thinking when I wrote it. I guess I wasn’t thinking much. “Made in China” contains a lot of unconsciously-crafted or rather thrown-together bunches of lyrics; phrases and imagery grabbed from different jottings in various notebooks. A little like the cut-up Burroughs method. With “Going Blonde,” I guess I just wanted to write a kind of dumb short fast loud bitchy-weary rocknroll thingy. And to admit my own continued willingness to play — albeit half-assedly — the pop culture game: putting albums out, being photographed, doing interviews, promoting myself, etc.
Dumb-blonde-ness is just a cliché, I know, and I certainly mean no offense to either the bottle- or natural blonds out there. I know not all blonds are dumb.
“Bleach in my brain”— when I went platinum white back around “Only Everything,” the chemicals burned my scalp and left scabs. So painful. Shockingly so. Before that I never knew what girls had to go through to get that Warhol-era Nico/Pam Anderson look. And I never did it again. It felt like self-mutilation. Like inviting a firing squad to have at me. It didn’t look right, anyway. I didn’t have the sass to pull it off. I am a brown-haired girl, through and through.
Anyway, I was talking about blondness as a sign of stupidity, which it really isn’t. Sure, yes, there are dumb blondes, but there are intelligent ones, too. Ann Coulter, for example. She may be repellent, but you can’t deny she has a working brain.
In my head I treat this stuff — my thoughts, my feelings, my ideas, my music, my world — as if it really matters when really I’m just “singing stupid songs.” It’s all so meaningless and unimportant to 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of people. That’s what the album is about.
But it’s all so meaningful to me, and that’s why I continue to do it. But as far as the big picture, it doesn’t — I don’t — amount to much, culturally or historically. It’s not because what I do isn’t any good and doesn’t have any merit and I don’t sell a lot of records. It’s partly that too much music has been made at this point — and it’s just getting easier and easier to make music — for any of this modern music stuff to really matter anymore. But it keeps me going. Keeps me marginally sane, some of the time, when I am doing it. Sometimes I feel that my music and my writing keeps me alive, that it’s something to continue to live for.
When love falls apart, I can go to my music, my guitars, (or if I am feeling too despondent to even lift a guitar out of its case, I can always go to the couch [really comfortable for afternoon lying-down], my Buddha books, or go outside to look up at the sky and the birds and the trees or, if it’s summertime, I can float on my back in the ocean) and it holds me up and together and keeps me from disintegrating or collapsing into a heap of self-pity and -loathing, totally destroyed and given up.
Another one recently fell apart. He was having a difficult time handling me and my problems. So I put him out of his misery. No, I didn’t kill him; I set him free. It was a merciful walking away, from my point of view, but also selfish and necessary because I couldn’t handle his not being able to handle me and my problems.
He would have left eventually anyway. He kind of already had, in a way.
It is always this way. There have been so few, but they have all fallen apart before I even knew what hit me. I am fighting to convince myself that it’s not because there is something deeply and unfixably wrong with me. Sometimes it’s hard to convince myself of this because how can it be that there is something wrong with all of them — with everyone else, every single one? It must be me, right? But this is childish.
I am trying to grow up. It’s time. It’s f*cking time. I’m f*cking 41.
He bought me diamonds. No one ever did before. This was the first time in my life that anyone gave me precious stones of any kind.
“Millions of diamonds/sparkling, shining” is not something I ever wanted or requested or demanded from any guy (mostly because my other few bona fide boyfriends were all basically penniless) but still it meant so so much.
He wrote in a poem about an ex-girlfriend that a butterfly once landed in her hand and that she closed her fingers around it and crushed it and laughed. I asked him if what happened in the poem really happened in real life and he said yes. I was shocked and kind of almost sickened that a person — especially a woman (is that sexist of me?) ; a young woman — could do such a thing. Am I pathetically softhearted and naïvely innocent and way too radically insect-liberationist? Am I a fool because whenever I find any kind of bug in my apartment I carefully bring it outside and set it free, alive?
The butterfly incident seemed to me to say a lot about this girl. And my reaction to the story said a lot about me. It got me thinking that there are possibly two kinds of people in this world — there are the kind of people who, when butterflies land on their palms, crush them to death and the kind of people who, when butterflies land in their palms, don’t crush them to death but, rather, marvel and go, “Ooh! Look! A butterfly landed in my hand! It’s so pretty and so delicate! I must be careful not to hurt it. I appreciate this wonderful and rare moment and I want to be still and savor it.” I realize this is a simplistic and dangerous and judgmental way of looking a the world.
I thought the ring he gave me was perfect, perfectly beautiful because of the hope and renewal and happiness it represented.
In “Going Blonde” I mock myself for a want that I never even had (diamonds), while simultaneously mocking other people who want or need these superficial symbols of plenty, symbols of love. That’s just it — they are only symbols. They are not love itself. The hard stones are often stronger and last much longer than the union of the two people. If only plans and intentions and promises were as indestructible. A ring that one day means “I am taken”; “I am happy”; “I am part of an equal partnership”; “I am loved”; “someone finally really SEES me and is okay with who I am”; “this one is going to stick with me”; “he’s/she’s the one”; “I have a great future to look forward to”; “this moment is beautiful and perfect and I must never forget it”; “I followed my heart and it didn’t blow up in my face!” can turn around and mean sadness and loss and disappointment and bad timing or tragically missed opportunity if the winds of fate/circumstance change direction. Or if two seriously and similarly damaged people stop pretending that they can be normal and can have well-adjusted, calm, happy lives and relationships.
So now what do I do with the ring? Do I give it back or do I hold on to it or do I sell it on ebay or do I give it to charity? What is the protocol?
Right now it is in an envelope, along with some photographs of the two of us, in the back of a drawer at the other end of the apartment, in the room which is farthest from this one here where I spend most of my time.
I don’t know what to do with the ring since, like I said, I was never given any jewelz before. I’ve never been here before.
Aw, shit, this was supposed to be a lighthearted fun post.
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December 10th, 2008
7287pwkr
Thank you all very very much for all the well wishes and prayers and encouragement and understanding. It helped me. I am now on the mend, doing better than before. Thank you.
By choosing this song, I don’t mean to say that I almost died. I was in bad shape but I wasn’t anywhere close to death, in my opinion. I just had to get my head screwed on better (and to put on a bit of weight).
I always manifest emotional distress psychosomatically. Anorexia is just one way. Over the years I’ve had a whole host of biologically unexplainable aches and pains crop up and then magically disappear. It’s never life-threatening but it’s disturbing all the same. Once, for example, I developed a blurry left eye. Or maybe it was the right eye. It lingered for a few weeks. It messed up my equilibrium. (Well, my mental equilibrium was already messed up — that’s why my eye went all funny — so what I mean to say is that my mental unbalance went on to affect my physical equilibrium, in an ocular sense. This is how I see it, anyway.) I took to wearing an eye patch after I nearly fell over while crossing a busy street on foot. I went through various tests and even a brainscan but doctors could find no reason for my one blurred eye. The eye finally went back to normal after I broke up with a guy I had been wanting to break up with and only then — when my eye cleared up immediately post-breakup — did I realize that there had been a completely reasonable explanation for the nagging dizziness: my brain was sending an unignorable message to my body, forcing me to confront the fact that I had to deal with this unresolved and pressing situation — the need to end an unhealthy, unfulfilling relationship — in my life. Breaking up with someone isn’t easy or fun and so I put it off and put it off and as soon as I finally made the difficult but necessary big step, I felt better all over.
And then there was the painful pain that appeared in my left hand after my fight with Brian in my book. Pain which disappeared as soon as Brian and I apologized to each other and made up.
Anorexia doesn’t start as a physical problem — losing weight is just a symptom of something that originates in the brain. It’s about control; trying to sort of half-consciously exert some control over something in our lives, when we feel that our emotions, or our lives, are out of control.
When the Blake Babies put together this song back in 2000 I wasn’t thinking of a literal or specific event in my life. Maybe I was unknowingly foreshadowing future difficulties (like what recently happened to me). But there was no actual definitive point at which I ever had a near-death experience. Rather, I meant to express that I’d been through pain and loss and had come through it feeling fragile and wounded, yes, but also newly hopeful and grounded. Tough experiences can enrich us, somehow, by enabling us to feel grateful for the things — and for the life — we do have. And trials can give us knowledge — about the world, about our mammalian brains, about our resilience, our self-forgiveness. Each painful experience helps us, if we let it, to be a little easier on ourselves.
In the song I also made up an abusive relationship scenario. “I” — the persona I took on in the song — was a former abusee and self-loather/harmer (“seeing a reason in a heavy hand”… a slap…a break”). She had escaped the abusive boyfriend/husband, escaped to a place where she was able to find some new, healthier, saner perspective.
I kind of wanted “violins” to be heard as “violence” (“keep the violins away/keep the violence away”) — as in “I’ve moved on from abuse (self- and other-inflicted) and from drama/sentimentality which can be represented by weepy strings.”
I used to really hate myself. More and more, I like myself and appreciate myself and even love myself and see that what I used to call flaws aren’t really flaws but are just me — who I am. It’s a nice feeling, when I’m feeling it. I used to think I was pitiful and pathetic and inadequate and unlovable and part of me still does, some days, but I am starting to believe that if someone can’t handle me (and I am a handful; a neurotic handful), and can’t accept me, warts and all, complexes and all, then I certainly don’t need to feel that I did anything wrong.
I want to be loved as I am now. With no conditions. If I never meet anyone who can love me like this, so be it. I’ve got a lifetime of practice at being alone. I’m an expert. I have a PhD in Solitude.
But, still, I’m not saying that everything is A-okay and that I am “well” now and that I have “fixed” my problems: sometimes I still think I could actually die from a lack of love and affection. I am very lonely. And I am very picky.
I am currently reading a fascinating book titled “A General Theory Of Love” by Doctors Lewis, Amini, and Lannon. In this book we learn that “studies demonstrate that solitary people have a vastly increased rate of premature death from all causes” and that monkeys raised in isolation are really screwed up and “cannot engage in reciprocal interactions with normal monkeys, who consistently reject them”; these screwed-up monkeys’ brains are maimed. And: “Self-mutilation is another of solitude’s legacies: these monkeys bite their own arms, bang their heads against the wall, and gouge out their eyes. Social environment even fixes the normal formation of such behavioral basics as eating and drinking.” And furthermore: “with their vulnerability to anxiety and depression, their social awkwardness and failure to attach as adults, these monkeys exhibit a close animal counterpart to the multifaceted misery that in human beings is labeled neurotic.” And one more thing: “We recognize instinctively that healthy humans are not loners.”
I won’t lie to you (at least not about the important stuff). I think I’m more confused than ever. But I’m not sure.
Evan played bass on this song (and on a few others, and sang on a handful — he was there in Indiana with us Blake Babies for the “God Bless…” sessions.) It made me feel a pang, for my old friend, listening again after so much time. Evan, where are you?
In “Waiting For Heaven” (from the same “God Bless the Blake Babies” album), I wanted “face” to be heard not only as “face” but as “phase”: “I’m on a wave coming down from a beautiful face/phase.” Same difference, really. This particular line means loss, and the tragic unraveling of love, of self-love, of companionship, of good times, of a good mood, of hope, of faith, of sweetness, of affection, of happiness, of confidence, of someone.
Whenever I sang “Waiting For Heaven” in front of a crowd, I felt I had to be careful to enunciate the word “heaven” at the tops of the choruses, and to make sure I leaned on the letter “h” at the beginning of the word, so that people didn’t mistake “heaven” for “Evan” and think that I was pleading, “Evan where are you?” because that’s not what the song is about; it’s way more existential than just one guy. And by the time I wrote these lyrics I was way past — years past — being in love with Evan. “Evan, where are you?” would be an easy misinterpretation to make, since Evan is singing with me on the song — he is not so much evoked as he is right fucking there with me and so it’s almost impossible to not think of him at that moment — and since people back in the day seemed to be so fascinated by the idea of me and Evan and “are they or aren’t they?” etc. and looking — in the songs — for clues and insight into what was or was not going on and maybe wanting to think that I was forever pining for the guy (I was not). I mean, I kind of was for a while but at the same time I kind of wasn’t. And then I really wasn’t at all anymore.
Some people also may conceivably be confused because I am addressing heaven as if heaven were a person (calling heaven “you”). I guess that means I’m talking to God. I do that a lot.
Next post: a happy or goofy or fun song. If I can find one among the tearjerkers.
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November 29th, 2008
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What a trip; I’m better for it”: that will be me, when I get through this thing I am going through.
This song is all about depression. When we make it to the other side we can feel triumphant (“landing on a crowded shore, high-fiving”) and so grateful for having survived. Also we can’t help but develop an empathy for the suffering of others after going through something so painful.
Maybe those of us who feel and think deeply, who suffer a lot inside, who are kind of mental are not to be pitied for our frequent aches, but should be patted on the back for sticking it out when it hurts so much. We who don’t ever give up and who continue to believe that things can — that WE can — be better. We are alive, we are not numb. We fight on and on and on. We fight our self-destructive urges. We refuse to close up our hearts and become bitter and dead inside in order not to experience the frequent hurts of an ultra-sensitive soul/mind/heart.
Sometimes I feel like a human pincushion. Every painful emotion hits me with ridiculously exaggerated force. And the anxiety feels like hands inside of me, squeezing my guts really hard.
For the most part I have not ever been inclined to escape with drugs and alcohol. In the drugs-and-alcohol sense I am and have always been very straight. My coping mechanism — or one of them; the one that kicked into high gear again most recently — has been restricting food.
We swim through the deep dark oceans to reach the crowded shore; lots of people have made it through the same sort of experiences. We are not alone. It just feels like we are when we are in the thick of it. And after one of us endures one of these things, she may be transformed into a more humble and compassionate person, “high-fiving” all the other freaks and mental defectives and addicts who have continued to survive and to try.
I am having to come to terms with the fact that at age 41, I found myself unraveling. Or, rather, I unraveled. I wasn’t fully conscious of it. Others around me noticed it before I did. A good friend forced me to confront the fact that I was in serious trouble. “You need to get well” were his words.
He was there when I woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat — pajamas soaked, hair wet, sheets wet, even the pillow with a head-sized wet spot on it (where my head was). He witnessed my fatigue; my falling asleep every time he put on a movie for us at night; I tried so hard to stay awake with him to watch “Sunshine” and “Network” (for about the fifth time — I love that one. I never get sick of it) and “The Strangers” and the DVD with Robert Thurman talking with the Dalai Lama, but they are all blurry in my mind.
I was dehydrated and anemic — anemia caused by malnutrition — and I didn’t even know it; I didn’t realize the seriousness of my problem until I had already entered dangerous territory. My anxiety was so great and all-consuming (funny choice of words considering I was “consuming” so little) that at some point I lost my appetite completely and it was no more about restricting food but became an almost inability to eat. My weight went as low as it has ever been in my adult lifetime.
They tell me here at the E.D. treatment center that people have been hospitalized for being as low (at my height) as I was when I came here. (I found that kind of alarmist and hard to believe — I was still skeptical and in a little bit of denial, like everyone is when they first come in for treatment for anything anywhere — but it scared me anyway.) In this environment they shorten “eating disorders” — the name of our problem — to “E.D.,” and say it like a man’s name (“Ed”), like he is a bad man; an evil man whom we need to cast out of our lives, our psyches.
Before computers you never would have found me blabbing (blogging [blogging is blabbing]) so openly like this about this. This is me being modern. Damn these computers and this Interweb and the pressure on us musicians to update constantly and to communicate. It encourages, inspires oversharing. It’s so easy to say too much and to feel safe giving away one’s private secrets. But screw it. I have nothing to hide. I’ve been embarrassing myself publicly for over twenty years. Why should I stop now? A heart that hurts is a heart that works. I will shout it from the rooftop (as I contemplating jumping but then ultimately don’t [jump, that is], and walk back indoors). I am not dead inside. I still care about right and wrong. I refuse to succumb; to accept that I can’t fix this. I want desperately to be a better, happier, healthier, saner person and companion. My will to endure is, so far, unkillable.
They make us eat six times a day. Three meals and three snacks. We all sit in the kitchen together and there is a monitor at the head of the table making sure we eat everything on our plates and drink everything in our cups. This is called the refeeding process. It must be done slowly and steadily, with more food added on as time progresses so we don’t shock our systems. So we are not in danger of ending up like Karen Carpenter — she gained too much weight too fast after starving for a long time, and her heart couldn’t take it.
The bathroom doors are locked so the bulimics can’t go in and puke. (I myself have never been a purger.) When you need to go, you must ask a monitor to unlock the door for you and after she lets you in she stands just outside the door and then you must either count while you are on the toilet, loud enough so that she can hear you, right up until the moment you exit, or you must let her flush for you after you are done — so that there is proof that you didn’t vomit your food into the toilet.
Every morning they wake us up at seven and we all put on hospital johnnies, first thing, and go and have our vitals (temperature, blood pressure) checked and have ourselves weighed. I have gained five pounds so far. I’m doing well. I’m a model patient, weight gaining-wise. My mental/emo health is another story — a longer story, a work in progress.
All I want is to be well and to have energy and to get back on track and to have my quiet little life back. It was a lonely and solitary life, but it was mine. And I was basically healthy-ish. And I was free, in a sense.
I’m going to be released on the 10th, maybe before you read this.
I will play all my currently scheduled gigs, barring unforeseen acts of God.
“When the damage is done, you’re damaged goods.” I am damaged goods. Truly. But I don’t want to complain. I am what I am. Others have it worse than I do. In fact, “it could be worse” is my motto and my mantra.
“Dark and repulsive though it is, suffering has been revealed to us as a supremely active principle for the humanization and the divinization of the universe.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I need to believe this. I need to try and manifest this, and to live it. If nothing else, I’ve already gotten some kickass songs out of this latest experience.
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November 9th, 2008
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Paul Westerberg once told me to not put my best songs at the end of the album — put them up front where people will hear them. But he doesn’t take his own advice (“Answering Machine,” etc.) so why should I?
This is another song about being sad and socially retarded, but full of sonic light and effervescence. (and some lyrical hopefulness, too: “Every day you mime a prayer though your faith is shaken.” Isn’t that the definition of hope and faith — waiting for the peace to come back; believing, even in the darkest darkness, that it will?)
“You only want to be loved” sums it up. Isn’t that all anyone wants? My dad used to say that I would never understand what it means to be happy unless/until I fell in love. Real love. He died before he got to see me really happy, but I like to think he can observe me now from time to time. My father was full of ideas. He once told me that the three best ways to get to know someone were to 1. Get drunk together 2. Play poker together or 3. Sleep together. (Did I already write about this, before, in another post?) He gave me this advice when I was about 12 years old. Even then, I thought he was right on about the poker-playing and the getting drunk. But I think that two people can sleep together and wake up knowing nothing about each other. I think that sleeping together can actually sometimes even be a way for two people to alienate themselves from each other, to drive them apart.
Anyway, David Kahne, uber-producer/mixer (he recently mixed my “Shining On” from How To Walk Away), commissioned this recording, plus a few others, so he could gauge my progress as a writer/singer and potential signee to his record company at the time (I think it was Columbia?). He set me up in a studio in a big converted barn in suburban Philadelphia with a drummer/producer named Andy Kravitz. The reverb was in the basement. David gave Andy specific instructions to not let me play guitar. “Don’t let her play guitar — I want her to play bass,” he said (or words to that effect). He thought I was a good/interesting bass player and he’d been disappointed when I gave it up for 6-string after the Blake Babies split up.
I agree that I am an interesting bass player, but playing the bass gives me a headache. It’s kind of like doing math problems, for me. And I never liked math. I like the end result of my bass playing (listening back to the finished songs) but the process of getting to the good stuff is tedious and kind of difficult, sometimes.
My playing on this song is somewhat characteristically spastic. I say “somewhat” because I held back some (probably because I was in a foreign environment — not a studio or a town I was used to). If you compare this performance to the old Blake Babies stuff, you’ll see what I mean.
There was a neighbor lady — she lived next door to the barn studio — who I met outside one afternoon with her old dog. The dog had weird milky/glassy eyes and looked blind but the neighbor lady went into a spiel about how she had discovered these amazing enzyme tablets that were healing her dog of all sorts of health problems, including bringing his sight back. And then she tried to get me to buy some for my dog. I‘d thought at first that she was just being friendly —neighborly and making conversation — but apparently she was a saleslady for the canine enzyme pills and was pitching the miracle product to me. Made me kinda sad.
Not seeing good was a recurring theme. The guy who came in and played guitar had bad sight — he may have been technically legally blind. Jim Boggia was his name. He was a sweetheart, and played great.
I recorded my vocals in the control room without using headphones, singing along to the musical tracks coming through the room speakers. That was a first for me, and it was freeing. Headphones can be stifling. The sound that comes through them is not real sound. When sound comes through the air, it is real sound, I think.
Andy played the omnichord. What a beautiful sound. I need one of those.
And the key change at the end? Why does it make me so happy to hear it, every time it happens? There isn’t enough modulating happening in music these days. I’ve got to set an example and bring it back. I vow to put a last-chorus modulation in the next song I write.
Something really weird and scary happened to me on the drive back home from Philly to Boston. I was driving up the New Jersey Turnpike, I think it was, and at the very end of the pike I was asked to present my Turnpike ticket to the toll taker and to pay my toll. But I had NO memory of ever having been given a ticket or of stopping to pick one up at any tollbooth when I got on the highway. I was absolutely 100% sure that I had never gotten a ticket but the toll taker was absolutely 100% sure that I had to have been given one in order for me to be on the road I was on and so but I had absolutely no memory of any ticket and I looked all around my driver’s seat area and couldn’t find one anywhere and so I was sitting there at the toll booth arguing with the toll taker that I HAVE NO TICKET! and so how could I be expected to pay a toll when I had been given no ticket? “But you had to have been given a ticket to get on the turnpike” the toll taker would repeat, calmly, logically. And so we went round and round for what seemed like half an hour until the toll taker said I should pull my car over and go inside and explain the situation to his superior, who was inside the building next to the tolls. I went in and plead (pled? pleaded?) my strange case to the tolltaker’s colleague, who was just as calmly unconvinced by my argument as the first guy had been. Then the new guy told me that since I had lost my ticket, I would simply have to pay the maximum — the whole toll road’s worth — and that was all there was to be done about it. ”But I was never given a ticket!” I argued, one last time.
I finally paid the full fare and got in my car and continued home, angry and confused.
A few days later I was in my car driving around Boston and I discovered the toll ticket on the floor of my car. I was horrified. Well, scared. Very scared. I felt insane. How could I have no memory of ever having stopped to pick up the ticket? I had argued and argued with the tolltakers and it turned out that my argument was completely insane and groundless.
More and more, I am convinced that I am honestly brain-damaged. I’m not sure how or when it happened, but it’s real.
I may have been abducted by aliens at the age of five. They may have done something to my brain. Experiments. Something weird happened that five-year-old summer, in Indiana, in the middle of the night one night. Something that I have never been able to fully understand or explain. I’ll try to tell you about it sometime, maybe, if you all are interested.
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October 7th, 2008
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This song is kind of all over the place, lyrically. Kind of stream-of-consciousness. Overall, though, it seems to be expressing discontent and frustration but also a sense of utter resignation. I like to liken “Made In China” to a sonic white flag.
I was thinking of an ex-bf who was a really good liar (“James” in my book) when I wrote “It’s a basic need to lie and be believed.” This was his need, not mine. His and so many other peoples’. Lots of people lie.
I want to tell the truth but telling the truth doesn’t always pay off like I, in my innocence, think it will. Telling the truth sometimes gets me nowhere. In fact it often hurts me. I am forever wounding myself by not holding back the truth. What is wrong with me? I wonder. Why can’t I just be like everyone else and learn how to play the games that people play? Why do I have to make everything needlessly difficult and complicated? Why am I always trying to get to the bottom of things when there is no bottom, really?
“Step out of line and you will have arrived” takes a different tack: it’s a basic contrarian stance. In this, I am proudly — not regretfully — contrarian. (To be unique is to have value.) This attitude comes naturally to me. Standing in line; joining; following; conforming never made any sense to me. I always wanted to step OUT of line, not get in it with all the other sheep. How else to distinguish myself and to feel interesting and creative?
It’s habit for me to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. On holidays — 4th of July, for example, when the whole city seems to head south or north to the Capes (Cod and Ann) and the beaches and the clambakes — I deliberately choose to stay in the city, where it becomes quiet and peaceful (as the people vacate) and empty and really…Nice. To go where others don’t, and aren’t, is instinct.
But sometimes this going against the grain — this need to be different — can be like shooting myself in the foot. Sometimes I take it too far.
“I’m gonna wait ‘til it rains then I’m gonna burn everything” — my contrarian tendencies can get a bit perverse, over the top. Can make things impossible. I mean, nothing’s gonna burn while water is falling from the sky, right?
I tend to create difficulties for myself. Maybe I do this so I have an excuse when things fall apart. So I can blame myself rather than have to deal with the horror of an unfair world — a world that deals us blows with no rhyme or reason. If I fuck it up myself, at least there is a reason I can point to for its going to hell/shit/the dogs.
I am forever trying to solve unsolvable problems. I CREATE problems just so I can try to solve them.
“I’ll sing to the clock because no one came” was a direct reference to a Some Girls gig in Eugene, Oregon. I’d told my booking agent to book us in all the cities I’d never played before (Eugene, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Des Moines, and others), thinking, “I’ve never been, ever, all these years I’ve been putting out records — they’ll be DYING to see me. STARVED.” Boy was I wrong. Turns out, people forget really easily what you may have accomplished in the past. And no one showed up in any of those cities. My strategy failed.
There were literally about five people in the Eugene audience. I cried before I went on. I couldn’t help it. It just happened. The floodgates opened and I couldn’t control it. Finally I dried my eyes and tried to hide the fact that I’d wept like a wuss and then I went out on stage and focused my performance on the big clock hanging on the wall opposite me across the room, just so I didn’t get too sad (about the fact that the room was basically empty) and start crying again.
“Tell me something” is like “C’mon, show me whatcha got. Something, anything. Excite me. I’m bored, tired, weary. Entertain me. Enliven this joint. Kickstart my brain, my ho-hum/tedious/predictable existence. But “Don’t say nothing” (grammatically incorrect — in the Southern vernacular of the ex-bf) is saying, “Oh just forget it. Shut up. Just don’t talk. Don’t try to make this any better. There’s no point. It’s hopeless” — acknowledging the futility of the original entreaty (“tell me something”).
“You don’t know what it’s like to be perfect.” I am saying no one is perfect; not me, not you, not anyone. You think I think I’m perfect? If you only knew how colossally IMperfect I think I am. So how can you put me down? It’s like beating a dead horse, sort of. Ridiculous. I am saying it’s silly to attack me personally simply because you don’t like my music or my musical persona. I guess it’s okay if it makes you feel better but you don’t need to do it for my benefit or to put me in my place or anything like that because I already know I am a worm. If you think I think I’m a supercool badass motherfucking hot mama, you don’t know me — you have me ALL wrong — and so you have no real business judging me and I can’t take your judgments seriously; if your criticism is based on an untruth (I think I’m hot shit) or a misperception (“she thinks she’s better than me”), it’s not valid or fair.
You can hate my music — okay, that’s fair enough. But leave ME out of it. Please. You know — let he who is without flaws throw the first vicious personal attack on a stranger, or whatever. I am flawed, yes — I readily acknowledge this, every chance I get, and you would know this if you were paying attention — and so are you and so is everyone.
“Shine a light on a sob story”. People love to ogle a tabloid tragedy — any old sad story — overdose, disease, divorce, arrest, bankruptcy, alcoholism, sex addiction, adultery, where-is-she-now, failure, aging/beauty going to seed/plastic surgery disasters, whatever.
“This is the age of boredom.” People are numb and uninspired and directionless so they watch TMZ and stuff like that, and look at Star magazine, to distract themselves from the undeniable everpresent fact of their meaningless day to day existence. And most of them own guns. Boredom/anhedonia and deadly weapons — a scary combo.
For some, there’s nothing to believe. There’s such ennui and disillusionment and emptiness and lack of concentration and absence of deep thought and of consciousness of connections between things. “Flip a coin to live or die” That’s how random everything is; how little a life means to some people. Such disrespect for the preciousness of being alive in the world. We are all one moment away from the end of the here and now. Can’t they see that? Doesn’t that mean anything? Doesn’t it make everything — every moment — matter more?
I cherish this life — this flawed, imperfect, wondrous, mysterious, fascinating, painful, joyous little life — knowing that it is a mote in the eyelash of a blink in the history of the universe.
When I complain in my songs, it’s only because I want things to be better, and I believe things can/will be better. I wouldn’t complain if I thought everything was hopeless. I am not a nihilist. I have tons of doubt and I question everything endlessly, but I am a moral person in that I hate myself when I mess up and I want and need to always continue to try and do the right thing. But it’s not always easy to know what is the right thing. Sorry — bad English. Sorry, Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts (MGM). RIP DFW.
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October 6th, 2008
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I really cannot remember who I was directing my sort of muted anger in this song toward — can’t remember who the “you” is. When I sing “Please forgive me for finding something real and pure and true” and “I’m sorry that I must go so soon,” I’m not actually sorry. I’m being sarcastic. Someone is giving me a hard time for trying to grab onto some happiness; to something that might be really good and joyful like love or a connection with someone — a new someone. The skeptic is withholding his/her blessing, and I’m irritated by his/her unwillingness to let me explore and pursue my destiny and to make my own potential mistakes.
No one can protect me, after all. If I get hurt, I get hurt. No one can prevent that from happening. Well, maybe I can, by not taking chances. But that itself — not taking chances (not risking heartbreak) — is actually another form of self-damage.
Maybe the skeptic’s skepticism is protective and well-intended and in my best interest, but more likely it is a knee-jerk reaction to change to the status quo; to what has been established and experienced for a significant period of time as comfortable. It can be hard for a friend to accept and welcome a new reality in the form of a new person in his friend’s life. Hard to rise above and not feel somewhat shaken/usurped/neglected/disposable. You know how it can be: a friend falls in love, and then it seems as if you never see him/her again..
And in the case of public people, the media and gossip machine — as well as significant numbers of ordinary folks — are so quick to question and mock and condemn and speculate and prophesy doom that of course it is going to make the subject of the gossip and conjecture somewhat angry or at least sad, and maybe irritated, and stressed, and a little (or a lot) hurt.
Let me make my own mistakes, I am saying. And let me at least try to find/create/discover my own happiness. Mine, not yours or your conception of it. Let me live my life the way I choose to live it or the way it chooses to live me. I’m just trying to do my best and to live the best life.
Maybe nobody was waiting for me at the time (I wrote it at my mom’s house one Halloween evening, while housesitting — working on the song between trips to the front door to give the little ghosts and witches and princesses and Spidermen candy from the big bowl in the foyer; I was alone, single) — maybe the song was all made up or projection into the future or memory of the past. But if I ever have someone I want people to be happy for me and to not get their pants all in a twist about it (if only because I want THEM — those people — to be happy, and peaceful, and not all worked up about something over which they have no control and about which they have very little insider information). I don’t want them to question and snicker and doubt. I harbor enough intrinsic doubtfulness already (thank you very much) to supply a whole town full of people (supply them with doubt, I mean). It’s been hard enough for me to believe in my own happiness; I don’t need anyone else bad-vibing me. And I can feel it when people are sending negativity my way. Oh yes we can feel it. I am very very sensitive to everything around me and in the air, whole continents away. I am hyper-aware. So please be careful what you think.
I don’t care SO much, anymore, what people say and think about me, but I hear it and see it and feel it and it can be hurtful when it is based on anything other than the whole clear honest 100% truth.
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September 24th, 2008
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