Month: May 2004

The tulips appear to have breathed their last, fortuitously enough.
Dead flowers anyone?

Be careful what you wish for.
It might come true.

For your profound amusement,here are the first 20 tracks of my involuntary
inner DJ this morning in semi chronological order.
Don’t ask me to explain them, I just report the news:

Nine Inch Nails:”Head Like A Hole”
Nick Lowe:”Cruel To Be Kind”
The Cure:”Killing An Arab”
Bowie:”Sons of the Silent Age”
The English Beat:”Save It For Later”
Duran Duran: “Planet Earth”
John Lennon:”Julia”
Replacements:”Anywhere Is Better Than Here”
Depeche Mode:”To Have And To Hold”
Bowie:”Zeroes”
Elvis Costello:”Welcome to the Working Week”
Suicidal Tendencies:”Institutionalize”
Violent Femmes:”Add It Up”
Plimsouls:”A Million Miles Away”
Strawberry Alarm Clock:”Incense And Peppermints”
Pink Floyd:”Time”
Eagles:”Life In The Fast Lane”
Boomtown Rats:”She’s So Modern”
Tori Amos:”Horses”
Linda Ronstadt:”Silver Threads and Golden Needles”

Coming soon: The story of my Neil Gaiman dream…

Sometimes she’s Persephone

Or just another Ophelia floating in the river

And she falls like morale

While he rises like dissent

All intent becomes meaningless as war

and laughable as justice

Everything given is a prayer left unanswered

And the only words left are empty metaphors

Every morning the Promethean heart regenerates

Lays poised on its sleeve for daily breaking

Down by the river’s edge she waits for a reason

trails a finger in the icy waters

Flirts with inevitable endings

Sometimes you have to die again

To remember what it hurts like to live

Sometimes you can sleep a life away

Wake to the scents of vanilla,smoke and fear

Sounds of a ragged heartbeat and a song

that will lose its meaning

Sometimes a heart stops on a doorstop

By light of a half moon and fire on a mountain

And you let the ghost of it burn into memory

Follow the contours of phantom hands and hesitant touch

An echo of reluctant longing

and heartbreaking sincerity of regret

Etched into permanence like a beautiful nightmare

There are days when she sits by the river’s edge

and thinks about sinking like a stone

becoming cold and dead again

Hoping someone will give her permission

You have to be careful what you wish for

One day he’ll give the signal and she’ll laugh

And slip beneath the waves like she was born to drown

Close her eyes and dream happy mermaid dreams

Hoping it’ll take this time

She’s always been so bad at dying

Back at the water’s edge he lingers

Watches her drift out to sea and smiles

Thinks he’s lucky to be free of her at last

Still, he must admit,she makes a very pretty corpse

He’s glad that he thought to bring the camera

He gets lonely sometimes…

A man deep in crisis turns to his bible for answers.
“Oh Lord.” he intones “please bless me with your divine guidance, for I am
troubled and in need of your righteous counsel.
Please show me a sign.”
Impatiently, he opens to a random passage and reads aloud.
“Judas hanged himself.”
Grimly he laughs and kneels again in prayer.
“Oh, wise and great Holy Father, I am in need of further guidance.
I am but an ignorant sinner and do not understand the scriptures. Guide me
further”
He turns to another random page. Closes his eyes and points.
“Oh, most Holy One, I shall obey the sacred word as is your will.”
He looks down and reads again:
“Go thou and do likewise.”
Sheepishly he grins and looks up at the heavens.
“Um, Lord? How about best out of three?”

…is that even if you found a bridge to jump off, there would only ever be dry concrete at the bottom.

Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by moving from where you left them to where you can’t find them.

Temptation usually comes in through a door that has deliberately been left open.

(They also have brainteasers on this site…)

(detritus)(dream)(poetica)(myth)(opinion)(divination)

There’s a Ceilidh brewing in a week or so. The 22nd to be more exact. Most of you know when and where. Otherwise, contact Lizzie or myself for details. They’ve been a blast so far, and everyone says third time’s the charm…Plus we’re thinking of adding a visual and interactive arts table for art and photography type exhibits. Maybe if someone would bring in a laptop, we could even do multimedia…or maybe not. Simple is always good too. Anyway, we have a piano and the acoustics are great. Clear your calendars already for goddess’ sake!

Offline for several hours, I panic and fear all my friends will think I’m

dead. Finally, I am connected. I have 24 new messages in my inbox. All of

them are spam. Way to stroke the old ego, eh? Strange to think that even

just a year or two ago I was completely out of touch with everyone and

didn’t care. I had my family and other than that, my friends were books

and indie movies and Elvis Costello CDs. Going to the farmers market and

buying fresh tomatoes qualified as an “event.” Window shopping at the mall

was a major outing. A box of donuts on a Sunday morning heralded a

celebration. I was sooo fucking boring. Not that there’s anything wrong

with that. There are plenty of good things to be said about “voluntary

simplicity” and I love my family to pieces. But I was not happy.

Smart,creative people with moderate depressive tendencies are not well

advised to hole up and forsake the outside universe. I forgot I could be

worthwhile at all. I hadn’t written anything in years and I was supposedly

such a great writer (according to the people I went to high school with

anyway, some of whom didn’t even like me that much and still said it…) I

hadn’t sung anywhere but in my car in over a decade. The closest I’d come

to “going out with friends” in years had been a rather disappointing

venture to a tacky comedy club with one of my Colorado mommy friends and a

chainsmoking, cackling, retired friend of her mother. The show consisted

of a Hispanic comedian making ethnic jokes and a female comedian making

“men sure are stupid” jokes. But I digress. My point is that I’m happy to

have gotten to the point where an empty inbox is something unusual. I’m so

glad to havemy old friends back and a few new ones and the guts to give

myself a shot at being alive again on some level. I love my girls more

than anything in the world, but I can see them benefitting from a mommy

with opinions and friends and outside interests. I take them out more

often than I used to. I’m more creative with them than I used to be. I

feel so much more capable than I did not long ago at all. And so, to my

friends old and new I say a long overdue “thank you” and also I offer an

apology for the times I’ve bugged the living crap out of some of you

because I was using my newly formed and/or newly recemented friendships as

a form of social prozac. And I vow to try and network a bit more until

someday I am at the point where I actually dread looking in my inbox

because there’s too much correspondence awaiting me. Depression is

invasive and stultifying and sometimes the best way to overcome it isn’t

pills and therapy but flat out getting the hell out of the house and doing

something slightly different for a while. And I swear to you all I will

grow less annoying with time 🙂

Corbid the still slightly dull