Grenade, or, WTF Were You Thinking When You Wrote That?

I'd catch a grenade for ya
Throw my hand on a blade for ya
I'd jump in front of a train for ya
You know I'd do anything for ya

I would go through all this pain
Take a bullet straight through my brain
Yes, I would die for you, baby
But you won't do the same

"Grenade"  -  Bruno Mars

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I just heard this song again while I was driving home, and I was struck anew with how much it annoys me.  It was popular as a new song when I went to San Francisco, and I remember standing on Pier 39 in the rain listening to it booming through the outdoor speakers thinking how totally asinine the lyrics are.  I try not to be overly judgmental about songs.  I mean everybody likes different things, and I try to respect that.  There's an audience out there for everything, and I know that my own tastes aren't bread-and-butter for all people.  That being said, there's just something about this song that pushes all my buttons one after the other.

I think it's the over-the-top-ness of it.  It's a bit of the old "the lady doth protest too much" for me. I am all for profound expressions of love, for deep and heartfelt commitment, but despite the intention to express that here, somehow, it doesn't come through.  Instead, what I hear is something petulant and immature.  I get Romeo and Juliet love instead, all extreme, all impulse. I hear, "Hey!  I'm showing how wonderful I am!  Aren't you watching?"  There is nothing here that is about endurance or survival.  Instead, this is all about sort of a glorious blowout finale that is supposed to serve as proof of love.  

What about proving that you love someone by sticking out the bad times?  What about proving that you love someone by simply picking up the phone and making a call when you know they need to hear your voice?  By going to the grocery store when they're sick?  By taking care of the daily grind instead of elevating the drama or waiting for the disaster movie?  Is this guy going to be there for that?  I think not.  I don't think he's got the stones for it, personally.  That is the real test of a man, and the point at which all too many fall away, unable to have real courage.

So, really, I guess, I don't want to hear any more of these "romance" songs with swords waving.  I think, gentlemen, that if a woman is asking you to "throw [your] hand on a blade for [her]," you might want to check that out a little more closely before you make a long-term commitment, too, but you know, hey, whatever works for you, personally.  Not my business.  I'm still on the lookout for somebody with that true daily courage myself, not courage to die like a drama queen, but the courage to live like a real man.

Corner

I felt ridiculously good today.  Like...Damon-Salvatore-kissed-me-good.   (ha.  I made a stupid funny.  like that.)  I don't know why, but I've been grinning all day long.  I've had a mental playlist clicking through good songs in my head when I haven't actually had music that I like playing in my room.  I've been more like my old self than I've been in, well, longer than I can remember.

It was great.  I'm very conscious that I am not exactly that person anymore because that old person would have reacted very differently to a couple of situations I faced today, would have gotten angry when faced with two or three things, would have been distressed by others.  The person that I have am at the present has sort of decided that I can't fix every stupid broken thing, looked those issues directly in the eyes and called them what they were (stupid and broken), made the sign of the cross over them, and let them go.  I am proud of this.  It made me a better person for the rest of the day.  I am not going to keep destroying myself over things I cannot control.  It betters nothing and no one.  I cannot help myself or others in that situation.  I may yet chose to throw myself on the pyre someday if it's necessary, but by God, I'm not doing it for nothing.  I am going to pick my battles better.  I don't have to bleed every day.

I also had moments of pure laughter today with my classes like I haven't had in a long time.  One class got off on a brief tangent and I wound up with a "stripper name."  It didn't offend me; you have to work really hard to offend me, and they weren't trying.  They were kidding around, and it was a random comment that just made me laugh.  I'm afraid my new name wasn't fancy or salacious at all.  Just the idea of me in that role humored me endlessly.  Yeeeeah.  Talk about Things That Will Not Happen.  I mean, come on....  I'm hardly anybody's idea of that, I think.

I got work done.  I put up my Christmas lights in my room and all my little decorations, including my Santa Elvis  bear who sings "Blue Christmas" and dances.  I stuck the small Santa hat on Shakespeare.  I rigged an old Yankee Candle I love so I could use part of it in my Scentsy warmer, and now my room smells like Christmas, too.  Every small thing I did made me just a little happier.

I don't know if it's just getting all the rest over Thanksgiving, finally getting that huge thing out of the way with the doctor or other things, but whatever it is, oh how I hope it lasts.  The only thing that could actually make it better is getting to see some of the people I love who are so busy and far away, and I think some of that will happen this weekend.  That will be great, and I can't wait.  I've been looking forward to it for a long time now.

Well, that and if Damon Salvatore actually shows up, obviously, because, well, I mean, DAMN.  (don't judge me, okay? he's...he's... pretty....and....and....just don't judge, you....)

okay.  no more Damon ridiculousness.
probably.  but.... O_O

The Curse

Long ago in the ship she asked, "Why pyramids?"
He said, "Think of them as an immense invitation"

~ "The Curse" - Josh Ritter
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Josh Ritter's "The Curse" is playing on a playlist of some of my favorite songs on iTunes right now. Every time I hear it, I fall a little more in love with it. It's just an impossible little jewel of music, perfect in every conceivable way. I don't think I know of another one like it.

Of course, I was bound to love it, I suppose, because it has Egypt in it.  Since the first time I opened the first illustrated book about Tutankhamen in the tiny cramped library behind the fire department here in Podunk, I have been in love with Ancient Egypt, with the mummies and the beast-headed gods... The pyramids then for me have always been an immense invitation.  They are on my "life list," such as it is, of things I must see with my own eyes, go to, be at, lay my hands against the ancient surface of.  One day I must stand before them, inside at least one of them before I die so I can say that I have no regrets. 

As children, I remember L. and me learning to write messages in hieroglyphics, reading Budge's translations of the tales of the gods and The Book of the Dead.  There was a time when I wanted more than anything to be like the woman in this story, spend my days digging in the shifting sands looking for the past.  

That phase passed as childhood "careers" do, but my love for Egypt didn't.  I guess I've read or watched dozens of variations on this same story....Anne Rice's lush novel The Mummy, the Boris Karloff Universal Horror classic of the same title, the modern film trilogy that takes the same theme and spins it again and again eternally around.  Of them all, though, even though at its heart there is still the same supernatural predator, there is still something undeniably poignant and somehow more delicate in this version.  

And that, of course, is coming from Josh Ritter.  That's his hand at the wheel.  He's taking something that has been told as a horror story, as a blockbuster action film, and he's making it somehow as sweet as an old-fashioned waltz.  I don't think anyone but he could have done that, and even if I had never heard him before, I would have loved him for that one song.  It has everything, longing, imagination, musical magical realism.

The video is fantastic, too, perfectly in keeping with the feel of the song and the story as a whole, sweet and sad.  If you haven't seen it, take the time to watch.  It's well worth it.

Sharp Edges

After church tonight, I went out driving.  Ostensibly, it was to get the only food that sounded good, a bacon cheeseburger from Wendy's, or at least the fry portion thereof.  Right now, if it sounds good, I try to go find it....  Really, though, what I wanted most was the dark, wet two-lane highway unfolding in front of me and very loud music playing.  Sometimes, as one of my students is so fond of saying, "it just be that way."

Tonight, I am not in a folksy mood.  Tonight I need loud bass and a dance beat.  Tonight I wish I had my hands in somebody's back pockets and vice versa on a dance floor.  It's just as well I don't live where that's possible or likely.  I have sharp edges tonight.  Anybody trying to handle me would just come away with blood on his hands.  I am not sure I know of anyone even strong enough to try.

Adding to my odd mood is the fact that I've already produced something like forty pages  of writing the last three days of this week, two complete pieces, and that feels righteously good.  One thing is more a less a throwaway, something I cut my teeth on again because I hadn't written anything in so long, a flexing of the muscles that I like less and less the more I look at it, but the other wasn't too terrible.  Both are finished, and I won't lie to you and tell you it didn't feel good to pull it out of my head, shape it by force of my will, and watch it come together.  It's more than a little like a form of magic. It's more than a little addictive.

Neither of those was the one I want to be working on.  They were just random bits that bothered me, and so I made them, put them where I knew they'd be appreciated.  Someday soon, I am going to start the real thing, the story I used to tell L. about when we were kids.  It's been sitting up there waiting for all these years, and I think I'm almost done with my journeyman phase.  I'm sure it won't be as easy as this other playing I've been doing, but more and more, I think that I want to try my hand at it.

Tomorrow, I will go back into the regular world.  It feels like so much more than a week has gone by.  I feel like I've been gone from there for a hundred years, like I've somehow slipped through one of those "rites of passage" and wasn't paying attention.  I don't know.  As I came home watching the headlights of oncoming traffic dance over the wet pavement, I thought about how I felt before I got out for the holiday and how I feel now.  Somehow, so much has changed.  It's strange.  It's as though I was stuck in a place of total stasis before last Tuesday.

Now, I would have to say that is not the case.  I still have some serious questions about some things, but last Tuesday was... a log-jam destroying moment, for lack of a better term.  Everything is now in a state of change.  What remains to be seen is what happens next.

Sweeping Up

I've come here several times in the past few days thinking that I would have something to say, that if I opened a new post, something witty or clever or even trivial would appear to fill this little blank box, satisfy the demand of the blinking cursor, but each time, I've closed the entry and gone to other things, to Tumblr where I can express myself through images and quotations, to work on a writing project (because, good God, I'm actually producing again...I guess the words just will come out of me somewhere), to read the words of others, because my capacity to put anything here has been as limited as my current appetite for food.

In other words, it seems that I want nothing.

The drive that used to call me here almost compulsively to share my thoughts is empty at the moment.  What shall I tell you?  What would you have me give?  What is there to say that has not already been said?  I feel like the janitorial staff coming out at the end of a major production to find that a member of the audience has not departed but is still sitting front row center waiting for another act to unfold.  I am standing on stage with my broom, the house lights are all up, and I'm forced to lean across the footlights and whisper to you, "What else is it you expect to see here tonight?  Go home.  Go home to the people who love you.  To the people you love.  The show is over.  There are no more shocks or horrors left here.  All the performers are gone now.  All their mysteries are done."

And maybe that, too, would be a kind of performance after all if somebody paid attention, the action of a trouper who had to do double-duty, who had to clean up after her turn in the revels was over.  But I'm still a little off-kilter right now, still trying to figure out what to do with what I've learned this week, and while I know that it really doesn't matter to anybody else but me (and maybe to a few precious ones of you who I am more thankful for than I can say), I'm not really up to resuming my little performances here, I suppose.

For those of you to whom I am just an interesting curiosity, just a thing of clockwork and puzzlement, click back in a few days or weeks as your whimsy leads you.  I am sure your usual service of loud-sounding nothings, of sound and fury, will resume.  For those of you who worry, well... Patience.  Patience.  As the heart-rendingly beautiful Marco once told me in Florence, "These things, they happen."

It's Never What You Think It Will Be

(be warned.  this is not a happy place.  there is broken glass on the ground here.  if you are looking for safety, sun, or sugar, go play somewhere else, child.)

As I type this, I am so tired.  I'd really just like to climb into my bed, pull the covers around me, curl into a ball, and let the grey half-light of this long afternoon fade away, be in a warm and still and quiet place where nothing is or was for an unspecified length of time.

But as I've already told one person today on another topic, that's too much like a defeat for me, and I don't do those so much.  I just keep getting up off the damn floor and fighting, even when I should lay down.

It all went quickly.  Once I got there, all my fear dropped away despite the gown and the table. The appointment as a whole really didn't go down the paths I expected, but that shouldn't really be a surprise, I guess.  Nothing ever does....  I expected to hear that tests were coming and procedures were urgently needed.  I expected him to talk about time limits and endings.  That came up, but very gently and briefly only.  The physical situation stays hanging in its ridiculous knife-edge balance, apparently.  One more year of grace has been, quite pointlessly considering my life and my situation, given.

I also talked to him about the hellish mood swings I've been having lately though, and things went crazy from there.  It might be the Topamax.  It might be more of the fun my body likes to dish out in little doses for me.  I have to call my neurologist and talk to him about the Topamax now since it's gotten scary-ish.  I have to have some relief from the roller coaster.  This conversation, the one I'm glossing so lightly, that I'm touching with such dainty fingers here, was excruciating.  It involved being told that perhaps I was trying to do too much, take too many problems on myself.  At one point, I was told that what I was trying to do was like trying to right a wrecked bus all by myself.

This isn't the first time I've been told this.  This isn't the second, the third.  Hell, I don't even know anymore how many times or how many people now have told me, doctors, coworkers, friends....  What I don't know is what to do about it.  That's the part that keeps getting left out.  That's the part I need somebody to help me with.  That's the part nobody seems to know.  There is only the "not this,"  never the "this instead."  (Although if I am fair, he did have a "this might help while you're looking for the this instead.")

And maybe others can't help find the "this instead."  Maybe that's asking too much.  Maybe I just am so totally screwed up that I don't have any idea about what I want for myself.  Maybe it all sounds equally good or equally dull.  Or maybe....maybe...

Maybe I do know what I really want and know that I cannot get it, not even in my wildest daydreams, so this is just as good as any other pointless substitute.

I'm so tired.  So very, very tired.  I warned you about the broken glass when you showed up.  If you got cut, well, I love you, and I'm sorry, but it's nobody's fault but your own.  I think I'm going to get in that bed now.

Not Running

This is me NOT running.  This is me scared as scared and NOT running.  Nervous energy.  Lalalala.  What time I am afraid I will....

Not run.  That's for sure.

Will not get in the car, head it west, crank the stereo, and pretend I can outdrive, outpass, outaccelerate the afraid.  Will not "accidentally" miss the appointment (oh SHOOT!  That was today?  Can we reschedule?  Like for the fifth of NEVER?).

Will not shake.  Will not cry.  Will not betray my image as the great cold queen in the red brick halls.  Will not keep turning worst-case scenarios over and over in my head because this doctor, unlike that other one, would never blind-side me with "So, your whole life is over today.  When would you like to schedule the surgery, honey?" lightly coated over in slick honey phrased as, "Do you have any children?... No?...I'm so sorry..."

And even if this is the beginning of that end, I will not fall into despair.  Okay.  That is a lie.  But I will try very hard not to go into it in despair, try very hard not to make monsters where there just might not be any, and I will try very hard to remember that for every single stupid hellish thing that has ever happened to me in my life, there has been a reason or at least some kind of thing I could take and use to help somebody else along the way.  If this is to come into my life now, even though it will seem like an ending, I have to remember that there has to be some purpose to it.

If I can hold on to that, maybe I can manage not to break into so many pieces that I cannot recover myself.  Maybe I can manage not to run so far that I cannot make it back.

Distracting Myself

You know this thing I have about blue eyes?
So...Yeah....

Tomorrow is the dreaded day.  I can't think of anything else when I stop to think, so I'm not thinking.  I am distracting myself. To that end, I have immersed myself in more TV.  I found The Vampire Diaries on Roku, and it's seriously fun fluffage.  It's what Twilight could have been and missed.  None of the vampires sparkle, some of them are really dangerous, people actually die, the heroine has a spine, one of the male leads (Ian Somerhalder) is gorgeous enough to burn all your houses right down to the ground and sassy to boot, and the storyline holds together beautifully. I can't believe that this thing is actually written this well.  It's not as neatly put-together as something by Whedon or Moffatt, but it's not what I thought it was going to be, vapid teenertainment.  There's solidity to it.  (Plus...have you seen his eyes?  I mean...O_o)  I'm in the middle of season 2 right now.  I think maybe there are three seasons out so far, so I have a lot more to enjoy.

I'm not exactly sleeping right now, didn't go to bed until 4:30 am Friday night, was up until 2:30 last night, so I am glad to have something to fill my hours.  After tomorrow, maybe I can get my brain out of this chasing-its-own-tail cycle of uselessness and do something other than mark time.  Because even as nicely as I'm being distracted (oh, and btw, I know what I want for Christmas now people...), this stasis is not what I want to be about right now.

Good Things

Great, good, simple things:

• Croissants, sharp cheddar, and green tea for dinner
• The feel of loud, deep bass through car seats
• Clean white dogs snoring
• The feeling of being clean right after a hot shower
• A yard covered in a blanket of gold ginkgo leaves
• Knowing that a whole week off waits ahead of me

Things of Nothing

I've done an astonishing amount of nothing today.  Vast quantities of it.  Heaping piles of it.  It has been a happy blend of dogs, couches, crocheted afghans, and televised costume melodrama.

Crazy, brilliant, blue-eyed, deeply-tormented, and carrying a sword.  Yeah.  You know that sounds like something I'd like..  O_o

Mostly, I've been immersed in the Roku.  I watched most of a series called Borgia and now I'm getting into Camelot.  What can I tell you?  I'm a sucker for a period drama.  Blame it on the pretty people.   No, really, though.  The guy playing Cesare in the Borgias was sort of...hypnotically gorgeous.  You can see him over to the right (or wherever the photo actually appears for you) as he finishes up a season-long bout of soul torturing and sort of says forget it, kills a bunch of people, and has a bit of what I call an "I AM BEOWULF" moment in the middle of the papal audience chamber.  He's quite mad and quite lovely.  I have to say that like Henry Cavill as Charles Brandon in The Tudors, a great deal of the reason I kept watching was for the pretty smart man with the blue eyes....  Tragically, I am almost always drawn to the monsters and the psychos.  Sigh. (Well, Brandon wasn't one.  Don't look so grumpy pretty Charles.  I'm sorry.  I'm sorry.)

Pretty man is puzzled by his own prettiness....

Anyway, I needed the rest and pure facetiousness of today.  It's been a real backside-kicker of a week, and I just wanted some distraction.  So far, so good, I guess.  In the absence of any sort of actual international travel, it's as much escapism as I'm going to get.

My Children

Today, apropos of nothing, one of my students said, "Ms. _____, you need to have a baby."  This alone was almost like someone sliding a piece of redhot wire into me slowly, but I knew there was a logic in that statement somewhere.  It was not intended to cause me pain, and there was no way she could know.  I dragged up a smile from somewhere, and said, "Umm-hmm.  Um.  Why?"

"Because you'd make a good mama.  Your kid would be interesting.  You would make sure they would read and learn stuff.  They'd be really smart."

I grinned. (I was dying a little inside. God, how can something be so funny and painful and sweet all at the same time?  One soul should not be asked to bend in that many directions at one time.  It hurts.)

"I think you're overestimating me..."

"No.  I'd want her to, like, be my friend."

"Okay.  Fine by me."

"Can I give her a name?"

"Sure."

"I'm going to call her Sarah.  She's my imaginary friend.  We'd hang out and stuff.  We'd be friends."

Stab.  Stab.  Stab.  My heart has so many damn wounds these days, it's almost all scar tissue.

They ask me all the time why I don't have kids, tell me that I need children.  God.  Soon, I might have that most definitive of all the answers for them for that question, and then what am I going to do with myself?  I feel like I'm ready to be balled up and thrown away.....

Didn't I, My Dear

But it was not your fault but mine
And it was your heart on the line
I really fucked it up this time
Didn't I, my dear?

~"Little Lion Man" - Mumford & Sons

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I'm afraid that I've hurt some people I care about, and I don't know how to undo it.  I think I took something the wrong way yesterday and made a major assumption about something that may not be true at all.  I have not been able to be good or kind, sweet or gentle in the past few days.  Yesterday was bad.  Very.   And when I am bad, I make all the devils in hell look like amateurs.....

Regardless of what the original intention of the other person was, what came out of me next should not have.  And today was just as bad.  I could not put it all aside. I should have. I needed to.  I wanted to, badly.  I was going to.  But then, suddenly, when the moment came, everything inside me somehow froze up, and I couldn't.  The smile that was needed to crack the ice wouldn't come.  The one gesture that would have made it all good had to be made at the right time, and today, just right now, there is something inside me so bruised and bloody and tired.  It could not get up and do the right thing.  It simply lay there with hopeless eyes and powerless limbs as the chance to fix the situation died.

And I'm so sorry for it.  I'm sure it bothers me much more than it bothers anybody else involved in the situation... 

I'm sure tomorrow is another day and all that, but I'm growing afraid of tomorrows.  They are not always better.  I am not always better.  Sometimes, I am so much worse.  Sometimes, I don't like who I am at all in my tomorrows....

Four Days Left

And I want to shut out the whole world.  I wish I could fast-forward time just to get it over with.  I think I'm losing my mind with the waiting.  All I can think about is four days from now, even though I know that it may come to nothing or may only be the start of a longer process.  First, physical weakness earlier in the week, and now, the inescapable jackboots of this thing I've been avoiding stomping ever-closer.  If you want to know why I'm not writing, you'd do better to ask how I'm still standing at all.

Invocation

Today, I'd give quite a lot to see you.  I've been a little sick, and just now, just this moment with rain spitting from a sullen sky, I'm a little sad.  In a perfect world, I'd look up and you'd be there like an antidote to all the badness that slowly creeps through my veins.  If I had any magic in me, any power to call forth, I would be tempted to use it.  But that's a selfishness, I suppose, an indulgence.  I'm sure you're hip-deep in your own battles.  Still, I can't help but glance toward the door once in awhile and wish....

I Cannot Brain Today....

"I cannot brain today...I has the dumb."  ~ hashtag seen on Tumblr post
_________________________

This says it all.  I have been fighting stupidity and ick all day.  It feels like a migraine, but the pain won't come down.  I staggered through a day, came home at 4:00, and I'm going to bed.  Tomorrow, I'll take another turn on the big merry-go-round, I guess....

Wide-Eyed Blind

The prelude was fine.  I played "In the Garden" fine.  I felt a little flutter when the music director wasn't out on time, but that's nothing new, really.  He's usually in the back working on one last run through on something, and so I take it around one more time, glance at the little clock I keep on the organ console to see if I need to stretch the piece I'm playing or if I have enough time to shift to a different one.  Nothing prepared me for the sheer nightmare that was coming.

It happened during the first congregational hymn which was always going to be tricky anyway since it was one we hadn't done in a long, long time.  The music just...went away.  The notes were there on the page, but they were practically meaningless, especially those for my right hand.  I could only stare in them in panic, reach for bass chords.  I felt my face flush, my fair complexion betraying my distress.

"It's just this song," I kept telling myself.  "Pull it together.  Chord it.  Get through, and the next one will be better."  I hit the ending notes, sometimes the only ones that matter because if you can at least end on the right notes at least it doesn't sound horrible at the end, and I took a deep breath during the prayer.  It had to be better during the next song.  I knew that one.

But it wasn't.  It really wasn't.

The third, the offertory, was an old favorite, and by that point I was actually shaking.  Fortunately, my musical ear and my brain just bypassed my dead eyes at that point and took over.  I played it with minimal error, and it sounded like I knew what I was doing.  But I can guarantee you whatever I was doing and however it was being done, whatever mechanism was active, ghostly possession by Ms. Sarah, my music teacher who passed away while I was in college; innate rote repetition of that song; divine mercy; whatever, it wasn't sight reading.

I was up for the offertory solo tonight, my pianist friend and I rotating that duty week-to-week.  I wanted to laugh, cry, or run away during the prayer beforehand, but I stayed on the bench, set the stops on the organ, slid the music onto the stand, and tried to remember what chords those stupid little blotches represented.  I have been playing the piano since I was seven, the organ since I was ten.  The piece I was playing was not an elaborate variation.  It was an old hymn in the key of C major.  It was like I was suddenly made so illiterate that I could not read a child's storybook.  I honestly had a moment where I thought I would not be able to play it at all, and then that automatic something went click and my hands moved for me and music came out...more or less.

After the sermon came the invitational, a song I've played probably a million times.  It went better, but I could feel the first twinges of a migraine beginning.  It's still rumbling like distant thunder on the horizon.  I am trying to get all my work done so if it does come down like I think it is planning to, I can take a phenergan and make myself unconscious.

This....this scares me.  When it does things like this to me, I don't know if it is the Topamax, the migraines, or something else.  Why am I like this?  It doesn't make any sense.  And why does it take the music?  It takes my spoken words, too, sometimes, but as I look at this page, I can read every single line.  Will it one day take this from me, too?  It's a terrible thing to be afraid of your own mind.  I wish I understood what was happening to me better.  It makes me feel like I'm trapped in a room with Boo Radley.  I never know from day to day if he's going to save me or stab me in the leg with that damn pair of scissors.

"To Darkness"

"To Darkness / Kripa"

Take my eye

and my whole heart

in your hands

in your hands

and board the yacht

as it departs

leave me on the shore

but I will hunt no more

Hold my sin above my head

and take me home instead

take me home instead

I will not speak of your sin

there is a way out for him

the mirror shows that

your values are ocean

The door, my heart was floored

I knew my weakness, oh hold,

my hand can sign me not to darkness

You know, my heart was floored

I knew my weakness, oh hold,

my hand can sign me not to darkness

~ Mumford and Sons, on Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling, and the Dharohar Project

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So I was cruising through Amazon this morning, and this album came up in my recommendations.  I was intrigued by the fact that it was a blend of Indian music (which makes me happy) and Mumford & Sons (which I like because of the lyrics).  There are only four songs in this collaboration, and I instantly loved two of them, "To Darkness" and "Mehendi Rachi."   The latter has lyrics like "Perhaps I'll be a bird one day/ if I'm good enough," which you know speaks right to my feathered soul.  It's great.  

This one, though, I am almost positive that this one is sneaking Faustus in.  It feels Fausty.  It may well be that I have just finished teaching the play and watching the downfall and everything feels Fausty right now, but somebody else take a look at this and tell me if the allusion works for you, too.  I know M&S do the whole literary thing, and I think there's a mirror that's important in the Gounod opera (or perhaps even in the Goethe version) of the story.  


(I've searched everywhere to make sure I've got the right lyrics here.  There are several alternate versions of them floating about.  Some of them are clearly wrong.  There are still a couple of words here I'm not quite sure about....  The words "can sign" could just as easily be "consign" ...)

Or maybe I'm just seeing Mephistopheles in every corner now....  That's probably not good, is it?  I'm going to be super-thrilled if I've found this gem tucked into a corner, though.

Pride Blind

"Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them." ~ Robertson Davies

True enough, I guess.  This directly relates to a conversation I had with someone the other day.  Maybe he needs this quote.

40

(No.  Not me.  Not yet....  That particular milestone is still a few years down the road.)

This week Led Zeppelin's IV turned 40.  I guess I heard a clip on the radio about it when I was on my morning high speed  interstate rally  drive to work.  I don't know why it hit me like it did.  I mean I did know the album is older than I am, right?  Even when I was in high school and everyone was dividing into the two or three musical camps all teenagers seem to wind up in as they are exploring their musical tastes, those of us who leaned toward stuff with the guitars did know that Zep was older.  It is just weird somehow to hear a number put on it, I guess, because to me this is music that should exist without them.

Some music dates achingly fast.  It's the stuff that the DJ pulls out at a high school reunion, some of it novelty songs from the your school years, some of it just not very good. You laugh with your friends over it like the old snapshots of you and your friends in bad hairdos or ridiculous clothing trends, and you sort of shudder and think, "My GOD.  What were they thinking when they came up with that crap?"  Other music never, ever sounds like it belongs to any particular age.  It is always good, always fresh.  It is an archetype.  It sets the pattern, is the mold that everything else tries to follow.   It's like an empire-waist gown, I suppose, always in fashion.  (And you can tell my mind is rambly this morning because I suspect I've just compared Led Zeppelin to an empire-waist gown... HA!  I will leave that there, too, because it makes me laugh....)

This entire album is special to me for another reason as well.  This music is my dad's music.  So much of my taste in music is his.  His album collection would make a classic rock vinyl collector tremble.  He's the reason I listen to the Stones, the Beatles, Zep, CCR, and so many others.  Riding around with him in his truck to basketball practices, to visit my relatives, or whathaveyou, he'd tell me about this group or that one.  There were always stories related to his life that went with them or that started because of them, and so I grew to love the music we were listening to.  He would give me his old cassette tapes of them or I would buy them myself.  That's how it started.

All these years later, I am still in the process of replacing all my old analog copies with digital ones.  "Stairway to Heaven," the most heavily-publicized song on IV (although probably not my favorite song on the album) is rolling through my iTunes right now.  I guess as formats change that is going to be a lifelong process of keeping a current library of my favorites.  I have to say, though, when I consider how much more than just mere music this is, it's worth it.

Art

The White Orchard

I am a bit too distracted tonight to read.  My mind just won't focus enough to allow me to buckle down for serious homework or grading.  I am bored with TV and movies.  I am restless, restless, longing to be elsewhere or doing something meaningful or frivolous with somebody who matters.  Maybe it's the moon hiding up there behind that layer of clouds....

In my random search for something to do that would not involve getting in my car and roaming the night-dark countryside aimlessly or spending cash I don't have, I glanced over the icons on my Chrome dash.  No.  Not Twitter.  Not up to paring my thoughts down to 140 tonight.  Also don't want to sort through the clutter of the streaming feeds which are bound to be full of the stupidity and depressing non-choice of politics.  Not a mind-killing game like Angry Birds, either.

What to do?  The trip out to the car and the unrolling dirt roads and dodging of poaching rednecks is starting to sound better and better....

Then I saw the unassuming icon for the Google Art Project.  Yes.  This.  I clicked it, and I was taken to an image of a painting from the National Gallery in London called The Ambassadors.  It was from the time of Henry VIII and was by Holbein.  I looked at it,  pulled up its history, read about it, and moved on to other works that gallery had put online.  I could feel that thing that howls inside me demanding that I take it out of here, show it something other, let it out to dance and learn and frolic start to grumble less and pay attention more.

I moved from gallery to gallery, ending up as I have before in the Van Gogh Museum.  The image above is one of my favorites they have of his.  There is something about these trees that makes me think of Their Eyes Were Watching God and springtime and lying under the cherry blossoms in Japan on a day when it is still just a little too cool to be outside but everything is so full of glory that your heart wants to explode with it.

Soon, I guess I'll try to go to bed.  I don't sleep well on moon-sodden nights; I never have and I have no idea why.  Maybe there's something inside me that needs to be out dancing in it (ha).  For a little while, anyway, I have managed to make the unquiet thing peaceful by feeding it art.  No small accomplishment.

(if you are running Chrome, I highly recommend the Art Project app.  if you are not running Chrome....why the heck not?)