F***ing Awesome

Dearest love, how are you today? Wherever you are I hope you are happy and smiling. I go through termagant mood swings myself as my day beats ceaselessly against the current, but at the moment feel a bit orgastic. I keep missing it when David Gray sings Stella the Artist. I gather from the KZE playlist that they played it overnight but I was asleep - blessed release, except for missing the joyous song. This afternoon I spent an hour at the library and when I returned to the car - as I learned later I had just missed it. I have had it with missing that song. Like chasing butterflies, or you, or me, for 33+ years. How much more can "one" take? It's not my only frustration, as you well know. (Oh darling, you & me both.)

Am downloading the youtube of Gray performing the song on Letterman. Had a Holly-Hunterish sob as I called it up because - no exaggeration - it takes on the order of two hours to download a 4 minute video.* At the library I had luxuriated in instantly downloading clip after clip, catching up on all sorts of stuff - except forgot to look up Stella. My bad. The universe granted me a small dispensation. Back at the car, Bob Schneider's wonderful 40 Dogs (Romeo & Juliet) came on, and I pretty well pounded the steering wheel over that one, while trying to go 25 (god, those arbitrarily low speed limits on the Route 9 Kinderhook straightaways - who made those rules? They're all about mere obedience.)

About half of the youtube has downloaded - enough to play. Gray is belting his heart out. That song rocks. How cannot it not be #1? It's fantastic. Mr. Letterman, thank you so much for having the one-outfited man on that I'm inclined to give you an executive pardon too. Kisses all around.

Later, dearest. Stretching out my arms farther, to you.

And one fine morning---




*cc: Rep. Scott Murphy I take such impediments in major dudgeon, do you hear? This is a major drag on creativity. Those synapses have to fire, not just sit there like a wet pancake in a Walmart parking lot.

Hell Gate and its Approaches

Thinking about Hellmouth, Hell Gate, and hubris this morning. Washington Irving wrote a vivid description of Hell Gate and so this morning, wool coat off, breakfasted, showered and pinkly dressed, I looked it up, and then my mind wandered over to reading Tales of a Traveller, which between maelstroms and idealized childhood love reminds me not only of Poe but of Lolita (Nabokov must have read him), and of you and me.

What a mess. But a fairly accurate representation of my mental state this morning.

***
From the NYC Department of City Planning, City Island: A Maritime History

Starting around the 1840s, some City Island men earned their living as "Hell Gate pilots," guiding ships on their way to and from Long Island Sound through the notoriously dangerous area where the Sound meets the East River near Ward's Island. The Dutch named it Hell gatt - literally, "hell hole." This narrow, crooked channel with its submerged rocks and strong tidal currents was considered to be one of the most dangerous waterways leading to a major port... Accidents were numerous and ships were continually gashing their hulls on the jagged reefs or colliding with one another. Pilots were essential in this waterway...

***

From Tales of a Traveller, Washington Irving

... the current is violently compressed between shouldering promontories, and horribly irritated and perplexed by rocks and shoals. Being at the best of times a very violent, hasty current, its takes these impediments in mighty dudgeon; boiling in whirlpools; brawling and fretting in ripples and breakers; and, in short, indulging in all kinds of wrong-headed paroxysms. At such times, woe to any unlucky vessel that ventures within its clutches. This termagant humor is said to prevail only at half tides. At low water it is as pacific as any other stream. As the tide rises, it begins to fret; at half tide it rages and roars as if bellowing for more water; but when the tide is full it relapses again into quiet, and for a time seems almost to sleep as soundly as an alderman after dinner. It may be compared to an inveterate hard drinker, who is a peaceable fellow enough when he has no liquor at all, or when he has a skin full, but when half seas over plays the very devil.

chart: Hell Gate in 1851

so, what's new with you?

Hello dearest. Sat out on the porch this afternoon with a hot cup of tea.

Here are my transcribed notes.

The world is of divided mind today, one foot in winter, one in spring. Walked at the conservation area, carefully, clumsily, to keep from slipping on the frozen slush. Frustrating to walk like that. I like to walk fast. So this afternoon I did, around here, in a fleece, in the sun, blue skies, and warm air. I baked you a pie and just tasted it - it's good - apple, walnuts, cinnamon, brown sugar. I discarded the raisins.

Read a poem today that reminded me of you, what you've gone through. You lived on South Niagara Way and been over the falls in a barrel. No need to visit Buffalo anytime soon.

***
Man, one is in a pretty bad way when one is italicizing journal text from that very afternoon.

All of my love, my darling.

ready when the time comes

From my blog post of 28 October 2009

I don’t like where our culture is headed. Our nation was founded on principles that I believe were on "General God’s" side. The colonies overthrew the oppressive forces of the British empire. Things have changed. Or more accurately, Plus ça change plus c’est meme, that is, “the more things change the more they stay the same.” I feel as though it’s 1773 all over again, and the forces of empire once again have the upper hand. They lost in 1776 but never left, which is why, for example, slavery wasn’t eradicated til nearly 100 years later – we didn’t form “the perfect union” right off the bat.

In the last 50 years the forces of greed have gained strength. They are relentless, will stop at nothing, and threaten to overwhelm.

***

***
from comment I left someplace or another at some point

Slavery is back in the U.S., in the form of desperate immigrants. So much for slavery having been eradicated after the Civil War. It's back. I guess in 2008, we are the new abolitionists? Someone has to stand up.

***
Not just desperate immigrants.

The time I heard William McDonough speak at a conference at Liberty State Park, I remember him remarking that children today (at the time - c. 1997) don't know where basic fruits & vegetables - such as a tomato, or an apple come from, in the sense of how they grow - vine? tree? etc., etc.

In 1997 we assumed that first graders knew what a tomato was, even if they didn't know how it grew.

Now, in Everywhere, U.S.A. they can't ID a tomato, or an apple, etc.

***
From some comment I left some place or another

For the last 40 years, Republicans have pushed a cultural definition of a populist Republican "us" that linked Democrats to a "them" identified as "elitists." In this way they have obscured the reality that the GOP has been working to abandon its moderate “conservative” philosophy and pursued a radical course rightward, working to exponentially magnify the power and influence of their traditional patrons - the economic elite.

Forty years later the GOP is no longer able to make the Big Lie work. As David Foster Wallace told the WSJ recently, “The truth—as I see it—is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate that it's very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.

***
Those first graders?
Maybe they just need the poor man's teleprompter.
***

Don't get me started.
Swat. Lemonade.

pie with your name on it

Not so easy to say it with raisins, plus they burned. The restless fingertips of my hula hands are in search of something else to mash. Aaargh. Pour some water on me.

Hitting Send

My dearest, today was quiet and seemingly uneventful, but as I sit up here in the aerie at this hour I realize that it actually contained a number of small discoveries. This morning I was rummaging through my computer files and happened on a poem that I wrote last year and had completely forgotten about. My poems (I almost hesitate to call them that, such a formal term, scary to me sometimes) are accidental, spontaneous affairs. I start at a dot, a phrase, a given, a gift, and follow from there. The file was in a blog folder that I had started that I don't save things to anymore. Why didn't I post it to my blog at the time? Really, I have no idea. But coming on it today - I liked it (and recognized it as something I did write) - and thought it related well enough to themes of late - plus on this day I turned the page on my botanical calendar.

On my walk this afternoon, ominously there was a series of large white, now mudcovered feathers on the side of the road. If there had been just one, I might epically have thought eagle, hawk, whatever. But the scattering of them, in that spot on the road - snow goose. Sinking feeling. On my return, I ran into not the Gang of Five - but four. The one with the damaged - missing - eye. Gone. Hope I'm not reading too much into things, that it's just the Great Screenwriter in the Sky removed him or her back to Props. In which case, I suppose, I shouldn't worry. But that particular goose, with its obvious blind side, is, I hope, not a metaphor for me.

What else? Went into Salon, haven't been there in a while (so many inputs, some get let go). And discovered that someone has made, and blog-journaled about, a film called City Island, filmed on City Island in the Bronx, a former stomping ground of mine. Clamdiggers and musselsuckers - ah, yes, the divided brain...

Then on KZE I heard Matt the Electrician sing oh so beautifully Faithfully, which I've heard before of course, and which I take very personally. I'm downloading the YouTube now, which I see was recorded August 16, 2009. My 50th birthday. Okay - I've totally busted myself (I was beginning to surmise that You're So Vain was about me, and frankly it was a relief to learn it's about David Geffen. But boy, she sure seems to be looking at me directly in that HuffPo photo, and you & I did have that rather epic "swim" in her old pool). My first thought was - ha! my birthday! But then I realize it was also the Giffords', not to mention the King of R&R's death. Oh heck, I'm into these angelwing conspiracy theories. Thank you for thinking of me on that day.

Blowing out the candles, now.

P.S. KZE is playing Sweet Home Chicago now. My one & only visit there also, was a complete disaster. I was so afraid of flying (less so, perhaps, now) that in my scatteredness left my handbag - containing so many essentials, plus cash & credit cards - on the plane which by the time I realized that I'd been a little too literal & dutiful in stowing all underneath my seat, had already departed - on time, I'm sure - for Indianapolis. That jaunt was quite the Niobic weepfest, on the architectural river tour up whatever ribbon of water that was...

Kisses, darling.