Blue [The Desert Island Collection]

Songs are like tattoos

This morning I went along with what my ipod gave me, absorbing each track no matter how strange they fit together. Dirty Vegas to a lecture on tonglen meditiation to Braveheart Party to a Beethoven adagio to Suzanne Vega. Somewhere along the way was a Joni Mitchell song. I never skip over those even when my ipod seems quite fixated on her. I can't blame him.

Here is a song for you

I don't remember exactly when I bought my tape of her album "Blue" but it was somewhere around the holidays and I remember the store and the shopping mall and I was at least 16 because I drove there myself. I removed the plastic while sitting in the parking lot and put it immediately into my car stereo. Later I would bring it into the house to listen on the tape deck in the bathroom while showering, then take it back with me to the car.

An empty space to fill in

I don't even know why I bought that album -- though I know I stumbled upon it on my own, through a magazine or a book because most people in my life as a teenager thought my music obsession was weird. Folks around me either stuck to what was on the "alternative" radio station or stayed within their genre of choice that matched their lifestyle: metalheads or b-boys or goths or even the people who didn't seem to listen to any music. I was an anomaly because I listened to it all, plus stuff that wasn't cool to like. I was starting to play acoustic guitar more and hanging out with other players who shared an obsession with local folk musicians. I suspect that somehow led me to Joni, though it could also have been I saw Amy Grant perform live at Six Flags and she did a cover of Big Yellow Taxi. I often stumble onto great works of art through completely random and unexpected means.

You've got to keep thinking you can make it thru these waves

Her personal lyrics went well with my adolescent pain and angst, but something told me this was more than moody music and went much deeper. I didn't understand most of the things she talked about: I had no old man, I'd never been to California, I'd barely flown on a plane, no one had loved me so naughty it made me weak in the knees, I had not given a child up for adoption, hell, I didn't even know what being born in the moon in Cancer meant, since I barely paid attention to astrology. Granted, I haven't experience the adoption part, but whatever.

Everybody's saying that hell's the hippest way to go

The album is unbelievably short. Less than twenty minutes on each side of the tape. My version was even messed up because the side labeled "A" really played side B, so I was confused by song titles for the first couple weeks. A year or two ago at some sale I finally bought a remastered version on CD, but I still have that original tape. It survived my car which tended to eat cassettes, it survived dorm rooms and half a dozen apartments and sits safely in a box right now, waiting to be unpacked. The CD is neatly alphabetized on the shelf and should be next to "Court and Spark" except I lost that in a break-up a few years ago.

There is your song from me

I initially wanted to learn to play all the songs on guitar, but then I learned about Joni using dozens and dozens of alternate tunings in her music and I'm way too lazy to do alternate tunings on my guitar. If I can't use a capo, I won't play it. But I can sing every song on the album, backwards and forwards, I know every word, every note. But I still stop and listen whenever a track appears on my ipod, a radio, a friend's house, a store, or even as background music on a cable special. But even though it has a permanent place in my brain, I put it on my top 10 list of CD's I'd hold onto no matter what.

The message my lies tell me in my dreams.

Last night I had a great dinner with Mistress Minax, as usual, which included cheap chinese non-cuisine delivery and persistant cats jumping in laps and astrological discussions and our usual topic of relationships and love and lovers. She said something to me that no one else has remotely intimated in conversations about my recent move, which doesn't really surprise me since she often plays that role in my life. Even if what she said isn't entirely accurate in perception, it's refreshing to have someone turn a situation on it's ear. She said something along the lines about how it might be easier for Lowenstein to co-habitate since she's been living alone for awhile and is ready for a change, whereas I might be having a harder time because I just lived with someone recently. No one else has said anything at all like this to me, in part because they probably avoid the elephant in the room talk of my nonmonogamous serial monogamy. I talked to her about how we're actually going through similar processes and anxieties and struggles and joys and excitement, though we're coming from different sides of the spectrum, but I liked that her take was different. Most people think in terms of inertia: she's lived alone a long time, it will be hard for her to change. I've lived with a partner recently, it will be easier for me to jump into it again. But Mistress Minax is often good at the figurative flipping of the script.

Last night my dreams took place over several days, and when I woke myself up at 6 am by accidentally brushing my arm against the warm body in the bed, I jerked up in a state of confusion. I looked down at her sleeping and thought, "what is she doing here? Awww, how sweet, she must have come over in the middle of the night and crawled into bed with me." Except, um, no, we came home together and went to bed together. Of course, I can't remember the dreams themselves, but between Minax's comment and Lowenstein packing up nearly her entire apartment last night and us moving some of it over, I have a feeling it might be related to my brain finally catching up and saying "this is actually happening. like, now."

Before I left dinner last night, I pulled a card from Minax's new deck of dirty cards, which weren't dirty in the way I thought and they were not a traditional deck in terms of Rider-Waite structure. I pulled the card "batter". It had an illustration of a bowl and a whisk and, of course, batter. The meaning is about having all your ingredients together, a sticky sweet mess that's on the verge of becoming and happening, not fully formed, but most of the process is complete. An interesting and delightfully auspicious card to pull, seeing as I'm in the midst of this in my life when it comes to school and home and writing and even my personal life as it relates to spiritually. I definitely something is brewing and ready to ding the timer and get removed.

Other symbols to look up: last night I was nose to nose with a spider right before bed, and a couple weeks ago I was being followed by seagulls several times in a few days.

I don't read the newspapers because they all have ugly print

Reading the news is pretty fcking depressing. I'm reminded why I generally just tend to read headlines so I have a vague idea of what's happening in the world without all the biased language and gruesome details and blatant lies. Several of my best friends in the world are journalists as well as some fabulous people on my livejournal list (all of whom are thoughtful critics of their own peers), but damn, that profession is going to hell and I don't even believe in hell's existence.

Here's how it started. I read from Zeppo about a plane crashing into Stone Mountain which is my tiny corner of a hometown within Atlanta, so I check out the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website to get details. Then I read about the recent court decision in the conspiracy murder suit filed a few years ago involving the former sheriff's widow and I start thinking about bizarre television movie crimes that happened in my former city, which makes me think of the series of kids kidnapped and murdered in 1979-1980 and the novel written during that time and what was the name again? That woman who worked on it for ten years then died before it's completion and Toni Morrison ended up finishing the editing? I look it up on my amazon wishlist and I notice that Fortunate Son came out with a third edition in December and I still haven't read it for fear of having an aneurysm but suddenly I crave it until I read about how Hatfield ultimately committed suicide after the drama that came with his publisher pulling the publication and I'm sure his life was threatened by politicos (and possibly even taken by them, at the risk of sounding like a madman conspiracy theorist), and suddenly suicide seems all around me, on the periphery with friends of friends and friends of colleagues and whatnot.

And although I hate the news more consistently for hiding and obscuring the truth in reporting, I never forgive it for reporting deaths because it pretty much sucks to have someone you know's life boiled down to their neat little paragraphs.

This was not at all what I inteded to write about in this entry. But what can you do?