Pasmoimeme, c'est moi

"Not Myself". This is my song (YMMV—but don't stop me, I'm on a roll). I've lived it since I emerged into consciousness and started filling looseleaf binders with stories at age 8. It's about being a creater (not a creator), driven to produce art of some kind—music, writing, paintings, whatever. It's about the muse whose grip on you sometimes chokes. It's embracing the wide wonderment of impulses that you cannot control—and understanding that, sometimes, those impulses will swamp you with fear, or obsessive concern, or irrationality. Not forever; just momentarily. "Would you want me when I'm not myself? Wait it out while I am someone else?"

Exactly. Straight up, that lyric is addressed to my best friend of adolescence, Ria, who'd be hanging out with me and I'd randomly turn to her, eyes alight--"I need to write. Now." (Yeah, I was 14, a little drama there—but that was a powerful, overwhelming urge.) And bless her, she would get all excited and hand me a clean white sheet to write on, then she'd sit alongside and wait. Some poem that had flickered across my brain screen would take shape on the page in Bic pen scrawls—me transcribing the input, that's all. And afterwards, my relief would be indescribable. More than "whew"—more like "yeaaaah." Ria would seize that piece of paper, devour the words, and report back instantaneously. "Wow, Kip!" she'd say (my nickname, in those days.) "You did it again! This is amazing!" Who knew if she was right about my writing's quality? That wasn't the point. She was my champion, and that encouragement was everything in my uncertain young life.

And "Not Myself" speaks to my spouse, the man whose patience and calmness outweigh anyone's in my life experience. He doesn't always read the pages after they fling out behind me, and he doesn't really even know what dark thoughts cross like clouds across my sky sometimes. (Memories of distress past...worries about weird things that no one else thinks of...why must people smoke in proximity to a gasoline pump? this whole convenience store could blow sky-high!...desperate, clinging thoughts that I will never get published, I will fail at my calling.)

But Peter knows it's all roiling. He sees my facial expressions betraying my thoughts, and he feels the empty space in the bed when I can't sleep until everything's thought through for the night. Peter believes I will triumph and produce writing that matters. He waits it out. And he loves me in total, all the colors, all the words.
 

John Mayer evidently knows what a gift that kind of relationship could be. ("Suppose I said, you're my saving grace....") That soaring, gorgeous line symbolizes all my hopes, as well as my major good fortune in having met a person who makes me feel so wanted and comprehended, no matter whether it's poetry or prose that day.
 

So when I saw the "Not Myself" demo surface today, I reeled a little in my desk chair with anticipation. I wanted to hear it stripped bare...I wanted it vulnerable. I was not disappointed, and right after the song ended, I was gripped: I need to write. 
 

Two well-respected writers commented on this phenomenon of creativity and self, and since these quotes are also among my favorites ever, I thought I'd share them. P. L. Travers, who wrote the "Mary Poppins" books (and had a rollercoaster artistic journey of her own, I might add), was interviewed by the New Yorker in 1962. She observed about her writing process:

"I think if I should ever start to interpret I should be a little lost. I read my books over and think, How did she ever think of that? I sometimes roar with laughter at things I've written. I don't mean to be conceited; it's as though I were reading a book by someone else."
 

And in the summer of 1946, George Orwell wrote in an amazing essay, "Why I Write": "From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.... Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane."
 

Thus is one's relationship with the muse. I love it when people can articulate it; it's a deep comfort. I'm glad that John Mayer set it to pensive music.
 

Yeaaaah.

When you least expect it...

...grief.
 

I was sitting in a work meeting this afternoon, when suddenly a poem took full shape in my psyche. Just like that. I scribbled it in the margins of my notes for the meeting (looking officious for a few moments, I'm sure). This poem says so much to me—I mean, its substance is what I have been feeling for months, but could not quite get my mind to say. Well, my mind found the words. And my heart felt them as soon as they arranged themselves.
 

Intensive Care

I touch the scarf
and I'm at your bedside
where I knitted it—
fluorescent, persistent
hospital light
machines that beep and flash
hours of uncertainty—
while flowing through my fingers
pure soft real wool
a strand to the outside world
forming warmth
in honor of
the warmth of you,
now lost

NBR 12/30/05

Writer's block

More like writer's blockhead. 'Cause I just realized, after a few weeks of insomnia-like behavior, that I'm desperately wanting to write something (bigger than a blog, understand), and I'm—yes—blocked! I guess I wasn't letting myself in on the secret till tonight. Always the last to know.

I sit here many nights into the single-digit hours, playing [evil, don't touch it, walk away] Snood; contemplating major projects (scanning my mom's pics, actually writing real Christmas cards, doing some genealogy); hanging with my friends online; checking e-mail...but I'm not writing. I'm stepping around the chalk outline of this project I need to launch.

It's not like I'm not writing—dribs, e-m's, blogs, drabs, and poems are happening year-round. However, truthfully, I've avoided the prospect of significant writing for a few years, now. I had rock-solid excuses: Gave birth twice (swelling our kid ranks to four). Job was stressful (that one's on repeat every day). Injured my back by falling off a futon, semi-attached to my spouse at the time (that hurt and took months to heal, but the picturesque quality never fades). Mother became sick, then after agonizing illness, died. Best friend died without any warning whatsoever.

But they are excuses, aren't they? Any one of them is a written piece waiting to emerge. And I fobbed on it.

Well, I feel like I can get a good night's sleep now, after this revelation. Perchance to dream, and hence to write? Geez, I hope so. If not, at least I know why now. Because I always read about "writer's block" and thought, "Hah. That must suck. Never happens to me." Ahhhh, but it does and it has. Zounds.

About harmony

This is pretty simple. I watched U2 tonight on DirecTV--a show from the Vertigo tour--and realized with a jolt that the harmony vocals of Bono and the Edge are exceptional. I knew this all along, but had not processed it until I saw them sing together, the classic sharing-the-mike moment. (This is one band I regret to say I have not managed to see live. Them and Pearl Jam. How's about a double bill in the humble state of Maine, wot?)
 

When Bono and the Edge are blending and belting it out...it's like victory, right within your grasp. The lyrics almost don't matter--it's what they convey as their voices intertwine.
 

And I've added U2 to my music profile list, in a moment of profound duh. How could I miss that?? I guess they've just always been there...all the Greyhound trips I took in my teens and 20s with the Walkman headphones blaring Boy and The Unforgettable Fire, highway trees racing by in green blurs. Any song from those records that I hear, I am transported to the sensations of traveling somewhere, urgency, and freedom. Youth.

The thrill of the hunt

This evening, I saw a splash ad for Napster that said, "Download a decade," and it completely sent me back to 1987. That's the year that Peter and I decided that we had to own the 1970s: a decade that formed us, with some of the oddest, most exhuberant, cheesiest, most excessive music ever. In 1987, we were really poor, and that dovetailed with something fortuitous: the rise of the compact disc.

Yup, I'm one of those people who can actually say I remember the first time I ever heard a CD. I think it was Bryan Adams, and it really sounded funny. I can't explain that now—years later, with hundreds of CDs on my shelf—but back then, music on CDs sounded tinnier, more distant and clinical. But that may well have been due to the lack of 1) a large paperboard cover and 2) dust. We looked at CD covers, those click-y clear plastic inventions, and they seemed so micro, so literally square, and just a tad obsessive. What do you think's gonna happen to the thing, you know? Aren't those freaky rainbow mirror circles supposedly indestructible?! (That was one of the media selling points, actually.)

And thenceforth, the rise of CDs led to a flood of vinyl. Some of it was actually still shrink-wrapped in the familiar large, alphabetical bins of a record store: marked down. Way to get my blood flowing. (We used to call all chain record stores "Record Orgasm," in homage to all the "Sound Explosion," "Record World," "Music City" kind of names.) At any rate, given our fiscal challenges, most of the vinyl that Peter and I set out to acquire was humble, used, and greyish with dust. In 1987 we began haunting Goodwills, Salvation Armys, yard sales, and anywhere else that vinyl was being shunted by the uncaring listening public. We became aces at cleaning layers of dust, excavating jewels from everyday filth. A little popping and scratchiness just enhanced the audio joy, we convinced ourselves.

I can still remember the palpable thrill one afternoon at the Goodwill in Bath, Maine. They had a bin crammed with outcast records. Stuck in amongst the LPs was a homemade spindle, some kind of long broomstick attached to a wooden disc as a base. That day, the spindle was stacked unbelievably high with 45s. I'm sure we let out some girly utterance in our excitement, like "Aaaaah!" or "Ooooh!" Then we commenced to pulling a handful off the stack and flipping through the coverless 45s—carefully; why scratch them any worse than they were—and setting aside all the ones we wanted. "Walking in Rhythm," by the Blackbyrds. "Back Off Boogaloo" by Ringo Starr. "Get Up and Boogie" by Silver Convention. "Clair" by Gilbert O'Sullivan. (You know, I could rave on, but that's the gist. Semi-obscurities that sent us back in time as soon as the first chords sounded through the needle.)

So what we were doing, really? We were reconstructing our childhoods and teen years, that's what. Because when we were kids, our parents weren't doling out sufficient dough to feed our music heads. I literally used to have to sneak LPs into my house underneath my coat, whenever I'd gathered/scammed enough money for records. I was skinnier then; it was tough to get my arms to fall naturally around a big squared-off chest as I rushed into the house past my stepfather. My mother was a musician, and yet if I asked her, "Can I have money to buy an album?" she'd retort, "You already have enough records, Nessa." Like what was that supposed to mean?! (She said the same thing about books when I came home forlornly clutching the Scholastic Book Club form. "I've read all those books!" I'd say. "Read them again," she'd intone with a profound lack of logic.)

Peter's parents, by contrast, were frugal Quakers. Not musicians, but not rock appreciators either. So his only album holdings, when he got to college, were from the Columbia House "Pick 20 albums for 1 cent" deal. That ran in every magazine any kid ever touched back then. I never could have gotten that box into the house under my coat.

What was the grail, you might wonder, the serious catch that Peter and I pursued so diligently in the musty Goodwill, under the buzzing fluorescent lights? That would be: K-Tels. We worshipped them, those splashy collections of every single that mattered in a five-month time period. They used to jam some 30 songs on one of those K-Tels! The sound quality suffered from the narrower grooves on the vinyl, but who cared? Now we had "You and Me," by Alice Cooper, and "Do You Wanna Make Love" by Peter McCann, and "Flash Light" by Parliament. (Reinsert raving comment here.)

1987 is a generation ago. Peter and I, still together, still fanatics, own thousands of LPs—most of them used. We own hundreds of K-Tels, fetish objects that they are. We love singles, too, and have more than 1000 of them. In many cases, we had to fashion sleeves out of flat paper bags from a bookstore. Their numbers increased significantly when jukeboxes switched over to digital; we ended up buying scores of cast-off singles from a local antiques shop. Those 45s had played in restaurants, bars, and bowling alleys all over Maine--we know, because the sleeves on the records had a handwritten note as to where they had been.

Download a decade? Nah. Search it out like a quest, clutch it to your chest (under your coat, if you must), share it with a beloved, and cherish it always.

She's Leaving Home

I'm standing at the sink by the window, filling a pot for pasta. As the water swirls against its silver interior, I realize how shiny and new-looking it is—that's because it was my mom's. I immediately think how grateful I am to have it...and then I realize that Mom's pots were cleaner than mine because I left home, and she didn't cook so much after that. And then my brain perceives the song that's just started playing on our stereo: "Matte Kudasai," by King Crimson. Lyrics:

Stand by the windowpane,
Pain, like the rain that's falling.
She waits in the air, Matte Kudasai.
She sleeps in a chair, in her sad America.
When, when was the night so long,
Long, like the notes I'm sending.
She waits in the air, Matte Kudasai.
She sleeps in a chair, in her sad America.

This song is mournful, plaintive, meditative, just nails everything I was feeling at that moment. And even more so, in that King Crimson's Discipline album is a total relic of the year I left home for college. It was the music of that autumn, thumping out of every stereo in the co-ed fraternity I joined. And there again, the frat was my first real break from the tumultuous home life I'd known before. I found acceptance as just me, not New York City me. I actually forged a more comfortable identity because I had that place and those amazing friends to guide me. It was not a typical frat: we were largely brainiacs with a thick streak of partyer woven in. Many science geeks (who were really cool underneath that stereotype, and I bagged a few besides); a couple of disaffected jocks; at least half a dozen writers; a significant number of Mainers; people who could discourse for hours about the plight of Wile E. Coyote or what made James Joyce's Ulysses worth reading.

Astonishing how music yanks you right to a time, place, and set of feelings, whether you knew that journey was pending or not. In fact, Pete put the Crimson on before I started cooking, so I was unwitting. And BTW, if you're dismissive of the notion of prog-rock, if it seems stegasaurean and ponderous...well, it's a lot more rhythmic and emotionally accessible than it seems. I wouldn't have gotten through my teen years without it.

Tuesday muse

I wrote a poem today, which is noteworthy ('s been awhile), so here it is:

November, Kebo

The gulls have retaken the golf course.
Against the fairway—still verdant, just a hint of rust—
they convene, white as doves.
Above them, black geese depart in the distant V.
The gulls bunch together—audience, tribe,
a town meeting, with something to decide.

NBR 11/29/05

I started writing poetry when I was 11. These things just surge up from some muse-mediated place, and I transcribe them—that's what it feels like. I decided today that this blog would be a good vehicle for the poetry that languishes unread on my hard drive. Here's hoping it doesn't scare people away [insert nervous laughter...poets are anxious beings.]

This is the year of the slippery catalogs. Somehow, the mailing lists have found us in droves...every day, our mailbox is stuffed fuller than a butterball. I weed out the overly outdoorsy, old-lady, or sporty ones, but somehow I feel compelled to flip through the others, even though I've no intention of purchasing their goods!! I guess I never let go of the years when a magazine felt like an extravagance (I made a cool $8000 a year in my first job). So free reading with colorful pics seems like a good deal, somewhere deep in my psyche. Ultimately, though, reading through them dulls the senses—they make everyday life even more banal, like looking through a window where nothing ever happens.

Turkey Grease

This was a week with much thanks to give. My father-in-law is recovering from major (mostly successful) heart surgery—and my mother-in-law is recovering too, in her way, from the shake-up of her partner's illness and reemergence. Meanwhile, Pete, the kids and I met our newest family member: 3-month-old Alex, son of Pete's older brother Dave. Then Pete and I saw a hottttt John Mayer Trio show at the Bowery Ballroom, two years to the very day since our first JM show at Madison Square Garden—and got to hang out with JoAnn, Jocelyn, and other friends old and new. We spent Turkey Day with my brother's family in NJ, and his m-i-l cooked a feast for the 7 kids and 8 adults in attendance (it even included octopus and ham!). I was immersed in city life for a few days, which is a great reminder of who I am fully (since I am of NY), as well as why I have embraced the northlands. I mean, America! All those lights ablaze at all hours! Multitude of vehicles, bigass stores and restaurants everywhere, crisscrossing routes all to get you from A to B, constant flow of people on the sidewalk! And Asian cuisine abounding, which I ate at every opportunity. (Fave restaurant name on this trip: Yum Mee.) Maine is radically not like that.

Still, America's a nice place to visit, and we all did, happily. 

 

BTW, hooray for hotels with floaty down pillows and duvets. Ahhhhhh. I don't even have those at home!
 

Came home tonight to relieved cats, crusty snow on the lawn, and a cranking furnace (another thing to be thankful for). Not to mention the excitement of getting back on the 'net after a week—where I found that one of my cousins had sent me precious scanned images of my mom as a girl, pics I'd never seen before. I received them on what would have been Mom's 73rd birthday.

And that was the other blessing about being in the city—I felt Mom's presence there, in the glittery, boxy buildings at night and walking the sidewalks of Herald Square in the wan sunshine. One night last week, actually, I dreamt I saw her again...I was incredulous, and she was nonplussed (classic Mom). We talked, I took her hand, and I really felt her clutching my hand in the dream. God, it felt good, familiar—reassuring.
 

Yes, thanks. And thanks again.

Eulogy: Daniel D'Antonio, Jr.

I am honored to tell you about my closest friend, D.J., and his extraordinary life. First and foremost, he loved, fiercely and protectively.

He was outrageous and mischievous, yet in his heart, he was traditional and old-world, his father’s son.

D.J. was devoted: as a son, as a brother, as a father, and as a friend. He was generous in every way.

Time and time again, he willed me to believe in myself—and I’m not the only person for whom he did that.

I marveled over the years of our friendship at how strong and positive he was. Even when he was young, he was an advocate and a guide to his friends.

He was an incredible hair stylist—and a great listener while he practiced his craft. You could rely on him to make you over and lift your spirits.

He could make a donut shop feel glamorous, a place to see and be seen.

I can think of no better way to while away an afternoon than in his company, eating pizza, drinking soda, half-watching TV, and talking about everything.

D.J. was a magical writer, and no matter how many times I told him that, he waved me off. But he was. His writing was all heart, all honesty.

He was also a savvy observer of Hollywood, with an amazing head for trivia and pop culture. He’s the only other person I’ve ever known who could sing every word of every Partridge Family song. Proudly.

His all-time favorite movie was Xanadu. It’s improbable, glossy…a time capsule from our teen years. Mostly, though, that movie is about the timelessness of love. One of the songs says, “I only have to close my eyes, dear, and suddenly I’m where you are.” It’s always reminded me of D.J., always made me cry. Now I really know what it means.

I refuse to stop missing him, ever. And I will not say goodbye. He will be here with us, part of us, unforgettable. Because love is timeless, and he knew that.