Try The Crazy Thing

I have to go catch up on actual work after a long sick break, but I have so much to talk about. I'll try to get back here later today. Here's kind of a hint -- an appearance by Tilly and the Wall on David Letterman last year. They don't have a drummer; they have a tap dancer.

Til later. Take care.

#26 -- More dancing and singing please

This blew my mind. Since I'm doing nothing but blowing my nose (the exhaustion has morphed into an actual cold), here's a fantastic story from the life of one of our modern masters of creating his very own reality, Peretz Bernstein --er-- Perry Farrell. From his Wikipedia entry:

"In December 2001, Farrell risked his life by flying into politically troubled Sudan with other members of Christian Solidarity International to negotiate the release of Sudanese slaves. Jane's Addiction donated their earning from one concert for the redemption of over 2300 people, who had been enslaved under terrible conditions. Once the redemption agreement was signed, Farrell started up freedom parties at various redemption sites "armed only with a boom box and his legendary voice."

"He began dancing and singing," said an associate; "I wasn't sure what would happen, but then everyone joined in. Everyone was dancing. Even the Arab retrievers joined in. It was Christians, Muslims, and Jews all dancing together. Arabs, Africans, Americans, and Europeans — all."

This says a little about why, as I get older and more decrepit and creaky, I see less and less personal value in finding the subculture that accepts you (maybe because I've done that already and admittedly, it's a good place to start because then, a, you have a community and, b, you have some empirical evidence that maybe you are not insane) and more value in this -- showing up and dancing and singing in a crowd of people who are nothing, at all, like you.

Until next time.

#25: Let Everyone Find Their Bliss

I know there's only about 20 of you reading this regularly -- and to those 20 of you, I say hail the tastemakers! I've been too tired to write anything substantive -- and by tired, for a change, I don't mean lazy. I'm literally exhausted and working to find out if there is a root cause.

Having spent nearly a week going through periods where I can't really move, I've gotten a little desperate, and a little whacked out, so I started asking the universe point blank for what I need the most last night as I lay in bed.

Please let me have my energy back so I can accomplish the things I need to.

Please let my son feel better (he has a cold)

Please let my friend K find the love of his life, cause I'm pretty sure he needs outside assistance.

Where the hell did that come from?

Next thing I know I'm asking for everything, for everyone I can think of.

And here's the thing. I've come to believe that we can all achieve what we need to in this lifetime. Joseph Campbell, Mr. Find Your Bliss himself, believed that reincarnation was a metaphor for continuing to die and be reborn in this lifetime until you achieve enlightenment.

I worry sometimes that this blog is just so much navel gazing. But I also think that as a society we have a responsibility to get ourselves in order. To be positive, to treat others with kindness, to be conscious of why we do the things we do.

So, here's what I want. For you to find your bliss, and for me to find mine. Let me know what I can do to help.

Tomorrow, I'll start to go beyond that.

Three Little Words

Still to tired to post, but if you'd like to be uplifted, amused and turned on to the commonality among us, by ABC TV of all things, take a look at this:

http://ugv.abcnews.go.com/player.aspx?id=694149

Sorry I couldn't embed it as a video.

Thanks to Ryan for the tip, and I shall now steal his description:

"ABC has a weekly summer fill in show called iCaught. It’s basically a show that tells the back story behind some of the most popular viral videos on the web. Well one of the things they do every week is something called Y3W. It stands for “Your Three Words”. They ask their viewers to record themselves showing three words that describe what they’re doing or feeling or thinking this week. They then put it together to music. It’s hard to explain but very cool to watch. Very moving."

Hope to have more to say soon.

Can't You See She's Pooped?

I'm taking a break for health reasons. All I know so far is that I'm so, so tired. Take it away, Lili Von Schtupp.

#24: Jump into life

My darling friend RR, she who I owe the apology to for the John Donne quote (short version -- the man wasn't a feminist), has created this interesting stepladder of inspiration for me. I once gave her a card with a photograph of a girl in a pinafore jumping in the air, I think the title was Alice in Wonderland. She framed it, kept it, and eventually decided to dedicate the year of her thirtieth birthday to leaping into life. She proceeded to jump out of an airplane. And now the thing I kind of inadvertently inspired her to do continues to inspire me, as I think about ways to push myself into living more, being more, and leaping.

Or, as Laurie Anderson said, walking is just falling and then catching yourself from falling.

I love this:

www.thejumpproject.com

but the artist says in her notes that the online store included home appliances, and when I took a look it seemed like that meant coasters and clocks. Disappointing, because I would totally buy a dishwasher with a photograph of a man in Marrakech jumping so high he can touch his toes.

I've decided to spend my upcoming birthday with my husband playing hooky and museum hopping in Manhattan, then I go to my second jewelry class where I will hopefully take a blowtorch to some gold. Sounds like a perfect day. I'm excited to look at some art and grow some more ideas that I never might have had otherwise.

Until tomorrow.

#23: Let me dissipate rage

I was on the playground with my son the other day when we saw one kid jump from a great height on top of a younger kid, intentionally. When the younger kid started to wail, the older kid got right in his face and yelled "Well, it's your fault for getting in my way! It's your fault!" and ran off.

I helped the younger kid get up while a couple of other moms tried to locate his mom. The kid hurt his arm and hit his head and just wanted his mom and was wailing. The older kid came back, saw me standing next to the hurt kid, and ran off again. The mom came over and carried the little kid off. I didn't see the older kid again.

Over the course of the day, I felt angrier and angrier at this kid. One, I felt bad for my own kid, who was confused and upset by the whole thing and asked me to explain what happened about five times and acted the whole thing out a couple of times. But I was angrier about the kid telling the younger kid that his getting hurt was his own fault. The reality of that situation was the younger kid was "at fault" for being anywhere near this enraged, angry, out-of-control kid.

And I became completely infected by his anger. I became obsessed with what had happened. My own anger got wrapped around this kid and this incident, and it paralyzed me for the rest of the day.

As I was falling asleep I envisioned speaking with the kid. The first few times, I wound up screaming at him. The last couple of exchanges went kind of like this.

"So what happened out there on the playground?"

"He was in my way! It was his fault!"

"I think you were angry before that. I noticed when I walked in that you were mad someone else had teased you. But you were really really angry about that, and that was a pretty small thing. I think you've just always been angry, and I don't know why. I'm sorry I can't help you."

Annie Dillard wrote in "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" a passage about how when you chop wood, you need to look at the chopping block and not at the wood you're cutting. I think people are sort of the same. When their behavior is insane, you have to look right past what you see and what they tell you, to what makes sense underneath. That's usually a wounded animal who doesn't even know where the wound came from anymore or how to fix it, so they attack you.

I'm not going to let other wounded animals turn me into a wounded animal anymore.

On another note, I'm listening right now to the podcast interview of the director of the National Institute for Play on the value of play and how it positively shapes our human character and socialization. Very interesting stuff.

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/play/index.shtml

See you later.

Rufus Wainwright - 11:11 at UofP

11:11

#22 -- A wish for peace, everywhere

I don't want to write much today, although I have a couple of essays brewing. With apologies to RR, here's the John Donne quote from Meditation XVII Governor Spitzer read today at the 9/11 Memorial, which says it best for me:

"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

Couldn't find any video of the NYPD Emerald Pipe and Drum Society, but Rufus Wainwright's 11:11 should post here shortly (come on YouTube, you can do it).

My friend Sally Herships conducted an oral history project in the weeks following 9/11 where she and Laura Dotterer interviewed over 200 members of the public about their reactions and experiences to 9/11. More information is here:

http://www.documentnewyork.com/Newsday.pdf

http://www.sohosally.com/sound/listen.html under “Special Projects”

Much love to everyone today.

Numberless Musing

Thank you to Jamal and Elayne for their kind posts.

A few words on why I'm doing this, as much to solidify my own thinking as anything else.

Really, it started with a good title. I work in public relations, so I have years of training in coming up with a good line and worrying about the content later. But eventually you do have to come up with the content, or the good line falls apart.

I figure I'm human, not to mention American, so I want things all the time. Not material things so much but for "things" to be better, richer, easier, to finally come up with the grand scheme that makes life work like clockwork.

I realize that's a crock. Crockwork.

I've also been irritated by things like "The Secret", that have some good ideas behind them, and Scientology, which, whoo boy never mind. I'm irritated by the idea that you have to put down a bunch of cash and then someone comes out from behind the curtain and tells you the meaning of life. (Although if Leah Remini is any example, a bunch of cash does seem to buy you A-list friends, so I won't knock the Xenu-worshippers. Oh who am I kidding, yes I will. Anyway.)

The meaning of life is in the living. This blog is about speaking my voice, making my intentions clear to myself and connecting with other people. I do want to see if I can make locusts swarm the Scientology Center on 42nd Street (how cool would that be?) but mainly I want to see if this can be an experiment, and hopefully a successful one, in learning the meaning of life without handing some faux Wizard of Oz a big wad of money. And that then maybe you can do it too.

More later. Much love.

#21

A late night wish to move on

There are times I wish I’d never met you.

Never taken your roommate’s offer to lend me money for the bus home and never gone to your room to tell him never mind but thank you, I’d gotten a ride with someone from off campus.

Never seen you with the grin that burst out of your face as you sat on your own bed in your own room at 8 p.m. on a Friday night, alone, with your shirt buttoned up to your chin and covered in so many clothes that I remember you, probably incorrectly, dressed in an overcoat and boots. Never been amused by you sitting there grinning as you listened to music you loved that I loved too and never invited you to the party at my house, impulsively, because you seemed so full of life.

I wish I’d never become your friend, and never held on to that friendship after I left that haunted, unhinged valley -- and the school squatting at the bottom of it -- behind. I wish I’d never heard about how impassioned you were about saving the soul of that rotting school and how beautifully you spoke about the education it had given you, pushing through the scrim of your dyslexia and delivering literature, turning on the light you didn’t know was there and making manuscripts start to push out of your skull, unformed glimmering arms and legs of potential future Athenas.

They fired your teachers anyway, and they shouldn’t have, they should have listened to you when they had the chance.

I wish I could hear “Not So Manic Now,” “All My Ghosts” and “#1 Crush” without thinking of you. I wish my friends who became your friends never went through their own muted or jagged versions of the same pain I did. I wish I’d never, with my husband, spent hours and hours agonizing over how to fit your name inside the vowels and consonants that would represent our newborn child without bursting into tears every time I called him in for dinner.

I wish I could hear news reports of strangers getting shot and just think “Oh, how terrible,” and not “Left temporal lobe,” which is where the bullet entered your brain and took your grin, your sardonic near-evil wit, your embrace, your singing voice, your constant irritations and your deep desire to fix everyone you loved, your freckles and every other piece of you that I loved so dear, away in an instant.

I wish I’d never felt your hand on the shoulder of my fear the night it appeared that I’d miscarried. I wish you never guided me in my dreams. I wish you hadn’t told me I’d marry my husband without ever having met him when we didn’t really know it yet ourselves. I wish I’d never seen magic or joy or love.

I wish I’d never vacationed with you, cleared the dishes with you, sat shoulder to shoulder with you dreaming about the future and laughing about how the hell we would ever get over our pasts. I wish I didn’t see actors from the t.v. shows you worked on and only want to hear your stories about them and your adventures.

I wish I’d never told you, the last time we spoke, that all I wanted was you to find a partner to spend your life with only to have you reply “I don’t think that’s ever going to happen for me.” I wish 3 weeks later, you hadn’t been proven right.

The only thing I do wish, sometimes, late at night, is that I’d called you back that week, or gone to visit you in L.A. like we were discussing, or somehow moved the earth and the heavens and the angle of that goddamned gun. I wish I’d changed time, set the clock off balance, set the world on fire. Maybe you would have walked into that parking lot five minutes earlier, or ten minutes later, or not at all.

I wish I’d stopped what killed you.

I wish you were here.

I wish this would stop hurting. It’s been seven years.

#20: Please please please let me find Little Larry

Full disclosure: My son Will started nursery school this week and I just dropped him off for his first full day. He was howling and screaming when I left, and everything at the moment is filtered through howling-colored glasses.

On the way there, we seem to have lost Little Larry, who was riding shotgun -- undergun?-- in the basket beneath Will's stroller.

Little Larry is one of a tribe of Larrys. Originally there was just Big Larry, a lamb baby blanket with soft satin paws that Will picked apart over time into cloudy pom poms of thread. He was a shower gift from friends and at one point in his life was actually white and not grey.

Big Larry was at first just Larry, named for my husbands now-late uncle Larry, who wouldn't eat lamb. Ha ha. Larry was eventually lost at the zoo where I like to picture him in the soft grass gazing happily at the clouds and not, say, frolicking with the baboons.

At that point there was a second Larry already, dubbed Larry Feingold, Certified Public Lamb, by my cousin. We ordered a third, and so we had two again. New Big Larry and Larry Feingold.

But the Larrys kept growing. The same friends who gave us OL (Original Larry) also gave us a tiny white Gund bear like the one my friend C had growing up. His was Mohatma Gundhi; we named ours Indira. By the time Will could talk, he let us know that clearly this was a case of mistaken identity. That bear was little Larry; the big teddy bear was Larry Bear; the little brown Gund (plucked from the Salvation Army when we were first talking about having a child and subsequently washed and washed and washed) was basketball coach Larry Brown.

So it's Little Larry, nee Indira, who seems to have made a run for it. I hope to find him in the nieghborhood or through the parents web group. I also hope to get through this morning without a big shot of whiskey.

As a parent you can control two things and two things only -- how much love you put into your children and keeping track of all their crap. In the face of howling-colored glasses and the sense that by God my baby is out in the world now, I'm trying to keep from hyperventilating over the few things that seem controllable.

For a very eloquent take on kids and their bears, go here: RIP, Minty Bear

#19: Please give Elayne the house that will best support her needs

Back in July I posted on my old blog, Set Cycle to Spin, about the seeming disappearance of PostSecret's man behind the curtain, Frank. You can go look at the old blog if you want the whole story. The whole ordeal earned me minute 3 of my personal 15 minutes of suspect fame when Wikipedia referred to me as a blogger who claimed to have called the police. So my only entry on Wikipedia makes me sound a little like a liar, a little like a hysteric, and a little like Ren from Ren and Stimpy ("Call the poliiiiiiiiiice!").

(Minutes 1 and 2 involved having stories published in national anthologies. As long as the last 12 don't involve anyone else posting footage of me on YouTube, we're good.)

The cool thing that happened, however, is lots of nice, interesting and literate strangers reading PostSecret and that Wikipedia link wrote me nice things and now I read their blogs, like Jessieh Speaks.

Elayne in particular wrote me a very detailed take on blogging etiquette with some good thoughts to chew on. But at the time I was about to go on vacation and when I scrolled down in her post and just saw more pesky words, I kind of panicked and didn't read the whole thing.

Blogging etiquette has been on my mind lately. I remembered the post and felt up to conquering all the words and went back and read it (good stuff) and then checked out her blog. She mentioned she's hoping to buy a house.

So, universe, please help Elayne that house, and if not that house, then another really cool house she'll love just as much. I don't know much about her, but it seems to me she has a big heart and a deep desire for this to happen, so give her a hand if you could.

Until later --

#18 -- Let's Move From Getting Well to Kicking Ass

Sorry I haven't posted lately. My son is starting nursery school. I didn't realize it would feel like the whole house came down with mononucleosis. Even the dog looks like she needs antibiotics and ice cream. My husband and I more or less lay on the floor of my son's room after dinner tonight, unable to move. The boy was too tired to jump on us. Transitions suck.

Much love --

#17: Help

Help anyone at the bottom find the ocean floor, bend their knees, and push back up toward the surface.

Help anyone with a voice to open their mouth and use it.

Help anyone coasting along to want more and do better.

Thank you for the roads that keep popping up under my feet right when I think my leg is going to disappear down into the quicksand. And thank you for all the fine folks who pick me up when I'm hitchhiking or chat from the backseat while I drive.

For those of you who know me and the fact that my main form of i.d. is still my passport, that last one is a metaphor, and shut up.