my hopes

I hope to never be as paralyzed as you are by the actions of others

I hope to never cower in my man-made box the way you do

I hope to never consider myself handicap (even if my doctor says otherwise)

I hope to never lose faith in all that you do (you as in the collective soul, not just you, you)

I hope I never see you again.

The Promise in a Smile (when you didn't play it cool)

Q&A: The Music That Moves Steve Earle

Ironically, I couldn't find a youtube version of Townes doing "Colorado Girl," so we're gonna let Devendra Banhart fuck with it, alright Earle, alright? Not too shabby.





And speaking of Kings of Leon, I'm feeling particularly generous.




At the end of the month, money permitting, I'm going for my next tattoo. It will be the first one that isn't a word (without even planning it, I have a word in a font, a printed word, and a phrase in cursive). At work we get these little bar codes on the edge of our pay checks that we use for our employee discount. So I'm getting one of those tool bag bar codes, only it'll actually have meaning to me so people can kiss my French Canadian white ass if they got a problem with it. We can move on up and get that piece of the pie, but when we forget the working man still working the third shifts and the graveyard shifts somewhere . . . we lose. Period.

Saturday Night Lullaby(s)

Dream hard, play fair, enjoy the ride and never forget,
xoxo,
Cindy Mayweather

And it is a ride and a play (comedy/tragedy) and a poker game and an ocean full of waves . . . so (shrugs shoulders) learn how to laugh at your own shitty jokes.

An all girls night out.

Hoorah for scorpion bowls and karaoke, new friends and old, and 24 hour Dunkin Donuts!!!

It's a weird bitter sweet fair trade dance; enjoy the ride

How I feel about life,



or how when you first get off a treadmill and you feel like you're still on it, but you're not . . that feeling

or when you read a note like this one



or see pictures like these
















or hear albums like this

Here Comes the Sun

Little Darling

Little People & Short People

Little Moments

Pancakes the size of manhole covers . . .

And pink, plaid dresses with cowboy boots <--- Exercise your imagination!!

Update:

My love affair with couches

and the smell of felt came from Fat Cat, a live jazz club and pool hall on Christopher St. in NYC. Sink into one of those couches older than you and I combined and try to tell me you don't know what love is. Slip in and out of orgasmic pleasure as the sound proof walls bounce sound waves into your chest cavities. Feel your heart almost come out of your chest as the musicians (no one was playing to get famous) played until their fingers bled. Closing between 4 and 5 AM was a suggestion.
Taking a break a few times for some cloves, a hot dog and a pint . . . as long as you had that stamp, heaven was just a door away.

We Real Cool.

I get by with a little help.

There is absolutely no better month than the month of May. I adore everything about it. The weather is perfect (even if you live in New England). Right now the smell of my neighbor's lilac tree is permeating into my room and after being sick for the last few days I find myself unbelievably thankful I don't have allergies to such things. It truly is making me feel better. It isn't just the lilacs that make the wind smell so sweet in May. There's such an innocence to the winds of May. After the first real snow storm of the winter season, there is always this rough, piercing "cold" smell to the wind, reeking of accusations. Everyone complains about the snow and the cold, but the wind comes out unsympathetically to say, "What? You've left me long ago." Mother nature reminding us we've turned our back on her first, so why should she be merciful. She's right, I play Dinner at Eight, by Rufus Wainwright when this winds first blows. She gave us life, she can easily take it away.

The other day I was ringing a mother and daughter through at my work. The mom had one of those phones with the pens attached to it and she was using it. The daughter (around 11) asked her mother what was on the agenda for "John's Party" this Saturday. Now look, sometimes people find silence awkward so they just choose a topic to talk about in front of people. I do it, we all do it. The mom was doing whatever and that left the girl and me . . . some people can appreciate moments of silence, and some can't. I teeter between liking them and hating them myself. The mother looked up from the phone and said, "I emailed you about it yesterday, didn't you get the email."
"Well, yeah Ma, I just . . . "
"Never mind, I'm emailing it to you again."
And that was that. The girl pulled one of the Twilight books down from the display next to my register and opened to the middle of the book and appeared to be reading.
"Oh, God, Molly . . . I'd wish you'd stop it with those horrid books. They're pure rubbish . . . "
That's it. I snapped and cut the woman off, speaking directly to the girl,
"Are you on team Edward or Jacob? Don't spoil anything for me, I just finished the first book and haven't started New Moon."
"Should I swipe my card now?" I just ignored the mom, and kept ringing, folding, bagging and talking Twilight. And just a side note, don't fucking ask, just always wait until the end assholes.
"Excuse me, should I swipe my card now?" A few minutes ago you were ignoring both my existence and the existence of your daughter so . . . suck it.

People are not finding the balance between technology and mother nature . . . so to say. We keep taking from one and throwing all our best into the other, for what? One of my favorite's from Shel Silverstein is The Giving Tree. In the end, I suppose she'll always be there come May, as forgiving as ever, but . . . I don't know if that makes what we do to her in the interim alright.

Other things that made me happy,
a full ballet barre in the kitchen
chanel film
fat cats in baby carriages and hearts in mocha swirl
not enough night
esopus magazine

3 Cheers for Sick Days

All I did was sleep, read and watch Billy Wilder movies (and tried not to throw up . . . but whatever).




The ending to The Apartment isn't as notable as the "Nobody's perfect!" from Some Like it Hot . . . but "Shut up and deal" is just as memorable in my book.

Poetry Corner

I feel like orbs.

Red orbs. Red Balloons fit nicely here.
And The Red Balloon. Great Balls of Fire!

The Ball Poem by John Berryman

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over—there it is in the water
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

Hustle Loses Sexy Mickey, Gains Ne-yo's Little Brother, Cool.

So AMC has played host to some of the only decent shows on the tube lately in my opinion (Hustle, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men). My definition of "good"--- if it can hold my attention for the hour, through commercial breaks, bathroom breaks, Marcelle-nagging breaks, you catch the drift. My favorite out of these three would have to be Hustle. Last night, er . . . early morning I watched my first episode of the latest season. It wasn't the first of the season, just MY first episode of the season. So what I can deduce Mickey left (initial sadness until I see the fine, fine, fine man they got who is added to the team). I'm always weary of cast loses and add-ons. We'll see where this goes. I'm not sure I like the idea of Danny leading the team; I would have jumped off the couch and screamed with joy had Stacie been the one in charge, ah well . . . someday. Episode 21 had the team working pro-bono to take a real ball-busting bitch down. To me the team of grifters takes on the job of the Lone Ranger in the lawless land of white collar corruption. What Veronica Powell is doing in this episode is down right skeevy. It's deplorable, it's immoral . . . but it's all legal. With so many shows dealing with the idea of the "other" or the typical sexual deviant or the "terrorists," it's refreshing to see shows that prove the law of a land is only as sound as the hearts of those who inhabit it.

Thank you Drawn and Quarterly for the Newbury Comics throw back picture. The new store in Quincy Market is boss.

I heard Cold War Kids, Hang Me Out to Dry in a commercial for the show Burn Notice on the USA Network. I love Bruce Campbell and from the episodes I've seen of the show . . . he's pretty much the only thing the show's got going for it.

Talked Edith Piaf with some TCK at work. So here; enjoy. "La Foule" is how I feel about everything right now.

The thing about love

Everybody laughs, everybody cries . . . everybody has a story.

You can't con an honest man . . .

Soundtracks are important, yo

I'll be the first to admit that a soundtrack can make or break a movie for me. Although if you've ever seen There Will Be Blood, no one speaks for the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film and the silence was so uncomfortable my friend Sara and I had somehow moved from our own comfy spots on separate couches, to a spot huddled together right in front of the screen, holding each other . . . two kids with ADD, yeah we were ready to blow our lids, I think I even muttered, "I can't take this." Kudos to Mr. Anderson for creating that kind of tension. Amazing.

Quentin Tarantino is on my top ten of cool famous people I'd just like to hang out with. I don't care what we do . . . we could just sit on a couch and watch other people play video games and I bet some amazing memories would be created. Anywho, Jackie Brown (one of Tarantino's amazing flicks) has one of my favorite soundtracks . . . ever. Next in line is my man Clint's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the whole soundtrack is just one big tribute to Johnny Mercer. K.D. Lang's Skylark is probably my favorite version of that song.

When a movie starts with Bobby Womack and Pam Grier (still Foxy after all these years) well . . . I'm pretty much already snagged . . . hook, line and sinker. So enjoy the opening---she made me want to be a flight attendent, by the way, she made it look that good--- and check out some of the links to see examples of other soundtracks I just couldn't get enough of.





Pleasantville: the whole soundtrack is incredible . . . but I'm sending you to the Suite, Cheers Randy Newman!

Almost Famous: Stillwater, Feverdog

Detroit Rock City: BOC, Godzilla

It's in the movie, not on the actual Soundtrack Listing . . . grrr. I will disagree with one of the customer reviews on Amazon, I didn't mind Marylin Manson's cover of ACDC's Highway to Hell (but then again, I'm not a die hard fan . . . of either MM or ACDC sooooo . . . ). He is a tool no matter what he turns out. *** Funny story: my friend literally fled her apartment in the night once and when a friend and I went to load my mini-van with some more of her stuff, in one room, lonely on the floor were her heart-shaped sunglasses. Now Sara didn't even really like her heart-shaped sunglasses. I have a habit of forgetting . . . everything. So whenever we'd go out from her apartment she'd always wear her cool sunglasses and she'd lend me the heart-shaped ones. One time I even cussed someone out for cutting us off while wearing them and all the snotty couple did was laugh at me (and I can't blame them). I took the suckers home with me and held them ransom. Then this mother fucker sings a song about them and suddenly Sara can't live without the damn things. But she bought me my own pair for Christmas. They're pretty bomb.

There are about a million more . . . but I sense more tangents coming so time to turn out the lights.

Good night, moon.

Puppets X Bloggers = Smiles

Thank you Ms. Wonderland and Mr. Cooper for making my day. (psssst, Charity is my . . . er . . . close friend)

Ms. Wonderland I am slowly trying to help you conquer your fear of puppets with this video from Interpol, the marionette scene from Escape to Witch Mountain, and other various puppets with senses of humor.

Someday when you've conquered your fear we can enjoy a Thunderbirds marathon. Okay those marionettes kind of scare me but . . . still loved them. I wonder what that series goes for nowadays. And the Murder She Wrote DVD full-series collection cost $60, not $10. So bite me. Rawr. :)

Meaning and Being and Harmony: Losing a Member of the Band

I’ll admit it; some students, me included, may have taken the class entitled Meaning and Being in the hopes of finding a little meaning in being in a time when things seem a little nihilistic. Of course these hopes were slashed after the first reading of Husserl’s The Paris Lectures, which upon first glance just seem like some extreme version of Decartes whirlpool of doubt, sucking us down into some deep, dark void. I mean you can keep your cogitationes, Husserl, I want my sanity. Upon having Husserl’s epoche “[the] ubiquitous detachment from any point of view regarding the objective world” (The Paris Lectures, 1929, Husserl, 8) explained to us one day one classmate commented to me as we exited class, “That’s great, but where’s the meaning in all that?” It didn’t occur to me then, and it certainly didn’t occur to me when I sat down to write this paper the first time, that the "meaning" is what it’s all about. See I understand (I think) where my fellow classmate was coming from. I was still starting from the idea when you figure out what “real being” is you will find meaning in it. Maybe Husserl’s right. Maybe we should suspend any judgment on the “reality” of the world and examine the meaning we ascribe to our experiences of the world, whether real or not.

I got . . . annoyed at a friend once for describing philosophers as people who “assign meaning to everyday things.” There seemed something so arbitrary in his notion of philosophers and philosophy that I was insulted. You see I had this experience this past week. And along with this experience I had a theory about it that I thought went along so nicely with Husserl’s notion on

. . . the phenomenological attitude, with its epoche, consists in that I reach the ultimate experiential and cognitive perspective thinkable. In it I become the disinterested spectator of my natural and worldly ego and its life . . . The phenomenological reduction thus tends to split the ego. The transcendental spectator places himself above himself, watches himself, and see himself also as the previously world-immersed ego (Husserl, 15).

For the last few years, I’ve been begrudgingly visiting my Godfather suffering from Alzhemiers. He meant (this is just a side note, upon rereading this section of my paper, I just noticed the subconscious grammar change to the past tense, it was slightly unnerving, amendment, "will always mean") the world to me, but as of last summer the disease has finally taken over. He has no recollection of who I am or who he even was. He sits in chairs and stares out windows. That spark of life that had drawn me to him is long gone. He is just a man waiting to die. I thought that perhaps this “transcendental ego” of mine was the bubble keeping me from breaking down. It was my higher understanding of the phenomena of disease and his eventual release from suffering that allowed me to be strong. I thought it was this same transcendental ego that was going to let me write about the American flag for this paper and never actually explore the sense of loss I was feeling.

I wasn’t there yet. I wasn’t at the “transcendental ego.” I was still swimming around that sea of “primordial phenomena” only choosing to look at the event in contexts less painful to myself. I was telling myself how to interpret the events unfolding in my life and I was acting in accordance to how I thought I was supposed to feel. On top of all that, I was left wondering where all the meaning in his suffering was. I was stuck imaging the short obituary that would run in some local paper upon his death.

And then it hit me,

I was looking at too much at once; I was looking at things I had no experience of--- all I know is my experience of him. I, the phenomenologist for a day, was given access to “. . . transcendental subjectivity (7) . . . I am not the ego of an individual man . . . I am the ego in whose stream of consciousness the world itself . . . first acquires meaning and reality” (8). Through my transcendent description of my experience of him I can present an explanation of how his being had meaning to me. Oliver Saks in his story, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” describes how a patient of his lost the capacity to perceive the world in the same way we do. His eyes worked fine, but his mind could only recognize and make sense of movement and rhythm. By all conventional means of perception, we were an odd pair to be so fond of each other when I was growing up. He was from a much different time and culture, but our ideas were harmonious. I suppose I shouldn’t be so pained to lose someone who has already lived so much. It’s the natural way that life works, we live and we die. But my transcendental ego lets me “know” that I’m sad because I’m losing a member of the band. Things just aren’t going to sound the same anymore. That’s not a good or a bad thing (no judgment), it’s just an observation.

To Live is Beautiful

In love with lilacs miss The New York Botanical Garden

Candy always makes me happy.