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Hip-Hop Hooray for Love

18-Aug-08

Today I woke up with Ella Fitzgerald’s Hooray for Love in my head. Specifically, these lines:

It’s the wonder of the world, It’s a rocket to the moon
It gets you high, it gets you low, but once you get that glow…

So after my morning coffee, I went to iTunes and typed in “Hooray.” The song I wanted (from The Best of the Songbooks) came up, as did a 21-second Funkmaster Flex clip, Hip Hop Hooray (sampling Naughty by Nature1) from The Mix Tape Volume II: 60 Minutes Of Funk.

Played back-to-back, I then wished I had the ability to mix them. I will provide both tracks here in hopes I might inspire some random individual to make this happen:

Ella Fitzgerald: Hooray for Love (mp3/album)

Funkmaster Flex: Hip Hop Hooray (album)

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1The original Naughty by Nature song from which Funkmaster Flex’s track was itself derived is available here.

Filed in Amusements and Music | Tagged , , |

A minor marital vignette

12-Aug-08

The hair, with shadow of husband.

[L: Me with newly red-ified hair; R: shadow of husband taking picture. One of our stranger portraits together.]

Proof my husband hates me:

He recorded “Bait Shop,” starring Bill Engvall and Billy Ray Cyrus, on the DVR.

Proof my husband loves me:

Only five minutes into its playback, even he had to acknowledge it was so desperately, irredeemably bad that he deleted it.

This might also explain why, even when I am flipping him off, I am also smiling.

Filed in Amusements and Images | |

There is something funny about watching this podcast download…

11-Aug-08

Fear of Sleep - This American Life

…while I am battling insomnia.

Filed in Amusements, Images and Process | Tagged , |

Oral fixation (not that kind, pervs)

10-Aug-08

Now that I’m a few days into serious work on a story (notes toward which may be found here), I find myself reverting to an old habit: breaking up the intensity by jumping up every so often, wandering aimlessly through the house until, inevitably, I find myself in the kitchen. Then I end up eating something, usually not because I’m hungry, but because it’s the activity that most obviously corresponds with finding myself in a kitchen. (Needless to say, this isn’t a particularly well thought out process; I’m in something of a fugue state, largely unaware of my actions outside of what I’ve been feverishly writing.)

It strikes me that this is a good way to get fat again, fast. (Or fatter. In recent years, about 1/3 of the weight I’d lost in 2002 has crept back. It’s sneaky like that.) This is not so much an aesthetic issue as a health issue; for instance, the heavier I’ve been, the worse my asthma has been. So yeah, I’m not particularly interested in gaining weight now, even if it is something of a relief to finally be back in a decent creative groove again.

Here’s the thing. Most writers have oral fixations, right? Certainly lots of us smoke. Outside of the one month I resided with Evelina Giobbe in St. Paul, MN and was literally compelled to do so (can you say “long story”?), I never have, and I find the habit personally abhorrent (even if it wouldn’t aggravate my asthma).

Okay, so some of us drink alcohol. Certainly, I like to drink sometimes, but at this moment it’s not the most feasible habit to take up (not least of all because I’m not much interested in becoming an alcoholic).

There’s coffee, of course, but even I can only drink so much of that; as it is, I take in enough caffeine every 24 hours to kill a moose. I drink either espresso or extremely strong coffee, so it’s concentrated - consumed in smaller amounts, less frequently - and thus doesn’t really satisfy the oral fixation thing, which is a sort of weird, nagging constant. (And drinking weaker coffee in greater quantity would be yucky; drinking decaf, somehow sacrilegious.)

Well, there’s herbal tea, right? But… eh. Something about being raised (at times) in hippie houses seems to have burned me out on the phenomenon.

Water? Doable, but boring. I need something that at least offers a modicum of stimulation outside the stuff I’m writing so I don’t go nuts from it. (If you knew how complicated the piece in question is, you wouldn’t doubt this.)

Besides foods which would fatten me, that leaves… what? Chewing gum? Okay, but the problem with chewing gum is there’s nothing you have to do with your hands at the same time as you’re chewing. (Go ahead and giggle… weirdos.)

So having ruled out food, alcohol, smoking, coffee, tea, water, and chewing gum, I am left with… flossing, unless I can think of something better.

Thoughts?

Filed in Process | |

See if I don’t

07-Aug-08

Last night, after hanging for awhile at Randy’s, my husband dropped his cell phone from his motorcycle, while going (he claims1) 65 mph. Evidently, after paying a toll on the Powhite Parkway, he’d forgotten to re-attach the Velcro strap of the bag in which both his change and his phone had been stored, so a little while later, the phone tumbled out.

This won’t be the highest quality image of what’s left of said phone, as I’m too lazy to find my own camera and deal with memory cards, etc. I used my phone to capture the image, which takes shitty pictures relative to, well, my husband’s, which had included a 2-Megapixel camera:

borked phone

(And no, he hadn’t uploaded any of the 50-odd pictures and videos from the phone to Sprint’s website before the phone went boom. Fuck.)

Naturally, he was pretty bummed by the time he got home (not least of all because Mark had texted him while he was at Randy’s asking what he was up to; Jeff had replied and was awaiting Mark’s reply at the time the phone took its fall). Whereas I’d been hoping to be next in line for a new phone under our family plan (we have a few phones on staggered 2-year contracts, one contract of which has expired, making us eligible for the ‘new customer’ price on a new phone with contract renewal), that’s clearly going to be deferred for awhile, as Jeff’s phone is irreparably damaged.

So, late last night, as Jeff was checking out his replacement phone options, he decided to look at our last several months of bills, to investigate some overcharges and other irregularities.

That was when he made the startling discovery that in the last billing cycle, the total number of both incoming and outgoing text messages from my phone alone (which, thankfully, is on an unlimited text message plan) exceeded 5,000.

That excessive message count is chiefly owing to my use of Twitter, via the following functions:

  1. Having SMS alerts set up for those users I find most amusing (the collective lot of which can generate more than 50 text messages a day);
  2. My own rather obstreperous output;
  3. The fact that I’ve gotten sucked into an elaborate ritual of “favoriting” others’ messages (due to the obnoxiously addictive wonder that is Dean Allen’s Favrd, a kind of “Greatest Hits of Twitter”), which one can do by sending a text message “fav username,” which will attach the requisite gold star to that user’s last update. This, then, registers one’s “vote” for that message, so that if at least two others also add it to their favorites, it will appear on Favrd; and
  4. Sending and receiving direct messages (via the Twitter command “d username”) to and from individuals, which can be quite handy. (For instance last night, when, at the grocery store, I was able to read an email from my pal FarkerPeaceboy on my phone. On my phone’s gmail app, it’s far easier to read than reply to messages, but I could, at least, send him a quick reply via Twitter’s direct messaging function.)

So yeah, all that adds up to a lot of goddamned messages.

Which got me to thinking about something scary: Word count.

Only two days ago, I’d added this “tweet” of Merlin Mann’s to my favorites:

Merlin Mann on word count

Because I read tons more nonfiction and poetry than fiction, I’ve not read much of King’s outside of his memoir On Writing. But holy crap do I ever respect the man’s work ethic. (And for that matter, Mann’s; he’s a goddamned machine of lucid, socially and technologically relevant creativity.)

So between the insane number of text messages sent and received on my phone, and the Mann/King anecdote about writing productivity, I was not-very-gently reminded of the fact that outside of Twitter (and only the occasional, generally lackluster blog post), I haven’t been producing shit in terms of actual word count.

Yes, I have literally thousands of pages of work towards several books, and there was a point when I was actually sending out work to, and actually publishing in, some worthwhile print- and online publications2.

But my output in recent months, outside of Twitter, has been negligible.

Of course, there’s a reason for that: The inherently fragmented (140-characters-or-less) medium of Twitter is well suited to the fragmentation of my own stories. There are things which, outside of the generally inane jokes that occasionally land me on Favrd, I’ve been able to articulate within that medium which I’m not sure I’d have had the strength to do outside those paradoxically liberating confines.

For example, I’m absolutely not ready to write the whole story behind this anecdote:

Bullet

But I am glad I could get that particular fragment out of my consciousness, where it had been (as it were) poisonously lodged. Its articulation is one step in a greater process of assembling a much more sustained narrative. It is a piece of my puzzle, the dimensions of which would be overwhelming but for the ability to realize its individual elements, one by one, even if it has been at an excruciatingly slow pace.

So last night was a wake-up call: I really need to start making the transition from fragmentation to sustained narrative, even if (no, especially since) that terrifies me.

Thus I made what will be my last post3 to Twitter for at least the next few days:

see if I don't

Not because that particular work-in-progress is especially relevant to the more obviously dramatic meta-narrative of my past which includes crap like bullets. (Although it does involve one armed private investigator/former City of Richmond cop, now that I think about it… hmmm.) It’s mostly a fun story, a means for me to re-enter the serious, sustained creative process without scaring myself to death (and thus, retreating back into the fragmentation of Twitter). And it has enough relevance to matters of cultural and political concern to me (for instance 9/11, the Iraq War, and Islamophobia) that I won’t feel (despite its sillier details, concerning my variously sordid experiences working in Richmond restaurants) that I’m wasting my time on something frivolous.

Those who follow me will likely doubt my capacity to restrain myself both from posting to, and reading others’ assemblages of characters (where the meaning of “character” is both literary, referring to those whose actions are described in our creative works, and computational, referring to a “grapheme-like unit or symbol,” of which Twitter limits one to 140 in any given message), on Twitter.

And for good reason, since, almost immediately after sending in that last tweet, I compulsively checked my feed to see if my message had successfully posted. It had, and already there was one response from my pal Abby:

taking bets

In response to which I allowed myself one final direct message for the night:

I can too

And now, I have a story to write.
__
1 I’m always suspicious he drives faster when I’m not there to fuss at him. Which, because I am petrified of motorcycles, I never am when he’s on the bike.

2 My best writing concerns things of which I’m least proud. This, perhaps, explains why I stopped sending out work, right as I’d started to publish well.

3 I’ve totally stolen “see if I don’t” from my pal Jane at Hillbilly, Please.

Filed in Images, Narrative, Process, Publishing, Richmond, Sources and Twitter | Tagged , , , |

If you are in Richmond (especially Lakeside), please keep your eyes open for this cat *UPDATED*

31-Jul-08

My Allie, my sweet tortoiseshell of love, is missing FOUND! . Last seen on Lakeside Avenue. (See update here.)

Hi, my name is Allie, and I'm missing, so if you find me please call my mom who is worried sick.

If you see her, please email me at vmarinelli@gmail.com. (You can put “cat” in subject line, and it will automatically forward as a text message to my phone, so I’ll be able to respond quickly). Or, of course, call the number on her tag (blue, as shown below, on pink and black collar).

Thanks very much.

Filed in Images and Richmond | |

Wreckage of an other than historical and/or metaphorical variety (UPDATED*)

20-Jul-08

Earlier this evening, as we were driving home from a visit to my in-laws, I thought it would be funny if I posted this pathetic but true-to-life tip on Twitter:

Lifehack: Can’t afford repairs needed to pass inspection? Make sure you have washer fluid. Pass cop, wash windshield, sticker date obscured!

Within about ten minutes of sending that message, my cell phone rang. It was our houseguest, who had been borrowing our truck. He asked for my husband, so I handed the phone to him, then watched as Jeff’s facial expressions moved through various phases of alarm, and thought aw, fuck, what NOW?

Here’s what he was alarmed about:

Truck 2

Thus, my follow-up ‘tweets’ (1, 2) upon arriving home:

Fact: If you have 2 vehicles (one w/ valid inspection, one not), & you tweet about the one w/out the inspection? Guest will wreck other one.

ALSO, the vehicle that gets totaled (almost exactly as you were tweeting about the other one) will have just had $600 worth of repairs done.

At least the Henrico County cop at the scene did not find our friend (the houseguest who was borrowing it) at fault. (And, most importantly, he wasn’t hurt. Freaked out and terribly remorseful, but not hurt.) The insurance situation is still going to be a mess though.

Oh well, at least my husband’s unemployment checks finally started coming in.

___
* UPDATE, TUESDAY JULY 22: And now the Jeep’s transmission has died. So other than my husband’s motorcycle (of which I am mortally terrified, and have never been on; nor have I been on any motorcycle in approximately a decade), we’re down to zero vehicles. No, I’m not kidding.

Filed in Images, Nonsense and Richmond | Tagged |

Rat! Torturing my brain!

10-Jul-08

Last night, the second we’ve spent at the rental next door (we have until mid-month to give up the keys to this one), I had a fairly unnerving experience. I was cold, and my extra-warm comforter that has seen me through more than a decade of love and trauma was in the dryer. Probably, I’d reasoned at 1:30 AM, it was dry by then, and also wonderfully warm, so I’d hopped out of bed and went down to the basement to retrieve it.

At which point I looked at the northern basement wall, just past the dryer, and observed an approximately foot-long (including tail) rat scampering away from the dried soups which had been stored on our shelves down there.

After issuing the requisite blood-curdling scream, clearly while I was not at the height of my powers of articulation, I posted the following update to my Twitter page:

OMG there’s a motherfucking rat in the motherfucking basement of the house for which we just signed the motherfucking lease last week. FUCK!1(link)

followed, after a bit of reflection (albeit still in a state of panic) by:

This isn’t psychologically transporting me back to experience of dealing w/ my hateful, schizophrenic grandmother’s rat-infested home AT ALL (link)

We’ve contacted the landlord, but as of this writing (7:47 PM) still haven’t heard back concerning what they intend to do about the situation. So right now, I’m attempting to wrap my head around the fact that we are heading into Night 2 of cognizantly cohabiting with motherfucking rats. And yes, I actually did consider moving all the furniture back into the old house, and or sleeping on the floor there until the crisis resolves, but it would be a logistical nightmare; also, the kids don’t know about Mr. Furry Disgustingness in the new basement, and I don’t need to infect them with my panic, so my solution right now is two-fold: 1) Raiding my old stash of clonazepam, reserved for only my most serious panic episodes, and 2) writing about it (while hoping today is not the day my also-fairly-high-strung teenager decides to read my blog).

And here’s the funny thing. A long time ago, I’d drafted a specifically rat-relevant blog entry which, if it ever was actually posted, it would have been years ago, at my very briefly anonymous blog, “Queen of the Bean” (where my love for caffeine, the bass player from the Butchies2, and assorted mental health issues were discussed). In any event, the text file in which I found the draft has a last-saved date of December 15, 2005.

Here, then, are my metaphorically rat-specific ruminations from a few years ago:

I’ve taken the laptop with me to bed, with the idea that given its weak ass battery, I won’t be able to write for long, and so there will be some brake system to keep in check my typical inclination of late: to forgo sleep in favor of writing all night long. My will to do this is formidably strong, even though, by all rights, I should not (at least at this moment) possess it, given my very few hours of sleep last night, the long, wearying day that followed, and the fact that it’s approaching 1:00 A.M. of the next day as I begin this.

I had made a credible effort toward slumber, but upon becoming horizontal, my brain had begun its usual racing around its own self-defining tracks. I’d been batting about some stray thoughts about this process: embarking upon this recent effort toward maintaining some conscious awareness of my mental “features” (let’s be nice and not call them “impairments,” shall we?), ala the diagnostic categories of ADHD, PTSD, GAD, and now (are you tired of the inscrutable psychological acronym game yet?) this tentative diagnosis of underlying bipolar disorder (as discussed with shrink today), albeit a variety within the less extreme range of the spectrum (perhaps BP II, or this cyclothymia term that I have lately been puzzling over).

And one of these batted-about ideas was the notion that I have begun to feel like I am my own personal lab rat; that I am creating certain obstacle courses for my own use, then blindfolding myself, then running around the various courses in a mad panic to get out. It all seems so goddamned self-indulgent. (Though at least with this blog not being in my name, I can desist with the usual pattern of self-condemnation: that anything I write, particularly when it concerns the inevitable stuff around inner life, that it is all mere self-aggrandizement.)

And then I laughed out loud (poor husband: he is used to such unexplained, late night outbursts from me), with the following phrase ringing in a distinctly operatic (yet off-key) fashion, in my head: “Rat! Torturing my BRAIN!”

What I was recalling was a certain poem by the inimitable and wondrous Sharon Olds. It goes like this:

The Try-Outs

“Rat! Torturing my BRAIN!” is the aria
my mother sang, trying out to be a singer
in a downtown theater. All month, she had practiced,
“Rat! leaping out in sharp coloratura
from that mouth that drew back from kissing my father,
her mouth I kissed as if it were sacred,
“Rat!” suddenly in the pantry, and then the pause, then
torturing and my run together in a
slurred mutter, then that radical, stridulating
high, off-key note, “BRAIN!”
–this was how a woman tried
to enter the world, Rat torturing my
brain vacuuming, rat torturing my
brain doing the dishes, atonal
shriek like choir gone wrong, or as if
the housework, itself, screamed, matter
and dirt-on-matter squealing, the dust-rings of
Saturn grating on each other. Backstage,
the folds of a massive curtain, and the mothers were
going behind its lank volutes,
one by one, and trying out,
Rat torturing my brain, I could tell
my mother by her pitch, about an eighth of an
inch below the note, and by
the way my skin tightened, and rose, and I
cried, when she sang. I would stop making
the paper Easter basket, and shudder
till another mother sang. At least I thought they were all mothers,
those grown-up women, although I was the only
child, there, cutting strips of
construction paper in the bad light
down at the base of the blackout aurora,
cloak of a potentate, where you wait
to be born, where your mother prays to be famous.
I never wondered just how the rat
tortured her brain, I cut out bunnies and
chickens and stood them up inside a basket
by bending them hard at the ankles, and taping
their feet to the floor. My jaws moved
with the scissors, chewing - it was a sort
of eating, that making, a having by pouring
forth, hearing from the dark the soprano
off-key cries of my kind.

__

Naturally, the very fact that the self-made rat scampering about, past the midnight hour, in the self-made torture chamber of my brain had reminded me of the poem, next forced me to go rifling about upstairs for the book in which I had first read it (Blood, Tin, Straw, New York: Knopf, 2001, pages 67-68), because I knew that I would have to transcribe it, and, well, now I’ve done that, and my battery is on empty and I should have taken my fucking Ambien three hours ago but I didn’t, so maybe I can get in a few solid hours of sleep tonight, in spite of rats… torturing my brain.

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1 In response to which one friend stated, “I’m glad you took the time to tweet that. I wouldn’t have the presence of mind to do that,” to which I added the clarification, “Well, first I screamed my head off.”

2 Title of that post was, if memory serves, There is nothing wrong with me that a few shots of tequila, a slightly darkened room, and the bass player from the Butchies couldn’t fix. (Someday I’ll dig it up and retro-post it.)

Filed in Narrative and Sources | Tagged , , |

Olympia’s queer history, as rediscovered in my underwear drawer

09-Jul-08

Olympia Queer

Found in the farthest corner my underwear drawer, amid the ruins of the recently excavated bedroom (as we’ve been in the process of moving to the more-spacious rental next door): my shirt from Olympia, Washington’s first ever Queer Pride march (of which I was a primary organizer) in 1991. We put the damn thing together so quickly (the idea having been hatched one night while I was talking with my roommate, the filmmaker and AIDS activist Tod Streater (RIP Tod, I miss you every day), about 3 weeks in advance of Seattle’s Pride event, when we recalled that at 1990’s march, there had been enough of an Olympia contingent that we could have had our own.

So we threw it all together in less than three weeks, all the while terrified that no one would show up for fear of being, I dunno, murdered by loggers? (Olympia, it then seemed to me, was about 1/3 uber-liberal college students and/or musicians, 1/3 state legislators and workers, & 1/3 loggers and related timber-industry folks: for sure, a curious mix.) There was barely enough time to secure the requisite permits, much less have T-shirts formally made, so in the living room of The Dreary Biscuit (the house I shared with Tod and a few others), some of us got together before the event and made these shirts 1 using a stencil and some spray paint type stuff. (I can’t remember if the idea was Dana Schuerholz’s or that of another of my roommates, Judith Samuels/Kahan, but they were both there and actively involved, and, along with Dana’s partner Sarah Wright, also covered the event for This Way Out.) We didn’t even have adequate supplies there, because the shirt I got was a size small, and uh, well, I have boobs, so to make room for everything I ended up cutting off sleeves and turning it into a raggedy-edged tank top.

The police estimate for the number of attendees (none of whom were murdered by loggers, although I did get some death threats via voice mail in advance of the event, and I found one of our hastily put together posters with a bomb threat scrawled on it) was in the 300 range; some activists in attendance put it at 500; I’m sure the truth was somewhere in between. In any case, it was incredible to have been a part of that moment in history.

And I’m happy to say that while I left Olympia, the annual Pride celebration I helped to establish did not; the legendary Anna Schlecht, among others (she was also one of the speakers at that first event, was there at the only formal planning meeting we had time to hold, and convinced huge numbers of people to attend; it could not have been done without her) has helped to keep it alive; see the website for Capital City Pride for more.

(Many more stories from that march to tell when I’m not still in the midst of packing insanity!)

1 Loosely based on the logo for Olympia Beer. Which utter swill few of us actually deigned to drink, but hell, it rhymed with Queer, so how could we not make use of it?

UPDATE: An excerpt of this post was picked up by a really cool Olympia community blog here, check ‘em out.

Filed in Images, Narrative, Queer and Sources | Tagged , |

Variations on a theme of independence

05-Jul-08

Yesterday, the ever snarkful (& smart, so, what - can I now invent ’smarkful’ in addition to ’snarkful,’ also not an actual word?) Simon Goetz offered the following, um, pearl of wisdom with regard to incipient Fourth of July celebrations:

Guys are prematurely shooting their colorful loads of Freedom all over the sky’s face. It’s scary and gross.

That effectively summarizes my feelings about the gaudiness factor of the present holiday. I hate its noise, its slobbering drunks running around with variously dangerous explosives, its crowded parking lots and jockeying for fireworks-watching spots at various parks (when I cannot find a way to plead out of the activity, and/or I’m guilted into going because the kids love it and they’ll be sad without me there), and, of course, its inevitable July 5th sob stories about unsupervised children who blew off their limbs the night before.

On the other hand, there’s the inherent sweetness of the way my teenager woke me up this morning: “Happy Independence Day, Mom!”

Which got me thinking about some stuff.

As I’ve mentioned recently, we’re moving. Only next door, but it feels much huger than that, because it involves going through the accumulated detritus of a decade, giving stuff away, figuring out what’s important, making proactive decisions about what happens next.

When I moved here, I was getting out of an extremely bad situation. I didn’t have the luxury of making such proactive decisions about the way I did want to live; I was only clear on the matter of how I didn’t want to live - how I couldn’t live, for one more damned moment.

A poem I wrote around then (ca. 1998), addresses some of this quandary. It’s called How the Exile Came to Love the Foreign Land. It concerns, among other things, the complexity of sexual identity, the ways in which our “choices” can be simultaneously products of bona find “agency” and of coercion (even where such coercion is entirely accidental and circumstantial). I had been living for years as a lesbian, and I was making the radical life change of going back to men (or rather, to one man, with whom I’d been lovers during the summer of 1990), and my reasons for doing so ran the gamut from genuine desire (despite my best efforts to compartmentalize and disown my previous heterosexual experience - and specifically, mine with him - I’d never stopped loving him) to dire necessity (I had to get myself, and, more importantly, my child, out of our miserable, dead end situation in Minnesota, and I had nowhere else to go). It wasn’t, shall we say, the smoothest path via which one could hope to enter into what would eventually (in 2001) become our married life.

And because everyone I’ve shared it with (including, most generously, the above-referenced Simon’s conspirator in copywriting and much more, Ainsley Drew) keeps telling me it’s some of my best work, and since my slacker ass still hasn’t made any sincere effort to publish it (or anything else, since 2004 when I stopped sending out work, just when I’d started “publishing well” - which is another topic for another day), I won’t use the whole thing here. But I will use an excerpt, from its closing stanza:


Guarantor of my asylum:
I wish I could be uncomplicated
adopt your customs without question,
happily digest your food.
All I can pledge is my allegiance
rendered honestly
with a broken tongue.

__

As I finish this post (begun hours ago, then deferred while we went to a July 4th party, then came home, where on the basis of a developing migraine, I begged out of going back out again to go see fireworks and took a nap instead), my husband is out with our girls and some of our friends, and judging from the sounds outside, the fireworks have finally stopped. They’ll be home soon, and I’ll be happy to see them, glad as I was to be able to pull away from them for part of this evening, to disengage from the annual ritual of explosives which still holds little excitement for me (though in past years, I’d done my best to “just go along” with it, and many other essentially alien customs, instead).

It’s not that I’m ungrateful for what we have here. But in recent months, I have been coming to terms with the fact that I’m not entirely happy with how I’ve been living. So I’ve been taking certain baby steps toward my own assertions of independence, from going back, as I did last November, to being a vegetarian (so, no longer simply “[adopting his]customs without question/ happily [digesting his] food”), to embracing new music (when I married an especially well-connected metalhead, I eventually came around to certain hardcore genres which had been alien to me in the past; this is not to say I’d lost my hunger for other sorts of sounds, most recently as evidenced by my falling wildly and almost inappropriately in love with The National), to traveling on my own to North Carolina every 4-6 weeks to visit my best friend from my early high school years (we write well together, and have a brilliantly good time). Individually, these steps may not seem very substantive, but cumulatively, they represent something of a sea change for me, long overdue.

__

And as I wrote the above words, “a sea change for me, long overdue,” two things happened simultaneously: midnight arrived, and my husband came home with our daughters. (Apparently, there was quite a delay with the fireworks, something about a baseball game going into extra innings? Whatever.) Seems fitting.

Now, when I tuck my tired kids into their beds, I’ll be able to say I hope they had a fantastic Independence Day, without any ironic twitching. That, to me, seems worth some very sincere celebration.

Filed in Music, Offspring, Process, Queer, Richmond and Sources | Tagged |