Here's a thing about me: I never get over anyone, ever. I often think I almost do, but then, ha ha, no.

I'm going to talk about the song "To Ramona" by Bob Dylan. It's not on the new album, I am, believe it or not, slightly digressing from that particular obsession, to my more general Dylan obsession I guess among other things.

I first heard the song fairly recently, a few months ago, because I never got the album it's from. MP3 blog.
Here are the words

Ramona, come closer,
Shut softly your watery eyes.
The pangs of your sadness
Will pass as your senses will rise.
The flowers of the city
Though breathlike, get deathlike sometime.
And there's no use in tryin'
To deal with the dying,
Though I cannot explain that in lines.

Your cracked country lips,
I still wish to kiss,
As to be by the strength of your skin.
Your magnetic movements
Still capture the minutes I'm in.
But it grieves my heart, love,
To see you tryin' to be a part of
A world that just don't exist.
It's all just a dream, babe,
A vacuum, a scheme, babe,
That sucks you into feelin' like this.

I can see that your head
Has been twisted and fed
With worthless foam from the mouth.
I can tell you are torn
Between staying and returning
Back to the South.
You've been fooled into thinking
That the finishing end is at hand.
Yet there's no one to beat you,
No one t' defeat you,
'Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad.

I've heard you say many times
That you're better than no one
And no one is better than you.
If you really believe that,
You know you have
Nothing to win and nothing to lose.
From fixtures and forces and friends,
Your sorrow does stem,
That hype you and type you,
Making you feel
That you gotta be just like them.

I'd forever talk to you,
But soon my words,
Would turn into a meaningless ring.
For deep in my heart
I know there's no help I can bring.
Everything passes,
Everything changes,
Just do what you think you should do.
And someday maybe,
Who knows, baby,
I'll come and be crying to you.


These are good words. These are good words for when you feel in trouble, in ways large and small, when you feel sad. So I took to them, but also:
this person
There was this person I loved, who really I was only friends with such a short time. And after college I moved back home to Bakersfield, sort of losing my mind; somehow, when I moved, maybe before, maybe later, I don't know, we stopped being friends.
It might help to mention we listened to Dylan a lot together, in fact I've never had another friend who liked Dylan as much as I do other than this person. But then, I don't make that many friends, really.
It meant a lot to me to know this person, and a lot to lose this person, and when I hear this song
it doesn't make that much sense
but when I hear this song, it seems like this is what the person would have said to me
basically
without the first half of the second stanza. Yeah, other than that part, it feels like he could have said almost those exact words to me.
If we had stopped communicating so badly for just a minute, if I had stopped believing the worst of him and he had stopped
I don't even know.

He treated me really badly, very badly without explaining why, ever
so this is probably stupid
but sometimes I think this is even still what he would say to me.

I am a deeply ridiculous person.

notes i found on some presentation from first or second day of school. i enjoy it.

ok, another brief interlude of dylan nerdism

No Direction Home is a weird album--it's all a bunch of different-sounding takes on familiar songs, mostly, though a few early unfamiliar songs are thrown in too. But mainly it's songs I love sounding different, though from the guy I love, and then on the album cover and in the booklet are different versions of album covers I know and love...and yeah, for the most part I'm thinking, "ok they chose the right version to go with." But it's still so cool. So weird. So...alternate reality.
And in one song
Only one song that I've heard of in all the Dylan recordings I've listened to
Dylan forgets his lyrics.

Like, his lyrics are so hard to learn, so intricate, and he changes parts around all the time, but he at least always seems to have the flow going, knows what he's talking about. But in this outtake of Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again he starts going "hmmm....hmmm hmmmm...." and then remembers the lyric mid-sentence...
Dylan humming his own lyrics! HA


I so want to go back in time to the 60s and do him.

TOMORROW:


It damn well better be in that record store downtown. NO MORE DISAPPOINTMENTS, FOR ONE DAY PLEASE.

huh

To further reminisce about my undergrad education: I actually know the book they're talking about here. Thanks, Fussy Old Man Professor Whose Name I Forget, No. 2!

So I've been completing a lot of homework, which is kind of nice because hey I'm doing stuff, but it kind of sucks, because it's boring stuff, it's nothing stuff. And I want to be a person doing what she loves, I want my future career to not feel like torture. In undergrad, I took a lot of classes I was interested in. I genuinely loved what I did, however much I hated deadlines and riddled myself with self-doubt etc. I loved reading what we read, and thinking about it, and I loved to feel like I was a writer; I loved to be a writer. Things might start to get better here once I am actually in the schools, working, teaching; that is totally different than the classes I take, it is so very much better and harder, I know from experience. So yes, I will probably be ok. But right now I'm a little freaking out, because I hate my classes, and to say I feel out of place is such an understatement I can't even begin to know how to express it.
And I don't write anymore, really.
I get so worried and turned-around feeling, and like maybe again I have trapped myself where I don't want to be, cannot get to a place I want to be. And this is about my career/purpose whatever, but also of course about my personal life, my life with other people. But I won't go too much into that; you know I'm lonely. I start off in new places all alone and when I think about it as if I'm someone else, it seems almost brave, just going out there, but it's not, because bravery would involve creating something new rather than hiding from everyone alone.
This might just be a hard time, and soon things will start to make some sense. I keep saying that though. But that might not mean it's not true. Anyhow. TIME TO PUT THIS ON THE INTERNET, SO YOU ALL CAN FEEL SAD TOO. I have no idea why I blog things like this, it's just if I don't then I can't blog anything.

my homework, pt 2

it's supposed to rain soon. maybe sunday night.

I'm doing homework, yes, on a Saturday night. Because, though it's plentiful, it's not very demanding, and also what else have I got to do.
For one assignment I have to look up a bunch of books that have certain characteristics, and it's interesting, trying to find good ones I've never heard of. Have you read The View from Saturday? It looks really good. I always liked From the Mixed-Up Files.

Here is a sample of my night's work.

4. I like “Singing” best. A lot of the others I looked at in Child’s Garden of Verses were pretty sappy, but this one, though it mentions a “birdie,” is rescued by the last part,
“The organ with the organ man
Is singing in the rain.”
I like that the organ is singing with the organ man, and I like that they are in the rain.

do me a favor? shit-talk these boots, so i don't want them so much.

"4 Yrs," from Nina Nastasia's Dogs

Listening to Nina Nastastia reminds me of the few days I lived in New York. I listened to that album constantly then, except for when I tried to get into Blueberry Boat by the Fiery Furnaces which I bought while there in Brooklyn, in a store I thought at the time would be a place I'd go to many more times. I think it was called Music Matters? Music something. I couldn't really get a hold on Blueberry Boat, but Dogs was easy.

A month or so after moving here, Nina Nastasia's music, along with Neko Case's and Townes Van Zandt's, and bourbon and the movie Paris, Texas, and complete isolation, formed an aesthetic I deeply felt and appreciated and lived inside for entire days at a time. I don't know what else to say about that. Here are two more Nina Nastasia songs, these from another album called The Blackened Air:

Oh, My Stars

The Very Next Day (this is only 33 seconds long, not a mistake)

I'm not going to always put songs up. I just have been in the mood I guess.

going home for lunch way beats not going home for lunch

I have three bruises I don't know how I got. One is on my hand. Hopefully this doesn't mean I'm about to die.

what i really need now is ideas

I followed through with most of my plan, except I didn't walk to the record store. It is still very warm here. I expected better of Oregon. Ok, so the picnic was nothing to write home or on one's blog about, I was there for maybe a little over a half hour because I'm not into volleyball...it was ok, not horrible, but not really anything at all. Worth making brownies? Eh.
Ok, but the best part of my plan was that record store jaunt. It was right after a dreadful team building session, in which we played group games like the one where you grab hands and untwist, and one where we had to all stand on two by fours and..
you know, really not worth the effort of describing. So many people so close to me for so long. Alone time=palpable relief.
And the album is good.
And here is one of the songs, along with a version of that song which I heard several months ago from some mp3 blog. This version is by a group headed by one of the New Pornographer members, a group called Destroyer. It does not sound like a band called Destroyer.

Click the link, takes you to page where you can right click save as. Links go dead in 7 days, so act now!
here is the destroyer version

here is the new pornographers version

Hope you like! New Pornographers are sunshine and dewdrops. With amphetamines, or, you know, caffeine. Yes.

bee in my bonnet

I don't know if any of you are familiar with/interested in JT LeRoy--here's an article about him if you don't know him, and here's maybe his main book that he's written. I'm not super-familiar with his work, but I think he's a kind of interesting writer, so I follow article links that mention him when they pop up on bookslut, and so when the article is subtitled, "in which we call bullshit on jt leroy," I am wondering what is up without really having an opinion yet one way or the other--thinking, "maybe he needs bullshit called? I wonder why" and then reading the article.
Well, I've started having an opinion on it, and now I'm actually somewhat angry. I am going to write about it here though maybe no one reading it is going to care one way or the other, because I want to work out why exactly I'm so offended.

I think it starts when the author of this article gives, as one of the first facts about JT Leroy: "Indeed, it is not even certain that LeRoy is male, as he purports."

Why this is a sticking point when considering an author's work, I'm not sure. Certainly blurred or fluid gender identity can influence an author's work, as far as themes, but...then why not focus on the themes first. I just sense a distaste, here, in this writer's words. The repeated use of purportedly, the description of LeRoy's typical subject matter as the "seamiest sort"....by then, I'm kind of thinking, ok, this person is not comfortable with
but then I got kind of stumped. Sex? Reality? The breadth of human experience?
The point of the article is that JT LeRoy makes shit up. That all his supposedly semi-autobiographical work is in fact complete fabrication, and that this is ok as long as it's never said to be at all autobiographical.

Part of his thinking is, "There is no way this stuff can be true, it's too weird, he's too weird to be for real." Oh, I'm sorry: " 'he' is too weird to be for real" might be a more accurate representation of the writer's views. I don't know, I think life can be pretty fucking weird. I have been using "fucking" too much in this blog, I think, it's getting to be a tic like my constant use of "just". But I'm digressing from my point. My point: JT LeRoy may be--probably is--making up a lot of the details of what he writes. Writers do this. "Even in an 'essay'????" gasps our music writer. Yes, sir: even in an essay. What is an essay? The guy even refers to this very definition in his article, but brushes it aside. Because he's got the wrong definition in his head, surely others do too, and so let's treat his erroneous, uneducated idea of the word as the definitive truth. Fact: essays can be fictional; poetry and comics were published, I am thinking it was just a goddamn music issue, not something for the history section of our libraries. Writers combine fiction and nonfiction all the time. It seems that this is a huge part of the writer LeRoy is. This is part of the magic of writing, for him, and for his readers: we can make and remake our reality. There is no obligation for a creative writer to ever---ever--tell the reader where the reality line is drawn. Especially when, in that writer's work, THERE IS NO SUCH LINE.
The power of music, from the plot summary this douche outlines, has a central role in the essay LeRoy gave this music issue of a literary magazine. Why is this guy so angry? He does not like that LeRoy gets the attention he does; he does not like how "preposterous" LeRoy's subject matter is. Here is the first definition good ol' dictionary.com gives for preposterous: "Contrary to nature, reason, or common sense; absurd." Contrary to nature. I think this guy whose name I am not even going to bother learning believes not only JT LeRoy's essay is preposterous--that his subject matter, for all his work is--that, in fact, LeRoy himself is. Because you know what? What a fucking freak, right? I don't think he's even a man!

I am sucking right now at nailing what I feel so strongly is going on in this essay. To spell it out, I think this man's prejudice against gender and sexual fluidity is coming out in a nonsense rant against an essay in a literary magazine. I think it's ugly, and stupid, and I wish someone with possibly more time, a less sleep-deprivation-addled brain, could properly lay the smack down. Fuck him.

the antisocial agoraphobe's motivational speech

soon I will get up to make brownies. I just went to the grocery store for vegetable oil, which somehow seems like something no one should ever have to buy. well, i didn't just go. maybe i got back 30 minutes ago. I'm just tired, so tired, and I got sidetracked downloading a lot of mp3 blog songs, and now I cannot sit up straight, and I can't make coffee to stay up to make brownies. Then I won't sleep and I have to sleep because my eyes, man, my fucking dark-circled eyes. I have to make brownies because of a picnic. I forgot to tell you. Because I have to go to a picnic tomorrow evening for the program, because if I don't go then I am just asking to not make any friends ever again, but. but you know it will suck. but i need to go. and to go i need brownies. and for brownies i need to get up. but i kind of right now would rather just drop out of school.
yes.
go to sleep, stay asleep, till 3 in the afternoon, and then walk walk walk from here to downtown, alone, to the record store i like, and buy my belated present to my mother, and buy the new new pornographers album. the one song i like a lot already is something spanish techno. i bet it will make me feel a little happy, that album. i need to get out of my townes van zandt rut, at least temporarily. so yes, i will walk and walk all alone and not talk to anyone for maybe another 5 years.

i am really lonely, but i so hate talking to people most of the time. isn't that stupid.

ok so i won't drop out of school. new plan. i will get up, eventually, and make brownies, and it will smell good and then i can go to sleep to the smell of brownies, after reading the thing i'm supposed to read for a class tomorrow. and i will get up early and go get coffee in the morning. and i will be at school so goddamn early i will get the best parking space and they all can suck it, those fuckers who take the good parking. and during lunch i can go walk downtown, and deposit my checks and so have money to buy those cds that are in the record store which is not that far from the bank. and i won't have to talk to anyone then. just before and later. but all this would mean i have to get up now.

I am tired of getting to know people, like, before I am actually getting to know them. You know? Like the talking, that is not really feeling like what you would say, and them talking, maybe feeling the same way or maybe just being boring...I am tired of saying the same things over and over and forgetting if I already said them to this person.

I am tired of being flirted with by teenage boys. Unless I am being erroneously judgmental, and they are in fact just like me, young-looking twentysomethings.
But I fucking doubt it.

Do you ever see, on the internet, the presence of a person you were friends with but aren't now? Is their presence ever right the fuck on top of yours? Does it really freak you out? Because it totally freaks me out. And is majorly sad. Talking like a teenager about this somehow distances it enough for me to be ok mentioning it. I miss that fucking bastard. Wait, was that teenagery? I SHOULD ASK THE GROCERY BOYS WHO FLIRT WITH ME, NEXT TIME.

ps: Have you ever had chocolate yogurt? It is kind of good, but the cup looks gross after.

I will however post a duo of bear concerts

little drummer bear!



and, saddest bear concert ever:

I think I'm going to shut up about school until I have something good to say.

fucking six feet under

Today is my first day of school! Whee!
Tonight I stayed up all night, because I have serious mental problems a)where paper procrastination is concerned and b)where first days are concerned and c)in general and also also also I had to stay up to wait for the Six Feet Under finale to come to me! It took a very long time, but that was good, because I only finished editing my paper about 20 minutes before it did finish. I've watched it twice now. Made me laugh, made me cry: all one can ask for in an entertainment! Made me cry for the characters, like they were real people, and then made me cry for real people, including myself. Cathartic and yet also: it is 6 in the morning and I have been up all night feeling weird and emotional and now I am very lonely. That's the thing with a show about life and death, it makes you get all serious and touchy feely, and I miss my mommy whose birthday it was todayesterday. And my dad always looks so old, and he's sad because he did badly at his big gun match. And my brother was home for my mom's birthday, on his way to visit our grandparents. How he got to be such a good boy I do not know, but I miss thinking we were close. A long time ago I took for granted we were. And I miss my dogs, like seriously. And they weren't even my dogs for most of their lives, but now they are kind of really and yet they're not and I live so far away, and should a person miss dogs this much? It is silly, but they live so short a time, you know?
Fucking Six Feet Under.
I am going to shower, and then I will have a lot of school and a lot of talking to people. It will be a nice change.

Feeling inordinately proud of recognizing Deadwood's Leon in the Gilmore Girls episode where Rory graduates.


I really suck at writing papers, and at this whole self-control/motivation thing. I'd forgotten that, in the years between undergrad and grad school. I've tried working toward cigarettes and/or spaghetti, but I'm too hungry for cigarettes and not hungry enough to really want to bother with making spaghetti. And the sentences I write, for the formal papers, oh, how they harm the self esteem.

Lauren Graham's really pretty.

-

There's a small paper due my first day of grad school, a very small paper, and I have a day now to do it. Even that short a time shouldn't panic me, but it does, a little, because of how long I haven't done the paper. And how I cannot figure out how to write about what I'm supposed to write about. And today is my mother's birthday that I have not yet sent a card or present for. I am only going to call her, and I don't understand why it's been so impossible for me to take a fucking moment out of my busy schedule of nothing and buy and mail a little card on time. It doesn't matter, but it does. I don't know why little things are so hard to do. There's depression I can blame, but it doesn't make me feel any less dismayed. Groceries, laundry, going anywhere in a car. Writing anything I have any aspiration for, and sense of pride attached to. I like to flout the participle rule; it is a stupid rule, and anyone believing in it should be beaten with ...some Latin grammar primer, maybe.
I've been meaning to go to bed for about 2 hours now.
Some days lately, even before I've been to bed I get the sinking feeling it's going to be a bad day. But then I try to think positive thoughts as I go to sleep so that when I do get up, even if it's afternoon I might be in a good mood. I think once it worked, years ago, and since then I've held on to the hope.

things i've watched, edition 1

I just saw a horrifying trash bag commercial. It was for Glad, and either I wasn't watching closely and so missed the details preventing the horrific sight I did see, or my goodness. The sound wasn't on, so perhaps the narration would have explained why a scene of a truck, barrelling down a curving mountain road and then falling off the edge of a cliff into one of the new stretchier Glad trash bags, why that was not something from a shocking and diseased advertising mind.

I saw a very short old movie last night that I had thought I would write about today, well yesterday now, and you see I didn't. It was on late, about now, but yesterday. I had seen the description in the cable on-screen guide, and not only did it star Myrna Loy, but she was trying to murder Irene Dunne! So I couldn't resist. I have an unaccountable distaste for Irene Dunne. Something about her teeth, when she laughs. They are very nice teeth, that's not the problem, it's that she seems to use her teeth, like they are among her top acting tools, not even just when she's smiling or laughing, when she opens her mouth to speak there they are, both top and bottom, shining out at us as if they equal charm and goodness. Sometimes I do like Irene Dunne though, even when her mouth is open, and that makes my sometime-dislike of her all the more incensing.
So the guide said Myrna Loy was on a rampage trying to murder old schoolmates, including Irene Dunne, and how she tried to kill them all was THROUGH HYPNOSIS. Only about an hour long, early '30s I believe, and oh that Myrna. Get 'er, Myrna! CLICK HERE FOR MORE

Myrna was a very bad person in this movie, though, and I ended up having to side with Irene. I mean, Myrna wanted to kill Irene's little boy. Who was absurdly cute with absurdly nice hair. Tsk, Myrna. At one point, Myrna gets her boyfriend/Irene's chauffeur (I don't believe I know how to spell chauffeur, shame) to give the boy a birthday present, which was a bouncy rubber ball, in which was a fucking bomb. Irene put it with his other presents, on the top shelf of his closet, and OF COURSE he was going to try to pull it off the shelf once Irene was gone, and though it's an old movie and there were limits back then, usually, on the carnage they allowed, they'd killed off an extremely personable lady already, who laughed very realistically and had a nice apologetic kind of lilt to her eyebrows, gee I liked her, but they killed her, so who knew their limits?
The boy did pull down packages, but luckily, not the bomb box. He was scared from the other falling boxes so thankfully stopped trying to get at the new present.
In addition to the attempted child killing, the Myrna-or-Irene sympathy dilemma was complicated by the fact that Myrna was supposed to be half-Indian--like, from India--and she was on her murdering rampage because, well because she was crazy, but also since Irene and the rest of the former schoolmates had been mean to her on account of her outsiderness--her ethnicity. That on top of all the other shitty things she had to go through for not being white were reason enough for rampage. I'm saying, for her. There's this great part toward the end, where she's confronting Irene and spelling all this out, and Irene says something like, "It's been horrible I know, but can you really say it justifies murder?" and Myrna, hilariously matter-of-fact, says, "Yes, I can." It's a beautifully logical exchange of dialog. Of course Irene has to ask, because she is so good and sane, and of course it's justification enough for Myrna. Silly Irene, the nutter's killed about 8 people already!

Not exactly logical is Myrna's murdering process: once she'd learned about hypnosis from a Swami and used his name to send out dire predictions to all the schoolmates, she killed the Swami and then...used hypnosis and/or more direct means to make the predictions come true. I'm still not clear on what all was involved in the murdering. What else was I doing at the same time? I think I was writing some paper. But it was interestingly frightening, the way the schoolmates were being told they would kill themselves, and they laughed it off, but then didn't, and what a weird thing to make a bunch of people become afraid of themselves.

So it's bizarre, in a great way, is what I am saying. A bad movie, indeed, especially with the whole exotic/Asian/evil/crazy subtext, and Myrna not being Asian at all, but then she has her kind of sad monologue with Irene about prejudice, and I don't know, it's 1930something, what're ya gonna do? Because also there are moments that utterly charmed me, like when the chauffeur jumps out of the car he's driving Irene in and she has to steer and the ball bomb is in the car with her, or at the end when the Swami's REAL prediction, for Myrna, about falling off a train, is about to come true--ok, so there's a bunch of stars, and Myrna stares up (how she has time when she's being pursued by cops, I don't know) and then one of the stars blinks, and then ZOOMS THE FUCK DOWN FROM THE HEAVENS, as if it wants to annihilate her, and she like doesn't even bat an eye at this hallucination. She looks out on the tracks, and then the dead Swami's face comes flying up at her, intoning dire things, and kind of twisting back and forth a bit, and not just for one second, but repeatedly, and her face is calm, maybe her eyes a bit intense but she's stoic, and then WHAM, out she jumps, landing flat and dead on the tracks as we in the train speed away and then can no longer see her. And go back to watching the detective and Irene flirt a little more...though now I can't remember how that turned out either.

Here is the allmovie summary. I swear I never saw all 13 women, more like 5. The summary likes Julie Haydon--I can't remember the character my favorite played, but I'd bet that's her. You know, the personable lady with the eyebrow lilt.
I think it is her. Here is a picture--looks younger than who I saw, but similar.



Stupid Myrna.

I no longer am as stoked about the blog name, but I could not think of another one and I still think it's so so pretty, my template. This is about my bazillionth blog, and I have no idea anymore who I want to be talking to, so do I offer an introductory post? Do I just start posting frequently in the hopes that people get all caught up in...whatever the devil I wind up talking about? Do I use pseudonyms on this one? Do I tell anyone I know about this blog or leave it a mystery?
More importantly, can I borrow my landlord's hose to wash my car, and would I still then need to get a bucket? Or should I just go to a damn gas station car wash? I kept thinking it would rain soon, save me the trouble, but no. This is Oregon, where I live, there should be rain for these things. But there isn't, and my car is looking ugly and sad. Poor car.

I'm not used to blogging regularly anymore, so I can't think of anything to write at the time. Maybe not the best time to begin an entry, but I thought
silly me
I thought something would come to me.

first

I don't know what this blog is for. It's got the best name out of all the ones I've had, so it seems only fair to make something of the enterprise.

I wanted to keep it a secret for a while, to have a place to tell the things I hesitate or outright refuse to tell elsewhere: who upsets me, how much and why; how I'm lonely; fears.
I've written these things before, though, or things close enough to them, and if I wrote about it all again, the way I would in a diary, the way I did in an earlier blog even, if I did that, the sentences would wend their ways back toward the past and the pen and keystrokes of a person I've hoped so long to cease being. So fuck that.

I love this photo.

It's not very remarkable, really, as a photo of a bridge, or a photo in a car, but since it's old, and aged, with the yellowness and flecks and being black and white--containing rounded-edge vehicles, relics of the past--and with that light, a reflection or quirk of exposure that marks it all the more ghostly....all of this pointing toward the passage of time, the ending and passing of things, and we're on a bridge, yet! And that clean white sky. How damn evocative can you get.
I wonder how a photo like this seems at the time it's taken, if it seems like anything at all, or only a blurry fluke. Somebody kept it for many years, anyway.