A Reuter's headline and lead. Something kind of haunting and pretty, here.

Wishing wells contain money mountain
Wed Nov 29, 9:49 AM ET
LONDON, Nov 29 (Reuters Life!) - Ever wondered how much money the
world's wishing wells contain?

"Morphine, morphine, what makes you so mean?/
You never used to do me like you do./
Where’s that sweet gal I knew?"
-Gillian Welch

Writing is my abusive boyfriend. I said this on the phone to Marshall the other day and straightaway he came up with all these reasons that this is too extreme a comparison. Maybe he’s right, but here’s the truth: For days, weeks, sometimes, I sit at the computer in the mornings and stare at the screen. I peck out a few sentences of whatever it is a I’m working on and then I sit back again and stare at the wall, at the curtain that’s blocking my mind from wandering too far - out the window and into the real world: to the neighbor’s backyard, the trees beyond, further. I sit and I sit as you’re supposed to do. I try to picture that half-inch-by-half-inch frame of a moment that you’re supposed to imagine when you write (Someone said, “At night your headlights only illuminate several yards ahead of you at a time, but you can make the whole trip that way.”)

I sit and I think about the headlights and about the small frame, but soon I’m looking at my real photos on the windowsill and I’m thinking I need new frames for those and I’m thinking about my car’s front broken headlight and how it makes me look kind of trashy no matter what, in certain settings. I think about these things, not what I’m supposed to be writing about and then I scream, sometimes out loud and I put my fingers on the keys again and again but only embarrassingly overwrought biznullshit comes out and it’s horrible and it’s horrible.

But I hang on. I come back. Why? I remember the good times.
The times when writing and I were fricking one, when it was good and it gave me that heady, light, cacklingly-happy, superior-to-the-poor,-unenlightened-masses-who-don’t-have-what-We-have, dear Writing, feeling.

The other day, without warning, that sensation, that ability or that bluebird of whatever the hell it is, returned, and I was clickity-clacking and forgetting the world around me, because Writing and Me, we were all there was. Writing was so good to me, Writing was sorry about all the times before, said, “Baby, you know I love you,” like Leo Johnson from Twin Peaks. And I, like Shelley before she started seeing that Bobby Briggs on the side, nodded, acquiesced, fell into willing forgetfulness about all the past bad times that surely indicated future bad times. I was just so happy now, for this one blissful day. I went to campus feeling like I had a secret and classmates would see me and shoot me looks they thought were shrewd.
"What makes you so happy?” they said and I just laughed and laughed.

It’s something special between us; nobody else can hope to understand.


New, New Music News
I’m in love, love, love with the new Tom Waits trio of cds. Kathleen Brennan once said Waits has two types of songs, “Grim Reapers and Grand Weepers.” He’s divvied up his new set into a cd of each, plus another of random, lovely odds and ends. Been listening to the “Bawlers” cd for the past few days. Listened to it driving up to Greensboro the other evening, listened to it tonight while cooking dinner, and no matter who I’m with, we both end up totally swooning. The man’s songs represent, always, some world not one of his listeners can ever quite inhabit completely. We hold our breaths, plunge our heads under the swirling waves for a time, but we’ve always gotta come up for air and the real world. That’s not what we want. We want to curl up inside this music and live there. But we can’t. And that keeps us wanting more.


Also went to see Joanna Newsom play on Saturday night in Greensboro. There’s been a lotta hullabaloo about her new record and whether or not it’s too much of a long-winded departure from its crazyamazing predecessor, The Milk-Eyed Mender. Before I went to the show, I was skeptical: I just do not care for the to-me-rather-gaudy string arrangements on the new record; I like the simple, folky quality of the one before it and the fact that they’re discrete songs instead of 14-minute compositions.

The show on Saturday, though, with just her with three musicians playing accordion, drums, glockenspiel, guitar/banjo-y things and singing really nice harmonies - was just really, um, well, magical. La mujer is just such a self-possessed, maddeningly impressive virtuoso. It left me really liking the new record, or at least three of its five sprawling tunes and just underscored how she’s grown as a musician and I could feel nothing but lucky to be there in that concert hall to be one of the folks witnessing it. So (gasp), yeah.

Anyhoo. Like Abba says, I am thankful for the music. Happy Turkeys, ya’ll.

Speaking only in commands.
“Your rosemary’s dying,” she said to me, and lifted the tired, browning plant from the windowsill. Rubbed a couple of now-brittle needles between her fingers, separating them easily from their stem. “It needs more sunlight.” I thought of those stats you hear that most murders take place between people who know each other well. Crimes of passion.

But here it had only been a week since I’d carried this plant home from the Farmers Market and already we were at killing, at life-and-death.

I had brought it home to live, but now I was preventing it from making its food. And there was no sunnier place in this small flat, than where I had placed the arid plant. It could not stay here and survive.

There was something that separated me from these plant people, these people who sprouted vines from their fingers that then ran around windowframes and flowered and made their living places living places. It was the same thing that separated me from people who trained dogs and horses. A certain lack of control that the leaf, the hound and the mare all saw and knew. To do anything in this world you just have to believe you’re doing it and soon enough, it’s done; but with me and plants and puppies, I caught myself up in the amazement that these were mine to care for. If I screwed up, they’d die.

Simply put, I cared too much. I cuddled the baby mutt I shared with my ex and the next thing I knew, he’d scratched up the couch and eaten my favorite hat. I tried creating distance, as the trainer directed. I tried speaking only in commands, but it was too late: the dog knew I loved him best. I tried commanding the plants, as well: the ivy, the herbs, I watered and sunned, no more singing, this time. Only: grow. Grow! But they withered, beyond my control.

class notes
məˈnätn-ē

Ways to Break Up Monotony:

#1 Shifting up meter once it’s been esta. for effect
Pay attn to “the sound of sense” – the sound beyond what the words are saying

#2 caesura-hard stop in the middle   of the line
Effect = makes the reader keep going rather than giving up

#3 Lines that run on and on – creates flow; enjambing lines rather than resigning oneself to stultifying breaks, rather than resigning oneself to failure even if when one is secretly afraid one’s actually already failed. Gives thoughts different sizes, shapes, weights because it’s not the meter that traps you;
it’s when you try to constrain each thought into just 1 line.

But It’s All Over Now
This morning I am foggy and slow to respond. Yesterday afternoon/last night I was felled, once again, by a most Evil Migraine. I’d had one once before, but for some reason, I didn’t recognize the symptoms this time around, or if I did, I dismissed them, like a migraine is chicken pox or mono. I’ve had both of those already. I don’t see why the migraine would need to waste its time on me, granting yet a second personal example of what it’s like.

So I’m putting together a wee story for a local mag and late yesterday afternoon I was sitting here transcribing when suddenly, the sunlight looked all dreamy and funky, its shine radiating to the nth power. Strange lightening-like flashes of light crossed my monitor from left to right; I had trouble looking at them or looking at anything at all. Light flashes? Sudden exhaustion? Slight aching behind left eye? Clearly, the solution was to type out the last of the transcript with my eyes shut. I did wonder if maybe I was going blind. I was going blind and I was spending the last minutes of decent sightedness listening to a local coffeeshop owner’s opinion on the new intersection across from his business.

Looking back, I think the real culprit is Roxette. I’d slowed the minidisc playback down in order to get all the coffeeshop man’s words down, but kept getting distracted anyway by the song that had been playing in the background. At this sluggish-yet-steady pace, it sounded like some drag queen had decided to slow the speed to a level where he could not only lipsync, but actually sing-!, “Touch me now/I close my eyyyes/and dream away...”

I could not not pay attention to this. It was driving me crazy. I was cursing that ‘90s prefab group, cursing Pretty Woman, the movie in which the song appeared and yet I could not tear my ears away. They say the opposite of hate isn’t love, it’s indifference; and I believe that. Indeed, I had to rewind the disc three! times! to force my brain to listen to and type out the owner-guy saying, “But whathappens is people, especially if they don’t knwo the area that well, they’re not aware that they’re int eh wrong right hnad lane.”

These are among the last words I typed, and poorly. The left side of my head, that which controls things like order and sense, was rebelling.

It got worse from there.

And just like last time, I did indeed wonder if I was dying. Wondered how one’s own body can decide to force a person into such unrelenting pain, like it’s bored or mischievous or getting you back for something:
“Hmm. You say you’re planning on going to go see a movie with your friend today. But the other night, you made us watch Seven Brides for Seven Brothers! You can’t be trusted to make a decision!” And so, this night, for revenge or because they’re just tricksy little beings, they - the Head Goblins - decide to stretch out all your inner head-parts out like rubberbands.

I don’t know what happens during a migraine, but that’s what it feels like. That, and then, for extra bonus fun: nausea! All this and I cannot really sleep through the whole thing, just lie there in stillness and darkness and try to pretend I’m somewhere else or that I’m just not anywhere or anything. I am a ghost, I am incorporeal, I am nothing – which sometimes, manages to work for a time, until that church across the street decides it just has to let everyone know another hour has passed –like this is news! In the world! - with its clanging, tolling obnoxiousness. I loved that bell when I first moved in here. Last night, that bell made me cry.

I’m feeling better now, though. Still not really feeling up to actually going out and seeing People or Things. I made the mistake of getting up and going to the UU church this morning, which, in my weird feeble state, felt like some boisterous AME deal. They told everyone to turn and greet their neighbor and my neighbors avoided me. They could tell that the best way of greeting me today was to not fix me with their challenging eyes. And that was a blessing.