Steve Earle in Somerville

There's so much to be said about Steve Earle's concert on Friday at Somerville Theater.

Allison Moorer, his wife, but more importantly an extraordinary talent herself opened the show. Nice surprise because it seemed everyone we talked to didn't know who was opening. I found out from the beer guy. I came back upstairs to our seats with our beer and Sue was talking to the people next to us who had heard rumors of her opening.

Moorer has a gorgous trained voice and an easy way of playing guitar. It's all sort of precise and, while I don't want to use the word academic, it's that everything about it is letter-perfect.

As opposed to Earle.

An entire acoustic set, if you can discount all the electronic wizardry that Earle uses. Even when Moorer was playing her set, I suddenly realized we were also listening to violins.

Earle is just so dynamic. So passionate. His voice is rougher, and so is his playing. While Moorer's is letter-perfect, Earle, well, as a buddy of mine said about my guitar playing, he takes liberties. But it's like listening to Lucinda Williams. Their unique voice and rough guitar playing is such a major part of what makes their music what it is, how it touches us.

He played most of Washington Square Serenade. (I'm working here: it's after hours here at the office and what the fuck is it about people and their speaker phones?) Anyway...

For his encore, one of the songs he played was from his Guitar Town album, the hillbilly tear-jerker Little Rock 'n' Roller, about a dad who's calling his little boy from a truck stop in Arkansas.

He prefaced it with a long talk about being a dad and being away from his kids when they were so little. So maybe it's a tear-jerker and maybe it's a cliche but, once again, the song has always resonated with me. You feel bad for all the things you've done, all the stupid things you've done, for the way things are because of you and there's no way you can ever go back and fix things. When people say, it's never too late, well, yes, sometimes it is too late. And sometimes things get broken that can never get fixed again, no matter what you try to do. That's life.

And it's always the kids that get hurt. Who get the brunt of things. And what's so endearing about this song is, that no matter how much the dad is hurting, it's the unspoken little child who is hurting the most.


I know you miss me, God knows I'm thinkin' 'bout you
I got your picture in my wallet, it cheers me up sometimes when I'm blue
Well little guy, I'm gonna have to let you go
You know it's way past your bedtime, and they're tellin' me we gotta roll

That last line, of the boss tearing him away from the phone like that, you can just feel the hearts ripping...

Anyway, here's a vid from YouTube where Earle is pretty much giving the whole talk that he gave in Somerville. You can see how passionate he is about things. About what he writes about. How he feels.

Steve Earle's coming to the Somerville Theater tonight

Okay, I have to blog about this and fast because there is a Very Important Meeting I have to attend.

Steve Earle is playing tonight at the Somerville Theater and Sue and I wouldn't miss this for the world. This is where life and art and music come together, and give you a little insight in how all this shit is connected.

Yeah, I'm a little juvenile when it comes to my music. I'm still like a teenager when it comes to me and music. I never left the, "It's my life, man" stage. It conjures up things inside of me like nothing else does. I know I’m not alone on this in this world. There are other people who are passionate about music and experiences that so many talented people in this world share with us.

When I heard Steve Earle's Washington Square Serenade album, and starting studying up on his life and career, I thought to myself, what the?--this could be me. Well, except I don't have his talent and fame and money. That's what separates me from the stalkers.

But I was at a point in my life where I just wanted to leave where I was, leave everything behind, and this country boy decided to move to the city. Just like Steve.

I was somewhere where it was never my home. And I was hanging around people who really weren’t my friends. I mean, they weren’t horrible. It’s not like they were crack dealers. Maybe worse. They just didn’t care one damn way or another about me. Not caring is worse, I think, than anything. It's like you know a relationship is over when the fighting stops. Fighting at least shows that a person cares about something. Not caring. Apathy. It's death.

And darned if I didn't have an old dog on the floorboards and a pretty redhead by my side when I skeedaddled, too. (Guys just really dig redheads.)



And way back when I was just so full of it, too. And if that didn't seem to be ole Steve coming into Nashvlle, Guitar Town, ready to kick some ass.

Well I gotta keep rockin' while I still can
Got a two pack habit and a motel tan.

Shit, that's still me.



And then he got to Nashville and just pretty much rebelled against everything he found there. Never was his home. But look at what he did there. You find yourself somewhere where you don’t belong, and you’re just screaming, hey, it doesn’t have to be this way. And people are calling you crazy and stupid and a whole lot of other names.



And it just keeps coming. Lord, I don’t know how he came up with Day’s Aren’t Long Enough; it’s such a chick song, but dang, he’s in love and that does some pretty weird things to men. Makes some of us get all sappy.



But I mean, look at those two. And listen to Allison Moorer. What a sweet voice she has.

And Sue (that pretty redhead) and Bob (the dog) and I moved to the city so we could just jump on a train and take advantage of stuff on the city. Well, Bob had no idea what we were up to, he just knew something was up. But Washington Square Serenade is all about change, or maybe change is one of its major themes.

And now this has to end because Sue just called me and she's in the lobby and we're getting on the subway and going to hear some really good music that's all about our lives together, and that, my friends, is like the coming of a comet, or the total eclipse of the sun.

Wide Open Spaces

It's so hard being a parent. Letting go. Standing back. Watching.

And I missed so much of my kids' lives, so now when I see my kids spreading their wings it just tells me how much is gone. But I keep telling them I want them to grow up. I want them to experience life and learn about life and learn how to live life.

My only feeble defense for the things I've done in the past and the choices I've made is that I feel you teach you kids how to live their lives by living your own. I think the big mistake my generation as parents have made is giving up their entire lives for their kids. Giving up everything to drive them to soccer games and ballet lessons and hockey practice. Giving up their own dreams and aspirations for their kids.

But, the day my oldest left for college I was playing the Dixie Chicks in the car. Playing? I was blasting them. And this song aways brings tears to my eyes. Because it just nails what it means to be young and starting out on your life, or conversely, it acknowledges to a parent that a part of their life is over.



But even harder is supporting your kid in something she wants to do that you wouldn't choose. Someone I know actually had this conversation with her son:

Mom: What do you want to do? You have to choose.

(So he chooses.)

Mom: That's the wrong choice.

What the hell does that teach him? Except lie to his mother?

Your kids are going to live their own lives; you can't live them for them. And now, my youngest is choosing to do the one thing I thought she wouldn't do. She's choosing not to play on her school softball team. Instead, she's working on the semi-formal committee. (And playing volleyball, but that's something else entirely. Volleyball is really cool; I had no idea until I started watching it.)

The semi-formal committee? She's helping choose a theme for a dance. A color-scheme. It wouldn't have been my first choice.

Last year she was the Defensive MVP on the freshman team. I coached her all through town ball, from the time her first glove was about the size of my hand. We sat on a bench together when we didn't live together. We had that time to ourselves. She has talent. And I thought she loved the game. But now she said it's not any fun anymore. (Well, going 0 for whatever last season doesn't help.)

I tell her she has talent and she should use it. But then I think: it's her life. She's going to live it the way she wants. And I have no right to tell her how to live it. The one thing I can do is support her 100% in whatever she wants to do. After all, she was eight years old and stood by me...eight years old...when adults were jumping ship like rats.

She's quite a kid. She's quite a person.

So, I guess the best thing to do is give her her wide open spaces to move.

Solar-powered, and proud of it

I was sitting in meeting just awhile ago, just before five, feeling pretty good, and while it may have been the Heineken I was drinking (the great thing about working in an agency is they're not all uptight about alcohol) but I think it was suddenly I realized it was late in the afternoon and the sun was still shining.

I am so solar-powered. I don't know for the life of me what I'm doing living in this neck of the woods except that both my kids live in New England.

So, we're riding our little space ship, it just whizzing along at 12,000 miles per second (you'd think our hair would get blown back, wouldn't you?), and while we're hitching a ride on it the way Lu the parakeet hitches a ride on Bob, the wonder Aussie, it's just going along in its groove, which is what Einstein figured out gravity was anyway, not caring one way or another about Iraq or Clinton or Obama or nothing.

And that's why you gotta love science and physics so much. They just don't care.

Carrie Newcomer

I'm always digging for new music. Rounder, it seems, is pushing out some of its artists. You see it in magazines. Web sites. Suddenly you start seeing the same names, ads, records. I mean, Steeldrivers and Amanda Shaw suddenly show up on big pretty pages in No Depression, and on the Gather.com site for their Rounder Records sing-a-long or whatever it is their marketing people brainstormed.

I just don't go for that bluegrass sound though. And I didn't think No Depression did, either. But that's fuel for another blog.

There's a big PR machine at work out there. With YouTube and every other rich media site, what's a poor musician to do?

But Rounder and Gather also were pushing Carrie Newcomer. And not to diss Steeldrivers or Amanda Shaw, Newcomer soars above them all.

Beautiful voice. Deep, poetic, beautiful, thoughtful lyrics. Her site's pretty cool, too. Simple, and you learn a lot about her, which is so cool. You can hear her songs on her new album, The Geography of Light. You can watch videos of her playing a bit of each song, then explaining where she got the idea for the song.

I love knowing what's going on inside the singer. I want to know where they came from. Where their ideas come from. And while it seems that a lot of Newcomer's muse is rooted in the Lord (well, hell, she is from Indiana, what do you expect?) like the Bible her songs don't have to be taken that way. Just like a good Bible story, you can say, wow, that's a nice little story. Or you can say, oh, that's what it means!

A favorite download is Where You Been. Sounds like a song about a good friend. But she explains she wrote it because she began wondering where great prophets come from.

Here's a bit of text from her:

I come to expect holiness in unexpected places and that it is best not to limit where and within whom we look for the Sacred. A true compassionate and radical love has always been counter culture. Hope has always been an audacious act of belief in the possibility for something better. As Jim Wallis and others have stated, “We are the prophets we’ve been waiting for.

So, knowing that, here are the lyrics:

He was driving in to Chicago in a borrowed El Camino,
On a hazeless day in springtime I think the Cinco De Mayo.
Maybe it was St Paddy's Or the Gay Pride parade,
But I've never seen nobody light up the street that way.

Chorus:Brother/ Sister where you been? Hold on if you can.
Just do your best then
say, “Amen.”

Called in sick and spent the weekend, drinking St Paulies in Wisconsin.
I'd been fishing with my buddies most of Sunday afternoon.
And there beneath the halo of the Old Milwaukee sign,
He said, There's big ones in the shallows I see them all the time.

Chorus

I stopped into the Seven-Eleven, I was buying an Aquafina.
He was wearing knock-off sneakers I was nursing a hangover.
He said, “You're worth a lot more baby than you've ever dared to dream of.”
Like he knew all the secret sketchy places I'd been looking for love

Chorus

A tall skinny guy with dread locks said they're giving' out free bagels & lox.
So I took the kids and all my plastic bags and walked the seven blocks.
There were joggers and commuters, skate board kids and Goths.
There were drunks and dogs and meter maids in that downtown vacant lot.

He said, “The universe is unfolding and the center still is holding,
There’s enough if we just share it, now ya'all don't forget to pass the basket.
Blessed are all the good hearted, the poets and the dreamers,
And all us crazy holy hungry ones who believe in something better.”

Chorus

I saw Jesus on talking shop, with Buddha at the Starbucks,
I saw Gia and Ganesh, doing double Dutch in the park,
And Mohammad was throwing popcorn to the pigeons and the sparrows.
And all us crazy holy hungry ones still believe in something better,

Chorus:

Pretty cool, huh?

Nothing was hurt...just feelings

This is a comment I heard today in passing. Of course it was meant as a joke. A glib witticism. The person who said it is known for his glib witticisms, and even if he weren't people would still laugh at his jokes because he's a Big Boss.

Anyway, I can get away with not laughing because I'm so low on the totem pole no one notices when I don't laugh.

But I didn't think it was funny.

Here's why...

This happened to someone I barely know. Let's say a friend of a friend. A woman. She was seeing this guy. For long enough. They were doing the back and forth thing, on again, off again, but it was pretty much clear they were together. But the one thing, as she worded it, they weren't intimate. Hmmm...

Still. I mean, she was really working here. Her heart was in it.

But things suddenly didn't bode well. Something he said. The way he said it. So one night she, thinking maybe she should start looking at her options, went back on to Match.com, and...

Yep. There he was.

That sucks. Imagine how she felt. What you're imagining are hurt feelings. We can't see them. But they still hurt the same way as a physical body part.

And I want someone to tell me what's the difference between him doing that, and him just taking his open hand and slapping her across the face? Because they both hurt the same.

Answer: The difference is as a society we've reached the point where physical assault is against the law, but as a species we haven't reached the point where we acknowledge that physical pain and emotional pain are the same and that there is something that we can't see but is as real as an arm or a leg and can be hurt the same way as any other body part. So while someone can get arrested and prosecuted for physically hurting someone, it's open season on emotions and feelings.

Men do this. Women do this. Cowards do this shit all the time because they know they can get away with it. They don't hold themselves to a higher standard. I fucking hate cowards. And retards who can't attend to their personal relationships maturely, like adults.

That's why I didn't think it was funny. What the Big Boss said.

Tammy Wynette: Tonight My Baby's Coming Home

You gotta admit, they don't make songs like this anymore:

Last night he called from Dallas he was havin' a beer at the Crystal Palace
He said honey you won't be alone for long
I got to make just one more stop to pick up a ring in Little Rock
And I'm gonna head this semi straight for home

Fourteen wheels a whinin' four big headlights shinin'
Him and that semi been away too long
Hope he don't get stop from speedin' cause I've got everything he's needin'
Waitin' for him right here at home

He's got that big ole engine singin' singin' my favorite song
And I know he's headin' my way rollin' down the highway
Tonight my baby's comin' home

[ guitar ]

Ten thousand miles I've missed him it's been a week since I kissed him
And forty truckstops since I held him tight
A million chicks and he can get 'em they wanna make love and he won't let 'em
The only thing he wants he'll get tonight
He's got that big ole engine singin'...

And I know he's headin' my way rollin' down the highway
Tonight my baby's comin' home
And I know he's headin' my way rollin' down the highway
Tonight my baby's comin' home

Jerry Reed can't play his own songs

Whenever I get frustrated playing the guitar, whenever I get someone telling me that "this is the right way to do it," I always, quite arrogantly I have to say, remind myself that SRV couldn't read music, and Willie Nelson always did it his own way, the right way be damned.

Then there's Jerry Reed. Listen to what Chet Atkins admirably says about Reed. He can't even play his own songs. And watch Reed just try to hang on to Atkins playing one of his own songs.

Missing what you got

Woke to an emptiness today.

Sue stayed on the Cape last night, and while the evenings used to be hard (evening vs. the night, when the day is dead and ghosts and demons stalk the world) the evening was easy. It had been a long hard day at work, and the quiet of the apartment was soothing. And it's so easy to fall on old habits. Walk in, crack a beer, pick up a guitar, sit on the floor and start strumming. Soon Bob plops down near me with a harumph, and we just sit together. I swear I'm going to take care of my health, but I end up eating a few cookies, a slice of cheese, a piece of leftover chicken, and then some leftover salad. Once you look at it, it's not a bad meal overall, just not all at one sitting.

It's waking to emptiness that's hard. And I had that sudden jolt of what life would be like without Sue. Waking every morning like that. And, to paraphrase Kathryn Hepburn in On Golden Pond when she told Henry Fonda that she visualized him laying in his casket and he asked what it was like, she said, not good.

I woke and lied there for awhile, and because I hate feeling sorry for myself I just pushed myself out of bed. The animals followed me. Bob, surprisingly. He used to just lay in bed until I called him for his breakfast, but now that Sue and I moved in together he's back to getting up with everyone else. I guess he's afraid he'll miss something. Maybe we'll move again and not tell him. The kids' cat follows me around, but after a week of him pushing between my legs and getting kicked, he keeps a distance until his dish is filled, then he eats.

There's just no substituting for a person you love. No matter how much you try to fill up the emptiness, it just doesn't work. I put on a CD, the Dixie Chicks, and Lu starts singing. Sue loves that little bird, and so does Bob. Maybe Bob realizes how much Lu means to Sue, so he gives her special attention, because Bob loves Sue so much. Don't ever underestimate the feelings of an animal. And I never thought I'd be saying it, but it's the cutest thing to see Lu hopping around with Bob following her around like a big, slobbering Balou the bear. He has a tough little swaggering friend who likes him; you can see it.

Lu. Now we have a guitar and a bird named after Lucinda Williams, and I can't believe how Sue has taken to Lucinda. And how Lu has taken to country music. Sorry, darling, I say to Sue, I don't mean to corrupt the critters, but I think you have a hillbilly bird on your hands. I know, you expect them to grow up one way, but darnit if they just don't do what they want anyways.

I knew I wanted Sue when way back she left for awhile and just like this morning I saw what life would be without her. I didn't need her. I could survive. Lord knows I had survived enough. But I wanted her. Life would be a whole lot better with her. And there was that night I made that infamous phone call, asking, could you just tell me how long it is you don't want to talk to me so I can pace myself? I guess it was the mixture of arrogance and desperation and how I was just downright pathetic that instead of getting mad she just busted out laughing, and I knew she was doubled over the way she does when she's really laughing. Some other woman would have let her pride get in the way, her temper, but Sue and I knew we liked each other so what was the point of fighting or letting our egos get in the way? Life's too short.

It would have been so nice if we had met and I had shown up at her door on our first date with roses and candy. Been all starry-eyed. Though when I first laid eyes on her I turned around real fast so she wouldn't see me with my mouth hanging open. A mutual friend for the longest time kept telling both of us about the other one, and at the time neither of us was interested. But once I met her I could see there was something there. There definitely was something there.

But it wasn't like the movies at first. Once you think about it, who would want that anyway? The start of things are never that smooth. People have to work things out, especially when you're our age and you've lived a life or two in that time. I'm divorced with two kids and she's never been married or had kids. She's lived all over the world, and I've been pretty much tied to this area because of family. I've been flat on my back a time or two, and Sue doesn't know too much about something like that. It's just knowing what you want and recognizing who the other person is, what kind of person they are, and just working towards what you want is what people should do. It really isn't that hard when you think about it.

No Country for Old Men

Good movie.




Great book.


Isn't that the way it usually goes? The movie is never as good as the book. That's the way it is for me, at least.

I think it's for two reasons. First, the nature of my brain. I love to read and imagine my personal idea of the characters and the place. Once it's on the screen, it's not yours.

And I think the second reason is the nature of books vs. film. Books can do certain things that film can't. And vice versa. Books let your imagination work. Like I just said before. Film can show things on a big wide screen with sound coming out of surround-sound that, if your brain actually did work like that would scare the bejesus out of you.

But the thing about the movie, it didn't quite nail the actual story. And the movie left out two key characters, the sheriff and the little run-a-way Llewlyn picks up and rides around with and with whom he eventually gets killed.

Wait a minute, you say. The sheriff was in the movie. Yeah, but in the book, the reader is inside the mind of the sheriff the whole time. So much of the character was missing he might as well have not been there. That opening monologue of the sheriff's is just about the sheriff through the whole book. And old Tommy Lee didn't quite get this character right. He was still doing that guy from Men in Black. The sheriff wasn't that stoic, nor was he that condescending to his deputy.

Of course, the deputy, and Carla Jean's mother were both reduced to comic relief, which really stuck out in the movie.

And ole Llewlyn and Carla Jean were cleaned up a bit for the movie. In the book, they're real trailer trash, and that's what makes them so appealing. They are so in love (muskrat love) and that Llewlyn could get as far as he could against Chigurh sets him apart. He's really the good guy.

And Javier Bardem nailed Chigurh. No doubt, he deserved the Oscar.

Of course, God is in the details. Great character portrayals by Gene Jones as the gas station attendant, Kathy Larkin as the trailer park manager, and Richard Jackson as the chicken farmer.

So, as the Asians say, same/same but different.

The doldrums

I think it's just that time of year. Out in the ocean there are the doldrums. There are the horse latitudes. We get February. You just feel sluggish. Unmotivated. There's a ton of work to do and it takes an extraordinary amount of effort just to push through it.

I'm feeling like shit. Nothing new. Nothing breaking free, soaring away from all this drudgery. And the more you get mired in this muck the harder it is to break free. I need a good long, long vacation a long way away from the commercial world where the total focus of our efforts is to entice people to spend their money on stuff.

Drunken Angel

It's a question I've asked myself so many times...though I'm no angel.

Saturday morning after the snowstorm

Sat at my window
Watched the world wake up before me

It snowed all day yesterday and into the night. The apartment is so big and old and the house built so strong that when a storm rages outside you don't know it. You can't feel it or even hear it. Not like my old apartment. I would have been freezing. I would have been like being in a tiny boat at sea. Here, it's like being in a big, old solidly built wooden ship.

And this morning the neighborhood is still so quiet. It's always so quiet here. The most you hear is the Red Line going by periodically down the hill on Newport Avenue. Or you can hear the upstairs neighbor's TV, barely. A good eight inches fell last night. And the light filled the apartment this morning as I made coffee and fed Bob and the kids' cat who's visiting while my daughter is in Florida, and picking up my guitar I quietly strummed it because that was the right way to play it in the quiet.

An older man across the street snow-blowed his sidewalk, the puny whine was all I could hear. And I'm sure he's proud of his snow-blower, even though it wasn't that big. In the city tools like that tend to be smaller. You see a lot more little pickups, smaller-sized snow blowers and lawn mowers. Nature just seems to be pushed to the wings here. But she's still here. Standing on the subway platform in the morning, the inboound platform faces east, and the wind off the ocean just knifes through your skin. And I think, I bet this is going to feel good in the summer, but right now this hurts.

Twenty some years and counting

It's the weekend. That's what you say after a long week and a long Friday and you're one of the last at the office because it is Friday and it's been snowing all day so people have been slipping out bit by bit but you couldn't because of your workload. But it's a good feeling to have gotten so much done this week, and it's not even a bad feeling to be one of the last ones here. It's quiet, and the office does offer a certain degree of comfort. It's comfortable because it's known.

I've been doing this work for a long time now. It will be 28 years this September, when I moved to Boston and opened up the Globe and saw the price of rent--even back then it was a lot; Boston's never been cheap--and realized I wasn't going to be able to support myself as photographer. So I went straight to the phone book because the Internet was still almost ten years off and looked up ad agencies because I knew I could write, knew it was the one thing I was good at and was confident I could do it, have been able to string together words like circus pony since first grade, and starting at the top of the list with the A's I started calling and got a job at Allied Advertising in Park Square.

You didn't need a degree in communications back then, all you had to do was prove you could write and you did that with a portfolio. Now they won't look at you if you don't have the right degree from the right school.

Then there was no Internet and no computers. We typed copy, handed it to a typesetter who retyped it and ran it out and then a designer cut the type out with a knife and pasted it down with hot wax. There were no fax machines, just these machines with a revolving drum that you clipped the paper to and a laser or something slowly scanned the paper and transmitted it over phone lines. I remember an 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of paper took six minutes.

We did all our work on IBM Selectrics. There was an erasure ribbon, and you erased by positioning the type ball at the mistake and typing backwards. I could type backwards as fast as forwards.

They told us at one point that we would be getting machines where all we had to do was hit a button and send our copy to the typesetters and we all didn't like that idea.

A lot has changed, mostly in the technology. The one thing that hasn't changed is the importance of messaging and features and benefits. That's the core of the business, and no matter how you deliver the message, the message still has to mean something to the person you're talking to. I said person, no people or demographic or demo or audience. Pull up one person in your head who wants to buy the product pretend you're talking to him or her one on one.

Broken, but not destroyed

When you're picking up the pieces, rebuilding every part of your life, it's like picking up the pieces after your home was demolished by a tornado.

You try to put things back together the way they were, but that's not possible. Some things are completely destroyed. Some things that you loved but there's no getting them back. You mourn. You grieve. And you get over it, sorta. But every so often, when you're quiet and a lot of times when you least expect it, it rises up again inside you and in public you stifle some tears. You sigh. And you remember what you did just recently to pick yourself up again, and that's what you do.

And then there are things that you can put back together but they're just not the same. A once-beautiful vase is all glued back together, but the cracks are there and it's just not as smooth and beautiful as before. But it's there, whole.

You keep what you can, save what you can, and sometimes you just tough it up and throw things out.

Some things should have been thrown away a long time ago.

But the one thing you do is get rid of what destroyed your house in the first place, however you choose to do that. Move out of Tornado Alley. Or like the smart little pig, rebuild your house with bricks, to protect yourself the best you can.

And, if you're like me, you find yourself back where you started. And it's a little freaky. And, if you're like me, you wonder if you're getting a second chance at something you should have done in the first place. Do you find yourself at the same square one because that's where you were supposed to be in the first place? Do you find yourself there because that's where you were supposed to be and until you get it right you're going to find yourself going back there until you do get it right?

Almost thirty years ago I was in the same place. A copywriter at an ad agency. Living in the city. With a woman, a social worker, no less, who has the same ideas and hopes and dreams of the way a life should be lived and shared. In a big funky apartment in an old house in a beautiful old neighborhood. As then, we're embarking on a life that includes travel and music and books. It's filling up with an odd collection of furniture. There are as many bookcases as there are chairs. Actually, bookcases outnumber the chairs about three to one.

A comfortable old kitchen where good food will be made, because food is like love, and you share it and enjoy it together and with family and friends. And we see something very beautiful in an old wok hanging among the other pots. Or an old cast iron skillet. As a matter of fact, there's something beautiful about those pots, their beauty is in the utilitarian thing that they do. And they even make a beautiful noise, like wind chimes, when you pull one off the wall. And there's even something elegant in the setup of the kitchen, that lets you move smoothly from the worktable where a glass of wine sits, to the stove, to the fridge.

And we treasure music and books. And conversation. The rooms are set up so people can sit and talk and enjoy one another, filled with light and music and plants. We're looking for old Orientals to cover the floor. Funky old lamps that don't match.

And while I wasn't able to raise a family in a apartment like this, maybe I can finish what's left of raising my two daughters. They both love the place, and like to come there, so maybe we can share where our lives have taken us there. And maybe, just maybe, what was destroyed in their lives, they may find there. Maybe a bit broken and cracked, but not destroyed.

Let's the dance, the Huck dance

As C said, it just keeps getting worse.

ROTFLMAO

Check out this video of Clinton. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. And I'd hate to meet the person this vid is targeted at.

I don't do cute and nice.

But good lord, who's the target here? Some woman locked back in 1965, wearing one of those blonde flip hairdos, driving some big car with wings on the back, pearls around her neck.

It certainly is a strange country.

Manna from heavens

God takes care of the little birds in the field. What makes you think he won't take care of you?

One of my favorite little stories in the bible. I remember when my mom was alive she accused me of being a heathen, of not believing in God, probably the worst thing she could ever imagine a human being doing, even beyond murder, and I hit her with that quote.

I'm not any kind of evangelist, right-wing Christian, or anything like that, but I've read enough of the Bible to know that there are some great stories in there, and some really good messages on how to live our lives. Obviously I don't take it completely literal. That little message tells us we're all on someone's A list, and when you're feeling pretty down, that little bit of knowledge just may keep you breathing.

And it was more of a joke that this popped into my head this morning because I was so hungry and tired and was racing around home trying to get out of the house, feed critters, shower (but not shave), get garbage out of the house to the curb, that I didn't eat and I was so hungry, and when I went for a cup of coffee here at work there were free bagels over on the kitchen table. I thought of Moses and Jews in the desert and manna dropped out of the sky. Today, manna dropped out of the sky for me.

Not a big deal. Not a miracle. Just a nice little happening that changes the day.

A big question

They say if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.

Well, there's busy, and then there's flat out, I don't even have time to shit busy. And usually that last one isn't good busy.

That's me.

There's so much that rattles around in my head on any given day, and being a writer since as long as I can remember--it's the one thing I knew, even as a child, that I could do and loved to do--writing is the one thing that I'm driven and obsessed to do.

But today it ain't gonna happen. And that makes for a very frustrating day for me. It seems the busier I get at work, the more I blog. Or write in my journal.

There are other creative outlets, but I've shut the door on a lot of them. I've said it time and time again on this site, but my life just crumbled. Just imploded. It was demolished. And so much is new for me, and there's so much of me that wonders if I ever want to go back to any part of my old life. Friends. Pursuits.

Just the other night I auditioned for a part in a full-length play for the second time in over two years. And I did great. I didn't get the part, but the director wrote me a nice note saying why she didn't cast me. And I believe her. I can still act. The question is, do I want to still act? Or more specifically, do I want to act around here, in the Boston area? Yes, that big question lies directly on a lot of people who I may run into when I make the rounds of the theaters. And you know, there are a lot of people who I wouldn't care if I never saw them again. And maybe they feel that way about me, I don't know.

Do it for the audience, I'm told. Other people say, do it for yourself. If you give in, they've won.

You know, I've never been one to keep score, and have always felt this world is big enough for most of us. When I've walked away from things I've usually found something else.

Little Conversation

The little conversation
Is over very soon
And I watch in admiration
From my corner of the room.
They shine on you with starry eyes...
They rain a friendly storm.
Like kids around a christmas tree
And then you smile all nice and warm



The little conversations
If I tried my very best
You know I never could say anything
In twenty words or less.
Somewhere, sometime, down the line
Someday I may confess,
And spill it all. thats all

The little conversations
On me are very rough
They leave me all in pieces
You know theres never time enough
Like a book with missing pages
Like a story incomplete
Like a painting left unfinished
It feels like not enough to eat.
Starvin

These little conversations
Well for me theyll never do
Now what am I supposed to do with
Broken sentences of you?
Ill stay in my corner `cause
Thats all that I can do
And let the others speak for me.
Little conversations
Are we.