Room in the World

When I was a kid I was always fascinated by Grand Central Station. I loved watching all the people and spotting so many amazing faces from all over the world. Seeing humanity in all its fullness gave me unspoken permission to be who I am. Anything was possible!! But I also saw it as proof that maybe there was no room in the world for me.

Odds and Ends

Last Sunday at the jam we sang the Bonnie Raitt song Love Me Like a Man as "Love Me Like a Ham," for Easter! I nearly died laughing, tears running down my cheeks.

I love soap, I love washing with a plush wash-cloth. I love skin! I hate perfume. I loathe perfumed detergents and soaps and other artificially scented things. Let the real smells in! Baking bread, breaking a sweat, cooking collard greens, breathing in my dog's breath.

The guys at the jams have discovered my weakness for suspenders, and now every week they wear them to the jams and tease me. I blush all night. There's always a new kinky undiscovered corner of my brain. But actually I'm really boring. I prefer solitude and work.

Last night I noticed that my friend's beauty mark, right on her face, was forest green. I had never noticed it was green! How cool is that! My husband has a few red beauty marks. I love dimples, strange blemishes, scars, all the skin glitches that make us unique. I am fascinated when people have a gap in their front teeth. I get vertigo and feel like I am getting sucked in! It's like my Aunt's cleavage coming at me when I was five, and she'd bend down to pinch my cheeks and I'd notice that her lipstick line went over her lips. All the things that people try to hide about themselves are usually the things I appreciate and remember.

In Rhode Island if you have thick hair they charge you double at the barber shop! My lady mail-carrier just told me the same story I have heard from other thick-haired friends! Little state, big ideas. I impulsively trimmed two inches off my mane the other day and I am traumatized. As a 13-year-old I had monthly hair choppings, against my will. I love my hair wild and long. Now it's turning gray and I love the way it sparkles and swirls in cubist robot ringlets.

I have a friend who told me years ago he was so desperate for an audience he'd put a dime in the phone booth, dial an arbitrary number and then play harmonica tunes into the phone!

I love to swim long distances. Twenty years ago I swam across Mallett's Bay on Lake Champlain while Bill was in a rowboat beside me. I loathe competitive swimming or racing. I prefer to look across a lake and say to myself, I'm going to swim over to that red house.

One year I swam the circumference of Spring Lake in Burrillville while people were celebrating the Fourth of July, and it was like I had the fish-eye view into everyone's family as they picnicked in their back yards and sat on their lawn chairs. But my favorite thing is to get up at 4am in the summer to swim when the sky is just getting light. Not many people will go along with this early morning stuff, and I won't swim long distances without a rowboat spotter and my dog!

Do Not Remove This Tag

I used to think
if I removed the tag
from the couch cushion
the one that says
do not remove this tag
under penalty of law,
the police would come
and rescue me
from my mother.
(8/31/05)

Earthy and Dusty

I drank a red wine once that tasted like a dusty couch, not that I've eaten any couches. My dog has, but that's another story.

Smells and tastes intermingle for me. Yesterday I made bread with buckwheat flour mixed in with my house blend of grains; rolled oats, cornmeal, and wheat flour. It came out very buckwheaty tasting, with the texture of rye bread, but it was good. This morning I pressure-cooked blackeye peas and realized they have that buckwheat, red-wine, dusty-couch taste and smell. Earthy. This gives new meaning to the phrase comfort food.

Hold-Your-Breath Skinny

I have an aunt that I think of as "hold-your-breath skinny." Her whole life is about how little she eats. I only eat a banana for lunch she would say, or I live on buttered noodles, or I never eat breakfast. Cigarettes and diet soda completed the menu. For me that's no way to live. She was slender but didn't look like she was fulfilled or happily occupying her body. I would rather climb trees and swing from the vines like Tarzan and enjoy all of the earthly delights; edible, musical, sensory, and sensual. The belly-dancer we see every week dancing at the jams says proudly, "I'm a woman who eats!" Hurrah for the women who eat, dance, run, jump, skip, and scream!

My mother took diet pills that were speed (amphetamines) to "keep her figure." She would gorge herself on weekends, gobbling up cheesecakes and ravioli and meat pies while entertaining my father and his clients, and then not eat anything but chicken broth from little foil packets during the week. Not a fun way to live.

I went to school with a girl who was orange because all she ate was carrots.

We live in a culture that says women should be stick figures with grapefruit-sized breasts. Luckily that image is changing!

Body wisdom is available to you when you use your body.

There are many folks who loathe being a body, a creature, and who wish they were just a brain. I see these folks as separated at the neck. Their heads float about two feet over their torsos when they walk around. They try to have complete control over their bodies. Have you ever seen this?

I often struggle to pull myself down from the sky and back into my body, or up from the mud and back into my body. The only reliable way to do this is to blam on my horn!

For years I swam with a sad woman who was tall, skeletal, and worn out. She swam every day for hours. She had no meat on her at all and big anxiety creases on her forehead. One day we were changing back into our street clothes in the locker room, and she told me when she was little she was a fat kid and her mother "didn't want to have a fat child." So, unloved, she now was spending her whole life making sure she didn't have an ounce of flesh on her. She was obsessed with swimming herself thin.

Quote of the Day

I can't do it if I don't do it all the time. Put it aside to build up strength, the flow will dwindle and finally disappear. One cannot hoard some things.

     - Rosellen Brown

Fool's Day

I'm celebrating my 2nd saxual anniversary today on April Fools Day!!!

Today's jam outfit idea: black leather zipper vest, turquoise "mermaid" tights, black plastic roller-blade knee pads. I need to find a black miniskirt or just wear a black leotard over the turquoise tights (and under the black plastic knee pads).

I'll be a middle-aged biker bari bug chick!

Cast in Iron

I have a collection of cast-iron fry pans I started collecting when I was eleven years old and planning my great escape! I've got dutch ovens, and the spider pots with legs, with rimmed lids for stacking potatoes on top! I even have a huge tub-of-a-thing I call the baby roaster, that I assume can fit a turkey. Even my old Kenmore sewing machine is cast iron!

My dream is to cook outdoors over an open campfire and make my corn bread and beans + greens over the fire, in the iron pots, and to play music while it's all cookin'.

Goinky Goinky

Spring has sprung! I'm high as the moon! A histamine high!!

We had a seven-horn blues-jam blow-out at Pawtucket's News Cafe Thursday night! The jam was really great. Seven horns!!! Everyone was having fun. I pushed air like never before. My inner critic was out to dinner, and a few people noticed. I think it's the tree pollen boosting my courage.

I'm looking to find bright yellow overall rain pants to wear as a stage outfit. I'm into highway department fashion! I did have yellow rain pants once I got from Job Lot. I wore them with a magenta jog bra to a Christmas party 15 years ago. It was my best party outfit ever! Unfortunately the pants were el cheapo and crumbled a year later.

Friday morning I walked to City Hall with Honey to renew her dog license. I left the rabies certificate on the kitchen counter, so I had to walk home and then back to City Hall. It was a gorgeous morning!! I liked it because it was not too hot, not too cool, but I needed sunglasses because it was so bright. All the usual characters were out. I saw Donut, and the couple with the matching wrap-around sunglasses, and a bunch of new characters out muttering to themselves and to each other. There is so much sand on the sidewalks left over from the ice storms that it looks like we're living in the desert. Are there sidewalks in the desert?

A kid in the neighborhood recently got a pogo stick and now I hear the goinky goinky metal sound as I sit here typing. It's charming.

Quote of the Day

"I never tried to prove nothing, just wanted to give a good show. My life has always been my music, it's always come first, but the music ain't worth nothing if you can't lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, 'cause what you're there for is to please the people."

     - Louis Armstrong

The Notebook, Part II

After keeping the spittoon notebook for eight or nine years, I occasionally have to ask myself why it works. I don't think of myself as regimented or disciplined. Why do I continue to value it and keep it as a fixture in my life? Why do I feel like oxygen has been removed from my life if I miss a day of writing? Because it has. The writing is a way of breathing insight, awareness, and contemplation into the start of my day.

Perhaps I have kept the notebook alive because I have no major expectations except my initial one; to get the words in my head down on paper. I write because I love the hour sitting in my chair, illuminated by the north-window light, facing my favorite cottage on my street. It's the brightest room in the house. It's also the coldest room in the house in winter; I just wrap myself in a blanket. This writing is about openness, allowing for anything to cross the page, an attitude necessary for me to also make paintings and drawings, but much harder for me to achieve there. I write because having had thirty years of therapy didn't help me the way the notebook does!

How did this habit become ritual, become a reliable best friend? How can I have this relationship with painting? I have a good relationship with practicing and performing on my horn. It seems that with painting I have to dismantle deep-rooted expectations and attitudes I learned, starting at age seven. Ultimately I wanted to be a famous artist so my parents and relatives would love me. I have to dismantle this burden, lighten the load, keep my creative dreams within reach. What else is life for, vacations? Accumulating money?

May we all be able to do something creative for no practical reason, and do it every day for eight years!

Second Quote of the Day

"Say what you want and be who you are because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."

     - Theodore Seuss Geisel

Cracking a Smile

During a stretch of deep depression about eight years ago I was swimming religiously, to try to lift my spirits. One Sunday morning I was on my way home from the YMCA pool feeling so deeply dark and haunted. Just as I arrived on my street I saw a guy on the sidewalk, at the base of my driveway, talking on the pay-phone while wearing gigantic fluffy yellow-and-bright-orange slippers resembling chicken feet. It was the middle of winter!! I cracked a smile, feeling that divine intervention had taken place.

Genetic Counseling

When I first heard the term "genetic counseling" I imagined it meant that doctors would sit down with you and say, "Yeah, we know your father tells bad jokes and your mother is neurotic, but we can help you get through this!"

Mood Pushing

Before I began to understand the importance of accepting my energy/mood cycle, I used to try to grab hold of my moods really tightly, and push them. I would make the highs go higher and dig the lows even deeper. I thought this would help the moodiness! It made the moods more dramatic and entertaining, but potentially disastrous. I don't recommend it. Pushing my moods was my attempt at control. It was exactly the wrong approach, which I didn't yet understand. It can be hard to let go, to trust, and to live my life by letting the waves happen.

Spin

Growing up I felt as though my parents were always distracted. They were in a spin, their heads a-whirl. Their days exhausted them, and they were rarely present. It's a horrible way to live, I know all about it, my thoughts, my worries, spinning around in my head like a tornado. Sadly I often see my friends in spin, and I hope their kids won't grow up feeling that they, too, were raised by tornadoes. Can we embrace this journey, and try not to spin through all of it? Sometimes spin descends on me for weeks, and it's torture. I just try to hang in there, poking my arms out through the swirling 110-mile-per-hour winds to grab my notebook, my saxophone, my laundry basket, promising myself this too shall pass. I try to laugh at myself, try to remember that the present is a present.

Invite the Magic

On the rough days I try to coax my terrified self to enter the studio, because I never know where the work will take me. Good days have turned sour, and sour days have brightened. I show up and invite the magic, as my pal Craig says. My efforts change me; exhilarate, frighten, exhaust, soften, frustrate, worry, anger, bore, entertain, enlighten or amuse me. I have to put myself on the spot to invite the magic, and return again and again to build this life.

Band Names

I love to dream up fantasy band names. Here's the list so far:

Girls Fear Cheese
Tilted Uterus
Invisible Fence
Friendly Bacteria
The Spit Valves
Moose Farm
The Cervical Caps
In-Ground Pool
The Zebra Stripes

The Notebook

I keep a notebook. I call it the spittoon. It's full of the scattershot ramblings I have running through my head. I started keeping it about eight or nine years ago when I had so much chatter in my head it was destroying me! I thought I would have to construct my own guillotine and then use it on myself in order to have peace. A friend of mine suggested I instead scribble down the noise, and I did and continue to, to this day. I got hooked.

I found that forming a sentence, even a crazy one, helped organize my tornado-spun thoughts. To put together a sentence, even a bad ungrammatical one, the spin has to form a line so you have one word following the next: "Okay guys get in line, single file." The notebook writing is much less scary than the high winds in my head. The sentences go in, one after the other, into the spittoon. It's a psycho-linguistic gestalt home remedy.

At first the writing saved me from having to make my own guillotine. Although I still have those days, now the writing is the churning and aerating of the soil, preparing me for my artistic day. I am so grateful for my simple friend, pen and paper.

A Man's Heart

Today while walking Honey past the elderly high-rise, the clear glass electric doors opened and a man who knows my name shouted "Emily!" He was wearing navy-blue sweatpants that were slipping, revealing his abdomen and showing the patterned elastic rim of his boxer shorts; he hiked them back up. As he spoke, his top row of dentures let go and he popped them back onto his gums. "I'll only hold you for a minute. I went to the hospital and they shot me with dye and saw my heart was bad. They said they can't operate because I could die on the table. They said I have a very bad heart. Take care of yourself, Emily."