October 03, 2004

12:31 p.m.

Digital Tide

Kripalu, Lenox, MA, 9/27/04

Quiet here. Little band meeting after dinner; we brought our gear in for a rehearsal in a spare room tomorrow evening. More biz to do, but I plan to get in a couple of deep hikes and some serious sleep. Now I'm listening to my little Soothing Sounds clock with the choices of ocean tide, crickets, rain or waterfall. It's a pretty cheesy representation but it comforts me nonetheless.

I missed Will a little bit, yesterday and today. I'm not so mad at him that I don't wish him well. But I'm not so forgiving that I'm not mad. It's really okay, just a shame. Let it go.

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Tuesday, 9/28, 1:30pm

The Dream Train

It's like a meditation retreat, only it's off the grid from the rest of the practitioners here. I've slipped easily back into my anonymous role here as interloper -- not signed up for anything, just staying under the wire for a few days, sleeping and eating. And dreaming. Here was the fare between breakfast and lunch today:

1) My dad, with whom I'm living, has gone off early in the day to go grocery shopping for dinner. He doesn't come back all day and into the evening; he's gone AWOL and I know he's out drinking somewhere. Sure enough, he comes back eventually, looking quite inebriated (I could tell by the fact that his hair and eyes were darker) and offers me the remains of a packet of cold french fries. I'm so mad at him I wake myself up telling him off. In my half sleeping state, in the wee morning hours, I whisper out loud into my spartan room here, "Thanks a lot, Dad. I hope you learned something so you don't fuck up your next family."

2) I'm at Rose's, and Braela is there, though I know she's already been put down. I'm trying to pet her and crying because I didn't get to say goodbye.

3) Somehow I've created a house with several android type people in it, all guys, like my own little Sim City. They look and act just like people. I go outside and downstairs somehow, and in the back behind this "house" there's a whole lot with circus equipment. It's not up and running but I see trailers and tents and some animals. I talk to a guy there and he says they've been touring for twelve years or so. I'm amazed and want to see the circus. I try to ask him if they're going to set up there, but he ducks into a shower room and closes the door.

Full of emotion over this discovery, I go back upstairs having made the difficult decision to pull the plug on my androids. One of them is lying on the couch, and I sit by him and tearfully explain that, tomorrow, I'm going to erase the programs because they simply can't feel, and I can no longer have companions who feel nothing for me. During this discussion I become afraid that they'll rebel and try to kill me if I divulge too much, but I'm also watching for signs of spontaneous emotion. I know if I try to fool them they'll see through it, so I have to tell the truth or nothing at all.

********

In spite of the conflicts these dreams spotlight, I'm not feeling particularly upset by them. And I'm repeatedly impressed by how the dream mind can take a lot of random elements from one's recent experience and weave them in with deep dark issues like one's puzzling, deceased father and other losses, and one's generally unsuccessful relationship history. Dar and I were talking about 2001: A Space Odyssey the other day, and I'm sure the android-without-feelings-who-must-be-destroyed part was related to that (oh, in addition to people like Will, of course). And the twelve years of circus -- well, I just wrote a poem yesterday during which I realized it was just about twelve years ago that I first moved into the Willimantic garret. Life certainly has been a show since then. Step right up.

It's rained all day; the fog has never fully lifted off the Berkshires, and there has been no hiking. We have a little rehearsal scheduled for tonight, to brush up on the ever increasing list of old songs we keep avoiding doing because they're rusty as hell. Meanwhile, there are still a few hours left to board the Dream Train until dinner.

********

Sunday, October 03, 11:51am

Onions

Well, having forgotten to bring the palm charger on that trip, I curtailed further entries... of course I�ve lost a lot of the details of the weekend, but it was good overall and in spite of great weariness I made it all the way home last night, arriving at my blessed abode around 2am. Saturday�s house concert was in a very carpeted room so we had to push vocally and we were plenty tired by the end. I still felt it last night, but fatigued as I was I felt like doing every song and even did something vocally challenging for the encore. Ate far too much junk food over the weekend. �Oh! Take some of these CUPCAKES with you!� �AAAAUUUGGHHHHH!!� so this week it�s Amy Burgers, hummus and vegetables.

I struggled some yesterday on the 350-mile drive to Paramus, because we ended up having this biz meeting over breakfast where it was determined that I had to outline my monthly budget so Carol would know how much I need to bring home. This came up because we were discussing whether to go to Canada in February for the National Folk Alliance; we�d decided not to go for various reasons but some things have changed so it might be in our long term interest to go and try to become visible in the Canadian festival circuit. Trouble is, it�ll cost maybe $3000 for the trip and I�m so close to being broke again, I don�t want to commit to it unless I know we�re making enough that month to survive. We�ll get work from it eventually, but recouping the $3000 a year later doesn�t help me pay February�s rent, if you know what I mean. So it boiled down to my having to make a list of my bills, and looking at my financial picture isn�t a carnival even on a good day. Breakfast is when I�m most emotionally vulnerable so that was troublesome � I carried it around with me all day and fretted about lack and loss and it�s all tied in with anger at Will and Ex and everyone else who�s done me wrong. And I have more expenses!! I owe many thousands on my last album! I just went into huge debt for a car! I�m couchless and rugless! Where will it all come from? Will I have to get a day job for little money and stop gigging??? Of course these are my perceptions and the little roundabouts I�ve chosen to get stuck in, so I�m aware of all that. It�s hard to just pop out when it�s bothering me, though, so I lived there for a while and took note, and felt my fear, and later it was better, and by the time I got up this morning I organized my bank deposit and thought, �Oh, cool. This week, I made enough to live.�

********

I�ve arranged with Chris and Carol to go and get the sofa out of storage when we get back from Texas. I hope the three of us can manage it all right. Then it will be DONE.

********

Seth, my downstairs neighbor whom I have yet to run into, seems to be cooking. Just in this very corner of my bedroom I can smell onions. It made me remember that in the 90s, Darren, the old neighbor, used to smoke and we�d sometimes smell it up here. He ended up installing a drop ceiling in his place, and it might have been better then � although why anyone would want lower ceilings I don�t know. The ceilings here are glorious. Anyway, Seth doesn�t seem to smoke at all and I don�t mind good cooking. The smell of onions cooking, in fact, reminds me of my childhood because everything mom cooked started out with onions and garlic in a frying pan.

In fact, though mom cooked all sorts of things, there were certain rituals we observed weekly. There was hamburger night, which was nothing like MacDonald�s because the burgers were plump and stood up in the buns, and there would be plates of tomato and lettuce and onions and we�d put them together ourselves. One night we�d have breakfast for supper: scrambled eggs and bacon and toast. I loved that. Sunday mornings dad would make waffles or pancakes. We never went to church, though my best friend Susan was Catholic and when I�d stay over at her house on a Saturday, her mom would insist I go to church with them in the morning. I�m sure she thought she was doing me a favor, though I always felt lost in the service amid the ritual. I�d be given a quarter to put into the offertory dish. Once I think I took communion with them, and didn�t have any idea what it was for. One breakfast before church I dumped my poached eggs into my lap by accident and mom had to run over my other dress from next door. I was maybe seven.

Susan and I fought almost every day but made up right away. Once we got ahold of some �glow juice� � a little bottle of glow in the dark liquid that we could paint our faces with. After lights out we kept playing with it and laughing and laughing until her mom had to come in a couple of times to tell us to be quiet and go to sleep. We really didn�t want to incur her wrath, but it was irresistible. Glow juice! It was magic!

Once she was sleeping over at my house, and late at night when she was asleep and I was still wakeful, I saw a ghost. It was the most peculiar thing, and it scared the shit out of me. I was looking out the open window, and something went past that was wispy and smoky and in the shape of a person. I swear it looked like a person, and went by at the speed of someone just walking. I wanted to run to the window and see where it went, but I was so scared I couldn�t move. Eventually I went to sleep. I don�t remember if I ever told anyone.

With regard to my mom�s cooking, every year on my birthday I would get to request the dinner menu and it was always the same thing: California casserole. I�m sure this was some Betty Crocker thing, because it involved cream of mushroom soup and a jar of pearl onions, but it was my absolute favorite and I salivate to this day thinking about it. I don�t even want to know the sodium or fat content, but of course back then it didn�t matter. It�s a kind of chunky beef stewy thing with the onions and the soup, and on top of it is a layer of poppy seed dumplings that�s baked right on. Then there�s this creamy sauce that goes over the whole thing. If I were more of a meat eater I might make it sometimes. I tried it once with turkey chunks or chicken or something years ago, and it just wasn�t right.

When we moved to Germany mom learned to make some traditional dishes: sauerbraten, rouladen, wienerschnitzel. It�s alarming how much meat I ate growing up, in fact. It�s even more impressive to think that mom cooked for five people pretty much every damn day.

Why is it that we only really begin to appreciate our mothers when we get to be their age?

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I last saw Susan, incidentally, when I was about 16. We�d been out of touch for years, and my concert choir from high school was making a trip down to D.C. on an exchange concert. Susan lived down there with her dad, and somehow we got in touch and managed to get together for lunch that one day. Her mom had since died from multiple sclerosis. One of her older sisters had also died some years before � victim of a random stabbing, I believe. It was very sweet to see her, and her father was awfully nice and just as I�d remembered him. It was interesting, though, to feel that, had we met later in life, we probably wouldn�t have been close friends because our interests and everything were so different. She was the one non-family link I ever had to my childhood. After that day we pretty much fell out of touch, and I never saw her again.

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Isn�t it interesting, how many memories the smell of onions can conjure? They are many-layered like our pasts, tangy and sweet and secretive. Now I have projects in the present to attend to which, eventually, will include lunch.