August 28, 2009

9:27 p.m.

Friday Thoughts

First of all, let me just mention that the Florence Foster Jenkins link that Poolie posted today just made me feel better about everything. Everything.

My best laid schemes for mowing up all of Wednesday's whacked weeds amounted to naught today, as it rained. I might have done it prior to the rain except for the stacks of reasons I kept manufacturing for not wanting to do it. Having to drive the tractor down the street to my house. Having to empty the lawnmower bag every two minutes because it clogs up at the bottom before filling up all the way. Having to employ my still VERY achy elbows for the task. And wondering every minute whether it was, indeed, going to start raining. Fortunately all was decided for me and I carried on with the rest of the list, which included laundry and errands, as per usual on Fridays.

I am absolutely scraping for cash right now. I'm relying on my direct deposit on Monday to cover my part of the mortgage, and then I'll be low again til the 15th. It may be a while before we can actually pay the mortgage by the first of the month. Ah, well. We don't get penalized unless it comes in after the 15th so it's okay, just not pristine.

Anyway I really want to get the dining room ceiling finished this weekend. That meant getting paint and accoutrement, and I remembered that my realtor friend Angela (stress on "Angel") had given me a $50 gift card for Lowe's. So off I went to get my FREE paint, roller et cetera! I got the sand ceiling paint Marc recommended. There is some scraping yet to do, and sanding of some edges of remaining painted/plastered areas, but then it'll be pretty much ready to paint. At last: the first finished, flat surface in the house.

I talked with the band tonight; we made a conference call to our friends Jonnie and Calvin in Texas. Yesterday was C's birthday; he's having three parties because he has so many friends they won't all fit into one. I think that's just fabulous. Then we talked again after, just the band, to get a handle on the upcoming rehearsals. None of us has been pre-practicing. We're all worried about not writing anything. Maybe this is the phase where we do the cover album. Everybody does one of those. It still seems like an enormous amount of work to find and arrange songs we are really dying to do. Maybe we're just dying. No, I think I'm just really BUSY. Experiencing, processing, burning these events into my history. I love my house so much, in spite of being overwhelmed and impatient and worried and cramped into small areas of comfortableness.

The upgraded electrical service is going in this weekend; for my part, I will continue to scrub the kitchen.

Sorry if it gets boring to hear about nothing but the house. There isn't a whole lot else worth talking about. Some passing sadnesses, with or without explanation. Trying to stay motivated day after day, to get up so early for the day job, to always be working on a house project. Thinking about my choices and their consequences, and hoping I've done the best things for myself. I feel I've traded the elusive idea of romance for the solid perpetuity of home. When I have time, I will have to examine what that looks like, understand where I was when I believed that love would magically come and endure and be satisfying in the way I was taught by movies and books to believe it would. Along with that I cannot ignore the nagging longing for home, all the years when every place I lived was temporary. I will have to compare the early picture I had of touring and bringing my soul-music to the world, with the reality of same and the way the jobness of it kills the inspiration that woke it in the first place. What place, then, does that soul music have in my life? If it is not to be churned out with regularity and shared on a schedule, through a business model, what then? Before all that it was its own engine, fueled by its own fire. I wish it were only that again.

This is why I don't think or write much about these things; there are no answers yet, and it makes me sad to contemplate them.

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I had a very interesting experience last night on my way home. Over a year ago, when I was having this memorable dinner with a friend and another invited guest who was a shaman-in-training, we had this big discussion about this white house I'd dreamed of, and he said this was my actual house and that I would find it and there would be several signs indicating that this was the right house. Things like, the cry of a hawk, sound of the wind, really typical native American woo-woo things that might happen anywhere. There was a black cat supposed to cross my path. I was supposed to get a message in my dream on the seventh full moon, too, I forget from whom, and I'm not sure that's ever happened. But there was a point, before I bought this house but when I was visiting it a lot, that I looked at it from a certain direction and it highly resembled the house I'd dreamed about. And I did hear a hawk crying early on; one can see hawks around here fairly often. Anyway, I often wondered about the cat part, because the house is so remote from the road and there just aren't cats walking around my town.

So last night after dark I was driving up my driveway, and suddenly there were these two startled cats in front of my car, one black, one white and black. The black one disappeared into the brush on the house side. The other one went into the woods away from the house, on the right side. I just thought that was interesting, to finally see the black cat. I saw them again today and they both went to the right; I think they must belong to someone at an apartment building that is to the right of my driveway but down by the street. They don't look like strays. But I've never seen cats around, except when Linus comes to visit from Rose's house. Somehow I'd imagined that this sleek black feline would just walk up to my front door and come in or something.

I did see three deer today, different ones. Before, I spotted two bucks. Today there was a mama deer and two teenagers. It so warms my heart to know there are a bunch of them back there in the woods.

It's turned very chilly at night. I actually closed the windows which had been open since the fourth week in June. It makes the house even quieter. Now it is raining hard and I will get wet going out to the car to go home.