This is probably the first song I wrote about the feeling of being lost in an everlasting winter, the color white…
Download MP3: I Ain’t Crying
Category: Blue, Black, Silver, Water, Moons, Death & Ghosts
Another song from the Odyssey… Odysseus travels to Hades to seek guidance for his journey. Hell is a place we all visit at some point. Perhaps by visiting Hell while still alive we don’t have to go there when we die.
What is Hell? Hell is a place so black we can only look backwards.
A place where the light of the future has been extinguished by the shadows of the past. Suddenly we are engulfed by everything we had forgotten- lost opportunities, suppressed humiliations, mistakes we can never erase. We realize that what we thought was behind us- our past- was actually closer to us than our present- standing between us and the present like an atmosphere, a cover of clouds, and in Hell these clouds thicken and swallow us up. We are confronted with the ways we have hurt others and the ways we have hurt ourselves. We come face to face with the dark sides of those we loved, the ways they betrayed us, the love that existed only in words but not deeds. We see the ways we were overpowered by life and shaped by forces beyond our control. We realize we cannot change the past- not because it is behind us (it is not behind us at all!)-but because we never could have changed it. We did our best, but it was not enough. Our will was just a tiny candle in the big wide world, barely illuminating our own hand and bound for extinction.
Some dreams were fulfilled, but still they were hollow. Some goals were achieved, but still they led nowhere. Best friends slipped away, one by one, like sunsets. Ideals that seemed so tangible turned out to only be concepts. Right and wrong, success and failure, struggles and surrenders… in the end it all led to the same place… nowhere.
Welcome to Hell.
Download MP3: Black Black Hell
I hope I don’t get sued for writing a song called “Black Man,” but the truth is I believe there are beings in every color of the rainbow who live side by side with us humans. And of these vividly colored peoples, the one I think about most frequently is the famous “Black Man,” a jet black figure about 33% larger than a regular person. I think these colored beings might show up in our lives to compensate for our weaknesses. The black man seems strong and protective to me, though also opaque and aloof. But after all he’s part of another world, and “their ways are not our ways.”
Download MP3: Black Man
At the time I wrote this song I had a pink snake named Little Bun. She looked like a very long and thin hot dog bun. I thought having one animal from each of the animal kingdoms would bring me good luck in life. It is hard to say if it worked. I loved Little Bun but never got over the fear of her biting me. Sometimes, when entering a public situation where I felt nervous or awkward, I would take her with me and let her discreetly twine around my arm. My fear of her biting me caused my social anxieties to fade somewhat.
Download MP3: Murder
I always felt fascinated by the Ohio River because it separates Kentucky, where I grew up, from Indiana, the Emerald City-State, where everything is possible, where hopes and dreams come true by the minute. I love driving through Southern Indiana with its endless golden fields, gambling machines, and 64 oz polar pops. I love the flatness and lack of variety which make the land seem to stretch out forever, hypnotically, like a golden ocean. I love their cheeseburger hotdogs and American flag bandana-shorts, which encourage you to release the vain pretenses of the city and just be yourself, a human being, who loves tasty treats and the feeling of wind in your hair.
At other times, though, I hated Indiana and the Hoosiers who lived there. Sometimes it seemed like Kentucky was the promised land, a buttery gold corn fritter, while Indiana was a slimy side of spinach, basking in Kentucky’s sunlight and giving nothing in return but ghosts, which crossed the Ohio at night in hordes, seeking a better life in Kentucky.
Download MP3: Pink Star of the Beautiful Ohio
I like this song because it is a question song, and I really like questions. I like people who ask questions, and I love asking them myself. I’ve been trying to cut back though, because it can get to the point where I only ask questions and never make any statements at all. James (who may be biased because he hates questions and comes from a culture where they are neither asked nor answered) has also warned me that constantly asking questions could make me seem unintelligent.
But for some reason, appearing unintelligent has never bothered me. At times, it has been a source of joy, like in school, where through a campaign of routinely saying the dumbest things I could think of, I was able to change my horrible nickname “Brain,” to the more palatable “Brainless.” Being Brainless was fun. Brain had to stick to the program, saying things others could understand and appreciate, but Brainless wasn’t confined to those narrow gray crevices. She was free to explore, to soar to the clouds, to give the right answer OR the wrong one, if the spirit moved her.
Still, freedom can lead to exhilaration, and sometimes spin into intoxication and mania. One thing I have learned to appreciate about intelligence, even feigned intelligence, is its sobering and grounding aspects.
Download MP3: I Also Wanted to Make Love
It seems that, for a while now, the color white has been trying to take over the (human) world. White walls, open space floor plans, buddhism, yoga, kale smoothie detoxes… when will the reign of white ever end?
At the time I wrote this song I was completely swept up into the color white, trying to wear, eat, and decorate with it exclusively. White can be refreshing and protective, but geez, it can also be such a cold color, disconnecting you from everything warm and earthy.
Download MP3: Who Will Make Love to Me?
Probably the most traumatic part of living in Brooklyn was the cockroaches. When you lose control of your personal space, and cannot make it safe and clean despite your best efforts, you lose a part of your mind.
The first time I saw one I didn’t think it was real. I had just turned on the bathroom light in my newly rented apartment when a three inch long creature- that looked to me like an Egyptian scarab- quickly scampered down the drain. I didn’t see what a magical scarab would be doing in my apartment, and I didn’t see how something that large could have disappeared down the drain, so I figured it must have been a hallucination- and hopefully a sign of good luck! I thought- like the phoenix- it was the sort of creature I would only see once in a lifetime.
But unfortunately, it was just one member of a very, very, VERY large tribe, that tormented me day and night, and that is about all I can say on this subject without losing the contents of my stomach. Suffice it to say, this was just one more element of my life which felt intolerable, out of control, and left me turning to magic for answers.
Perhaps because I lived in a black part of town, most of the magic I learned seemed to have African-American origins, like Hoodoo for example. One book I read was called the 8th, 9th, and 10th Books of Moses. In the preface, it refers to Moses (if I remember correctly) as the Great Hoodoo Man of the Bible. It caused me to see Moses in a totally new light. Before, I had always thought of him as someone chosen by God to do God’s bidding with little will or volition of his own. Which isn’t very relatable, since most of us don’t have burning bushes to turn to for advice and have to figure out life for ourselves. But in the hoodoo version of Moses, he was more of a self-made man- a powerful, wise magician who led his people to freedom through his own knowledge, strength and cunning. Which makes sense when you consider that “God helps those who help themselves.”
Download MP3: Every River
I wrote this song while living in Brooklyn, when my mind was beginning to decompose from endless periods of solitude… first a year living off the highway in Santa Fe and then- I don’t know how long- living in the scary filth of Brooklyn, cut off not just from other humans, but also from the natural world since it took hours of expensive transportation to escape the urban grid.
My one connection point with nature was an abandoned lot that contained a metal rod sticking out of the ground. If I stood on the rod, I could see what appeared to be a creek in the distance, although it may have been a drain.
In Brooklyn, I started doing strange things I would never have done before, like buying tabloid magazines and reading them from cover to cover, eagerly devouring every story about celebrity weight gain and two-timing ex-boyfriends. And I would read them while polishing off family sized bags of Combos in flavors I used to hate, like Pepperoni Pizza Pretzel.
You might think someone with a lot of time on their hands and the freedom to do as they wish would make the most of it, taking up all sorts of new hobbies and interests. But instead I found that, in the absence of friends, money, nature, love, and beauty, it was difficult to be interested in anything at all. The only books I could bring myself to read were books about magic. I was especially interested in spells for invisibility, and would rarely leave the apartment without trying out one spell or the other. My favorite was to hold a crystal pointing downwards and imagine myself being swallowed up by the earth. I also began dressing for invisibility, and really constructing my whole personality around being as inconspicuous as possible. Because when people DID notice me, it was not a good thing.
Once I was walking down the street, when out of a window an invisible voice shouted “You’re ugly! You’re ugly! Hey you in the orange shoes- You look ugly!!” It was mortifying and he kept shouting it over and over again until he finally yelled “You’re not ugly, but your shoes are! They don’t match your skirt! Don’t wear those shoes with that skirt!”
Another time, a group of twenty or so kids who had just gotten off the school bus started throwing glass bottles at me. Equal to my fear of the bottles was my confusion and humiliation when none of the other adults did anything to stand up for me. I don’t know if this is because I was the only white person, or if New York is just a culture where everyone minds their own business regardless of what is going on around them.
It seemed commonplace for people to talk about me as though I wasn’t there. Once, two girls a couple feet away from me had this conversation: “Oh my god, she looks like a ghost!” “That’s what white people look like! Haven’t you seen a white person before?” “No, look! She looks like a real ghost! Like a white sheet!”
Download MP3: Not Here Not Now