Carlos Castaneda (my hero, although I reluctantly admit that he appears to have been a manipulative psycho rather than a true sorcerer) wrote that when people sleep together the female sends her energy to the male for the next seven years. In an ideal situation, though, the man will return the energy he receives through his genitals back to the woman through his heart.
This seems reasonable, although I tend to think either gender could set up a cord through sex which siphons off their partner’s red energy for an extended period of time. I guess you could call them sex predators.
How do you know if you’ve been attacked by a sex predator? If you start to share the sentiments expressed in this song and become too detached from life, too unconcerned and selfless, too passive and unmotivated.
For some reason, I love confederate soldiers and they pop up frequently into my imagination.* Obviously, the south was in the wrong, but still I tend to think that the soldiers did not fight alone, but had fairies fighting with them side by side. Why would fairies fight for the Confederate army? I don’t know. My best guess is that they wanted the south to remain agricultural and undeveloped, so that they would have a place to live and their societies and cultures would not be destroyed. But in the end, they were. It is strange how even in the most black and white circumstances, there will always be more to the picture than we can see.
It is nearly impossible for me to sing this song all the way through without screaming “NOOOoooo!!!!” and throwing down my guitar to hide my head in a pillow. It just embarrasses me to no end. It makes me feel like a cheesy, greasy guy driving around in a convertible and tank top, whistling at the ladies. Not that I dislike oily men, btw, I just don’t feel comfortable BEING one myself.
But James thinks I should include All my songs on this blog- The Complete Set- and I try to do as I’m told. Anyway, you can’t go through life just slashing out all the things you don’t know how to appreciate. I used to live that way, and now I really wish I could get my tie-dyed Iron Maiden t-shirt back. It was beautiful.
This song is more or less a true story, except that my husband never passed out from moonshine, it was a blend of vodka and wormwood extract. He did fall face first onto his plate of turkey, but the joke was on me and the other guests who must have been out of our minds as well, since it took us a while to realize that the turkey we were eating was still frosty and raw.
A song from Brooklyn where everything was black, black, black.
In retrospect, I can see that the mental torture I experienced there was magnified by growing up in a culture that valued money, status, fun, and popularity above all else. These values motivate people to work hard and achieve, but make it harder to find meaning and peace of mind in undesirable circumstances.
My husband, on the other hand, was raised to abhor money and status, and to seek only Eternal Salvation. This hasn’t always made him the life of the party, but it does give him patience and a sense of himself that isn’t dependent on “worldly” approval.
He was taught that God’s chosen people will be reviled and persecuted while I was taught that the “cream of humanity” can be recognized by their wealth and success…
I saw a tv show about an olympic skier who had been injured in a traumatic accident. Although he had recovered physically and was in better shape than ever before, his coach feared he could never be a champion again, because there would always be a slight hesitation, an underlying fear, that would keep him from making the bold and risky moves of his past as freely as he once had.
I wonder a lot if it is possible in life to go back to the beginning… to be truly optimistic, soft, and unscarred after traumatic experiences. Can a person coax their spirit back into their body once it has flown away?
I wrote this song on the day I finally moved into my own apartment after separating from my husband… what a happy day… free at last…
It would have been better if I had sworn off men altogether and become a sister-is-doing-it-for-herself type of lady, but I had no plans to stay single for even a week- I had my heart set on falling in love, as soon as possible, with the most boring and normal man in the world… I wanted someone dry, dull and left-brained, someone who drank coffee and read the paper with breakfast, preferably while wearing spectacles, someone who discussed subjects so uninteresting I would fall asleep listening to him.
And that was a good idea, I think. I still love boring, factual coffee-drinkers of all genders. They are comforting and remind me of my favorite breakfast food, toast. But in a city of illusions, appearances can be deceptive. You never know whose glasses are prescription, and whose are just plain glass. And a week is really not enough time to separate the dullards from the perverts in disguise.
Yet another song of unrequited love for Dusty Stables. Unrequited love used to the dominant feature of my internal life. I would always be madly in love with someone I had never met, and my passion would grow and grow until one day fate would arrange for me to meet my true love and then bam! a split end on one of his hairs, or a crumb stuck to the side of his shoe would cause my love to vanish in an instant.
In high school I was madly in love with Bono, for example, until one day some girls brought a big book of U2 pictures to school. I opened the book to see a big close-up picture of my dream man, so close up I could see the whiskers growing out of his pores and a whisp of smoke curling around a skin flake on his lips. I shut the book quickly, but it was too late, the love bubble had popped. While Bono remained a potential candidate for husband, I now realized I should probably consider other people as well.
With Dusty Stables, I don’t think I ever got close enough to see his pores. Instead, I moved to a new apartment which would have required me to walk two extra blocks to see him at the coffee shop. I guess that was when my enthusiasm started to dampen and I decided I needed to find a new meaning for my life.
Around the time I wrote this song, I had read that there are nine types of people which fall into three basic categories: heroes, villains, and fools. I figured I didn’t have the strong character of a hero, and I definitely lacked the balls to be a villain, so I must be a fool.
The fools were divided into three unappealing categories: incompetents, weaklings, and braggarts.
I didn’t think I was a braggart, so I had to decide if I was a weakling or an incompetent. I chose incompetent. In retrospect, I wonder why I didn’t choose weakling. Probably because I still saw myself as an Arnold Schwarzennagarish sort of figure.
In college, I had gone through a phase where my dream was to be a professional body builder. I subscribed to body building magazines, read everything Scwarzennegar had written, and spent all my free time PUMPING IRON and eating high protein snacks. I would even write Arnold letters asking for tips (he never wrote back). In my mind, I looked like a slightly smaller version of those hulking humanoids in the muscle magazines.
My self-image was altered a bit when- after a whole summer devoted to eating and lifting weights- a professor used me as an example to the class of a body type that would never be able to gain muscle mass. If the world couldn’t see my muscles by now, I wasn’t sure they ever would. I decided I needed a new career path and settled on professional pool player.
But the image of myself as a slightly smaller version of Arnold lingered for years like a twisted version of anorexia. Which is why I couldn’t be a weakling fool and had to be an incompetent one.
I got married (the first time) because God told my husband-to-be that I had to. This wasn’t the first time God had spoken to this man (let’s call him John). It started when God told John he had been appointed as my spiritual guide. Next, God told John I needed to give John my two favorite shirts. One for John to keep and one for John to give to a girl he liked (we’ll call her Sally). This hurt, because I really liked those two shirts, and I didn’t see why a man would want to wear purple velvet anyway.
After that, things started to snowball rapidly. I had to tell my friends I was in love with him (for complex spiritual reasons that I cannot remember). I had to go on a spiritual retreat with him. He drove me to Michigan which turned out to be where his parents lived and I was introduced to them as his girlfriend. I was horrified but didn’t know how to contradict him. Before he drove me home I was required to be engaged to him. Because God had needed me- as part of the spiritual retreat- to see him naked, and now that I had seen him naked his spirituality required him to marry me.
This was horrifying. I was a student and the very idea of seeing whiskers from up-close was still revolting to me. Plus, I had been hoping to marry Bono one day and live with him in his castle. But I didn’t know what to do. I tried to hide my ring finger because I felt so ashamed. But people would see the ring and congratulate me. I couldn’t tell anyone how I felt. So many people were fiercely loyal to him and no one cared about me in more than a “hey, let’s go to a party together” way.
And then, once we were engaged, John told me he had to give Sally a naked massage for existential reasons.
