One of Those Weeks

And I just don’t care.

Things spill.

Pink hair dye in my purse.

Blueberries in my basket tonight, all over my liner bag on the back of my scooter, splashed blueberry juice all over my pink riding jacket.

Ugh.

Who cares?

I don’t.

I don’t give a fig.

I’m having a great fucking day.

Heh.

I just scored four tickets to Mike Doughty’s September 1st Living Room Tour here in San Francisco.

One night.

Someone’s living room.

27 people?

30 people?

Intimate like.

I messaged my three people who are Doughty fans and said, “save the date bitches.”

I don’t even give a fig that it’s the day before my first day of classes.

Fuck it.

I’ll be a little tired.

But I will be happy.

Oh so very happy.

Live music, getting to hear someone who I really like and respect, musically and from my own private personal view, we have a few things in common, a few friends, it feels special.

I’m really grateful and I didn’t blink at dropping the money on the tickets.

I love my people and I am super psyched to get to share the experience with them.

Now.

Not one of the bastards has responded to the wildly ecstatic message I just sent them, but I ain’t worried.

If, for some reason, any or all of them can’t go.

I am sure I will find three other Mike Doughty fans that would love to go.

I can actually think of a few that I should probably message and say, hey, there was 27 tickets available when I bought my four, which means 23 are left, and um, in San Francisco, that’s not going to last long.

I just had this pricking in my thumbs.

My blueberry stained thumbs.

To go check the website and see if the tickets were up.

And voila!

They were.

I whipped out the wallet.

Didn’t think twice.

The only thought I had was keeping it to myself until tomorrow when I see my ladybug at the cafe to do the deal, but I didn’t think I could keep it under my hat for that long.

I am not the best at keeping a surprise.

I mean.

I can.

I suppose I could have written this blog about how despite prepping for the poetry podcast yesterday and feeling really excited about it, that the recording was cancelled.

I suppose.

I mean.

That was what I was going to write about.

Also that I didn’t find myself all that wrapped up in that either.

I was like.

Cool.

God’s got better plans for my time that day.

Yoga.

Doing the deal.

Sex.

Heh.

Who knows.

All three.

Although not all three at the same time.

Ok.

Anyway.

That signals to me that I am in a good place in my life in general, that when something unexpected happens, getting this cancellation, I can look at it and say, well, something else is supposed to happen and here’s to knowing that what ever that thing is, it’s the thing that is supposed to happen.

Just like getting blueberry juice on everything, I mean, shit everywhere, I didn’t really get upset, just pulled the stuff that needed cleaning and tossed it into the wash.

Came inside my little studio.

Hopped on line.

And, ayup, bought tickets to see a small, intimate little show of one of my favorite artists.

Luckiest girl in the world.

And.

Tomorrow’s Friday.

Yes.

Plus.

I’m listening to the Cars greatest hits and that puts me in a good mood too.

I mean.

That synthesizer.

So good.

You’d think that I would want to listen to Mike Doughty’s Stellar Motel, but this is what called and when I feel a call, I got to go with it.

“What is this,” my lover asked (which one, wouldn’t you like to know).

“Wooden Heart, Listener,” I replied.

I love the album, but have found that nope, not everybody does.

In fact, the disdain for which someone says something about the music I’m wanting to listen to can be off putting.

“What is this shit?” An ex-boyfriend, “can you change this?”

I might.

But I might have to dump you first.

I was listening to a jazz mix which had some old Soul Coughing songs from Ruby Vroom on it.

You know that band Mike Doughty was the lead singer for, the band my long time boyfriend took me to see at the Eagle’s Ballroom, the album that gave me goosebumps when I first heard it and I resonated so hard to it that I still can tell you all the sense memories that I get stirred up even writing about it.

Yeah.

That relationship didn’t last long.

“Do you like this,” I asked my lover, the asker of the Wooden Heart album, “do you want to listen to something else?”

“Anything but this,” he replied.

Fucker.

So I put on Thomas Dolby’s The Golden Age of Wireless.

Take that.

Ah music.

How I love thee.

I remember when I first came out to San Francisco and was reading through an SF Weekly and all the music shows that were listed and I was just like a little gluttonous piggie in heaven.

I probably do not take advantage as much as I thought I would.

But.

I still love a live show and I was telling a date last weekend about a pen ultimate San Francisco night I had with a friend many years back where we went to see Tron at the Castro Theater, then hopped on his scooter and burned rubber to get to the Fillmore and we rocked out like maniacs to Gary Numan.

So close I could see how angry the lead guitarist was, and jaded.

So close I could see the black eyeliner on Numan blurring underneath his eyes.

Magic.

Goldfrapp that same year on her tour for Supernature.

God damn that was a good show.

I really must be on a synthesizer kick, now that I am thinking of it.

Heh.

And I still haven’t heard back from any of my friends.

Oh.

Ha!

I just remembered one of them is out of town camping, well, hopefully he’ll be happy when he returns from being off the grid to the knowledge of another good show that we get to go to.

As for me.

Whelp.

I got the weekend relatively free.

What’s happening my people?

Let’s.

Shake it up.

Shake it up/make a scene.

That’s right, I said
Dance all night
Go go go
Dance all night
Get real low
Go all night
Get real hot
Well, shake it up now, all you’ve got.

Shall we?

Feels Like A Sunday

Despite it being Friday night.

However, I am out in Chambourcy, just outside of Saint Germain-en-Laye, France.

I am already in my pjs, and it is just before 8 p.m.

I just got out of the gigantic bathtub in the master bath and I felt no compunctions about putting on my Hello Kitty sleep shirt and yoga pants.

None whatsoever.

It has been a very relaxing kind of day, also, why it feels like a Sunday.

I have listened to jazz, gone for a walk with the dog in the woods, drank tea, curled up on the couch for a few hours while the rains blew in–just barely got back from the walk before the rain started to drop–and a bath.

I am quite blissed out.

It is counter intuitive to my personality, this slowness.

I am not a good practitioner of the resting, slow down, mellow out school.

I mean, come on, my blog subtitle is “Girl on the Go.”

That’s what I am usually up to or going to.

I realized as I was plugging in this person there and that person here and what BART would I take to get from Oakland to SF to see such and such and maybe I can squeeze that errand in here, that I was not in California yet.

I was in Chambourcy.

I put down my Iphone and turned on the music.

Jazz for the majority of my day and for a little throwback fun, I am now listening to some new age–Thomas Dolby, The Golden Age of Wireless.

It always reminds me of my last summer after highschool before I started my freshman year at University of Wisconsin, Madison.  We had sold the house in Windsor and I was living with my mom in a small two bedroom apartment on East Johnson Street.

The entire apartment was about the size of the room I had previously been occupying.

I escaped with friends from school.

Not my school either.

Although I had some friends from DeForest High School, I had left abruptly, the house had sold faster than I thought it would and we actually moved before I graduated from highschool.  I was the only person that did not show up for the dress rehearsal for graduation.

I had no clue it was happening.

I was busy helping my mom box up the house and move into the tiny apartment.

I was embarrassed and shy and scared, although from the front I put on, you would never have known.  No one in my group of friends knew that I had run away from home just a few months prior to graduation.

I had nowhere to go.

I ran away to school.

I slept in the back of the bus in the back parking lot I had broken into.

My swim coach had some suspicions, but did not discuss them with me.  He did however stop handing over my paychecks to my mom from the lifeguarding shifts I was doing after I asked him to not do it any more.

That may have been the first time I had really stood up for myself.

I am still learning how to do so.

It takes a little more time than one would think.

I still feel like a young woman finding herself out in the world.

I still want some one to tell me what to do.

I find that people pleasing is just a way for me to be in control of my environment.  Though the fact, amply substantiated by years of evidence, is that I do not have control of my environment.

The more I can let go of that, the freer I am.

I wanted to feel guilty about being out here in the country, taking it easy, but really, it is a bit of work.  I traveled from outside the city early in the morning to the city center, walked through thorough fares teeming with tourists hauling my pack of stuff with me like a college kid on sabbatical, up and down train station steps to the next Metro line to the next RER.

I do not mind work though and as I sit here berating myself, not as hard as I used to, I know that I will continue to do what is put in front of me to do.

Usually it’s just the dishes.

I don’t remember doing a lot of dishes that summer.

I remember I went to the pool nearly every day, riding my bike from the East side of Madison on Hwy 51 to DeForest.  My friend Jay had no idea I had actually moved to Madison until one night after the pool closed he offered to give me a lift and as I directed him past the Windsor Road turn off I finally broke the news to him.

The friends I hung out with were from Sun Prairie.

I had met one of them when I was in middle school in Madison.

When we moved to Windsor she and I stayed in touch.

Then her family moved to the outskirts of Madison and she was relocated into the Sun Prairie school system.  I would go weekends to her house in the country to escape the crazy at my house.

Not that I even knew it was crazy.

But when your step father makes you cut the grass with hand shears and the lawn is about an acre, there is some crazy going on.

My friend’s mom had her own struggles, I am sure of it, looking back with perspective, however, she seemed to make do in a way that I still admire.

She cooked and baked and made stained glass ornaments and windows in a little studio off the side of the house.  The house did not have running water, there was a well, hooked up to a motor, and there was an outhouse, but it was more civilized than anything I had experienced.

The bread she made still makes my mouth salivate.

One of my favorite smells to this day, hot bread fresh from the oven, mixed in with the scent of cut grass on a warm dusky night, topped with butter and mulberry jam she made I don’t know that I ever wanted to leave.

I was not always that fond of the friend, but man, did I love her mom.

I love my mom and I know she was just doing what she could, but that summer a lot of stuff fell out and I just knew my life on my own was really starting.  I took what fun I could and tried to cram the worry away in a bolt hole.

Worrying about the future does me no good, it takes me away from the blooming pear orchard out the window of the house here in Chambourcy France, where the sun has gathered one last welter of light to push the edge of the clouds apart and shafts of golden lace are caught high in the balls of mistletoe in the trees at the periphery of the lawn.

I was never at ease in my younger girl days.

I am now, which may explain the glitter and the pink and the fondness I have for childish things and toys, yes, my vibrator is pink, but it took me a god awful long time to get to this point.

I am going to enjoy myself to the utmost.

I am aware that the road is about to change and I am about to change again, I still carry the core of girl within me though, and today I am alright with it.

I have no regrets.

I really don’t

Here in France.

Four more days.