Gogol Bordello, Boston, June 1, 2012

Hubby, my older daughter, and I went to see Gogol Bordello in Boston last night. I figured out a little bit more why this is the best live band I’ve ever seen, and, when you go, the best live band you will ever see. It is their interaction with and inclusion of the audience in every move they make on stage. That’s not the only reason, but it’s one of the overarching ones.

One of my favorite things last night happened after the concert. We were driving back home on I-90 and we stopped at a rest stop to grab a bite to eat (I try, I really do. I had a cooler and food bag packed with healthy stuff, but McDonald’s fries and coffee won out in the end). While waiting in line, a 20-something man noticed my [new] Gogol Bordello t-shirt and asked, “Were you at the show?” He was in a state of bewilderment, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, a halo of bliss above his head. I answered that yes, I’d been at the show. We began to chat. It was nice to see the reverence in his face, the gears clicking in his head trying to figure out how it was possible for such a band to exist.

I also struck up a quick conversation, still in line at McDonald’s, with a teenage girl (14-years old, maybe) who had the same happy, dazed look on her face.

“Did you just come from the concert?” I asked.

“Yes. Weren’t they amazing?” she asked.

“Yes.” I answered, and: “Had you seen them before?”

“No, have you? Does he tour a lot?”

It was all so endearing.

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Just 2 hours ago, I bought tickets to see Gogol Bordello on Lake Champlain for a mid-August concert. This time, I’m going for it. Up in front of the stage with all the pretty young women and raving young men. RIGHT UP FRONT. That’ll be me backstage, the only sober person in a throng of groupies trying to share a bottle of wine with the band. Maybe Eugene will let me massage his hands. Or forearms. Or the twisted erector spinae muscles of his back. Yeah, that’s how fantasies work around here: me massaging famous rock stars.

It’s like my kid, clucking at me to Stop it, Mom when I was bounding, fleet-foot, up the aisle last night, dancing around, twirling my new t-shirt in the air. Nobody cares, Violet. Nobody cares what I am doing. They are not looking at me. She danced next to me the whole concert, her face glowing and carefree, safe with her parents, buoyed up by the good will all around her.

I’m here to be happy, to fill the empty spaces with energy and heat and vibration. Just like that band up there, biding our time and asking everyone to join in the ecstatic moments.

It was 21 years ago today…

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Algonquin Park, Ontario, perhaps 1989

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old girl

In 1983, I was a sophomore living in the dorms at Kent State University.

Some time that year, we got the diagnosis that my father had colon cancer. Now that I come to write about it, I realize I don’t have many details. He had surgery to remove part of the colon and when they opened him up, they found that the cancer had metastasized to the liver.

My parents were living in Sylvania, Ohio at the time.

Some time in 1984 or ’85. Our good family friends in Southfield, Michigan, lent me a giant, dark-green Ford so that I could commute back and forth from Kent to Toledo while my father was dying. I spent the summer drunk, screwing a number of non-boyfriends, dancing to reggae bands upstairs at Mother’s Junction (above Ray’s), and going to see the Numbers Band at JB’s down.

I can’t remember what job I held. I do remember the heart-wrenching misery of driving to Toledo every Friday night and returning every Sunday. The long dark road, I-80, where deer/car collisions were a regular occurrence and the tail-end of the Appalachian range flattened completely by the time you’d reach Northwest Ohio. Some damn ugly land. I remember how everything in me screamed not to go. If I didn’t go home, would he not die?

Richfield, Ohio, Kita Lyons’ property. I had written in my book that this is July 13, 1985, 2 days shy of my 23rd birthday. One of the necklaces I’m wearing belonged to my Tante Nelli, but she died in May 1986. I wonder if she gave me some jewelry earlier than I remember.

My father died in August 1985.

I decided to make my pilgrimage the following year. My mother bought me a used, silver Toyota Corolla/Tercel, a model that they made for only a short time. I think it cost 4 thousand bucks. I have no memory of how many miles it had on it. I do remember going to someone’s house to check out the car, how their driveway looked, dark black asphalt. I would pay my mother back from my aunt’s estate when I received that money. My father’s only living sister, Nelli Landau. She died 9 months after him. I know it was a broken heart, for she loved my father and had no husband or children of her own.

I decided first to drive east. I would be staying mostly in youth hostels, but also had a few connections to stay with people I’d never met. Friends of friends. I miss that spirit. I miss it.

I am not sure any more all of the places I stopped. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I stayed in a governor’s mansion because my friend’s friends were the caretakers. The wife was a New England blue blood, going back several generations. She was a fiber artist, had a studio set up in the house.

They steamed mussels we picked up fresh from a little fish shack in town. I’d never eaten mussels before. I learned what a Widow’s Walk is. I toured the rose arbor in the back yard. The wife’s name was Sydney. This is how people name their children in New England.

One night, we drove past oceanfront mansions, stopped on the damp ocean beach, got high, and watched the sunset.

I next stopped in Cherryville, Maine, the famed place of an annual blueberry harvest which gathers hippies, loafers, stoners, and other back-to-nature types for seasonal farm work. Now I realize that there must be real migrant workers who go there, not just the educated white children of middle class families.

The hostel was really an old hippie commune. My first of so many things, again. I used an ATM machine in the quaint town. I got poison ivy (sumac?) on my legs. I stood in a circle with a couple dozen other people, stoned, holding hands, swaying, singing om om om. I learned what a Clivus is and determined that some day I would have one.

Maine, Bar Harbor, a little boat trip around some of the islands where I saw seals and puffins. The first time I heard the word shoal. Acadia where I walked on some barnacled rocks for a few hours, did nothing else, and left. I met a guy at the youth hostel. I remember eating a meal, walking around the town. Saying Bah Haba like the locals over and over, laughing, tschoke shops, lobster everything everywhere. I gave him a ride to the Greyhound station in Boston. A kiss in the rain. I didn’t even like him, but he was friendly. Dark hair, not too tall.

One very clear memory is of driving on the interstate in Massachusetts and the giant granite rocks on either side, with their trees and lichen, roots, gray and yellow stains. I think of it still when we go to Boston on I-90. I remember.

I started this post thinking about every car I’ve ever owned because my 2000 Toyota mini-van is up near 160K miles and creaky.

Let’s call this Installment One of Old Girl, the story of the first half of my cross-country trip after the death of my father.

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Hey, I’m not saying I like this, but I went to see them live a lot back in the day. The first video is kinda shaky to start, still good to see them looking good and playing after all these years.

something deep washes through me

I started this blog not long ago, January 2011

My first post was a poem which I thought was a good poem and which I posted, pretty much in the raw state that it was written

I reworked that poem recently after leaving it alone for over a year. I now see that it is a better poem and I’m pretty sure it is finished.* That means I don’t get to judge it any more. The original one is under password protection, but at the end of this post, I will un-protect the original and post the revision below.

Completing a poem, getting to the final state of its existence, means I no longer get to judge the poem and, like the poem of this post, it means I have to forgive myself for it.

I have created 285 (now ’twill be 286) posts, have had 15,032 hits and 877 comments from my readers.

I have used my blog to bring forth something of a persona in the guise of my nom de plume, twinklysparkles. I am not really anonymous here; you can find my name in spots hither and thither.

I set out to have fun, to be playful, to be honest, to lie, to post poems, to try new things, to write, to share, to lay myself bare.

That last sentence rhymed itself; I did not plan it.

I like to use photos. A lot. I want something visual to break up the density of text and mind.

I look back at my earlier posts and I see that I have gotten better at editing my writing. I do not go back and reread my posts very often, but sometimes when I do, I cringe.

I have put most of my poems under password protection and I have mixed feelings about it. I still have a plan to register them so I can remove the password protection and let them be free and unabashed.

I have posted a lot more youtube videos than I ever thought I would.

I have not learned much about the technology, not even some of the basics of how a blog on wordpress functions.

I have tried to release parts of myself into the digital ether, the age of screens and sitting in front of them with fingers to keyboards.

Humans are sitting down for more hours than ever in history. How will this effect the evolution of the brain over the next 5 or 10 or 20 generations? How long will the energy needs which power the technology be available? Will we do ourselves in?

I am trying to integrate some of the disparate pieces of my psyche.

This Sunday, I will go to a little cafe/restaurant in Hadley and I will try to sign up for a spot in an open poetry reading. I have never been to an open reading in the Valley. If I get on the roster, it will be the first time I will read poetry out loud in front of people in over 25 years (if my rough mental calculation is correct).

My husband has told me that when one is a writer, all that one has is the process of writing. Yourself and the words on the page, whether it be pen in hand to paper or your computer’s blank document before you (a page, not a page). This is a startling piece of information to me. The process of working on my poems, sitting for an hour or two here and there, is quite new to me. It is labor but I dismiss it because it is so heavily an activity of the mind.

I suspect that I am in the second age of my blog. I do not have a plan.

We Are All Forgiven

I got the blues, but just for me this time

It has been delayed, like when I turned 40 and had no problem whatsoever
until afterward and it hit me like a ton of bricks
Fuck I am over 40

So all fall, I waited
I waited and barely noticed the light disappearing
moment by moment and daybreak by daybreak
creeping in around the edges

I would like to be bleached and virginal
like the shells that sat in the sun too long
the faded photograph of my brother and me on my father’s lap on the front porch in Detroit
one nine four nine seven Cheyenne

I struggle and pant to be free
and search each morning

I look for salvation in my fellows
and find you
as fractured and fallen as I am

One day I will turn and have it figured out

I will not be judged
I will be bleached and pure of spirit

Glory it is the New Year

January 1, 2011

*whoa, whoa, whoa. I just added a word to the poem. It’s 2:39 in the afternoon. I guess it wasn’t as finished as I thought.

stopped dead in my tracks

I was going to post something light and airy today, something fun and gratitude-filled. But I found this on Facebook this morning.

Every time one of you fuckers asks what’s under attack, read it. And don’t get all namby-pamby and innocent and ask incredulously are women really under attack? and say things like it’s not so bad and nothing’s being taken away and any more of your condescending, male-entitled bullshit. If you are walking around with a dick between your legs and think that you have any clue whatsoever, you don’t. Just shut up when needed and when it’s time to speak use it well to support your wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, and grandmothers. CAPICHE?

If you came here from somewhere else and you think I’m in the She-Woman Man Hater’s Club, you don’t know me well. But I can kinda see where you might get that idea. On the contrary, I love you guys, but like Erin O’Brien says: get out of our vaginas unless you are invited in.

Okay, so Madonna doesn’t have anything to do with this post and I don’t even care much for her. But she really knows how to give the finger and her name is Madonna and this post is about women. So there.

what angel wakes me from my flowery bed?

First, maths: Your children’s need for new clothes, because they have NOTHING TO WEAR, MOM, is directly proportional to the week of school in which they have a Shakespeare play and [had] a dance recital.

And in which you, as the mom, most need to expend some excess and erratic chi, but you are busy, busy, busy doing prompt sheets and picking up bobby pins and mascara and labeling paper bags for backstage.*

And if you don’t get to your !@#$% yoga class tonight you JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN!

(the author is keenly aware of her entitled and easy life and she wells with gratitude in spite of her rant)

*I am not actually very involved in helping out with my daughter’s class play this year. I have a very small helper role, perhaps the easiest and least work I’ve taken on in the last few years. Many other hands are doing much more work, just so you know.

new poem, in progress

Sub Contractor

He shakes my hand,
his other holds a lit cigarette

He grabs his crotch as I turn to go inside

My teenage daughters
are asleep in their beds,
the nail gun pulsing into the tiles above

Does the noise worm its way
into their dreams,
someone dark they haven’t met?

I crushed an ant in my kitchen
where they invade along the cracks

the black thorax
separated from the head

I leave the body
to be carried back to the queen
a warning for the workers
to do her bidding

* * *

still rough, but getting there after sitting in my computer for the last 6 months. I don’t like the title. I have a caveat for entomologists, biologists, students of animal nature, but I won’t give it here. I am not sure if the poem needs to be accurate…choppy last stanza, maybe choppy beginning. chop chop.

nighty night, my pets and sweet dreams, twinkly