how can you mend a broken heart?

(click on photo for close-up of sign)

if I can stand the pain, you can stand the pain

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Hey, I know I’m slackery

Slackery, though it’s not a word, makes a great word, dontchathink?

Fear not, my pets, for I have not abandoned you. Abandoned looks so strange…

I have a manuscript deadline (yippee!!!) and many other goings-on.

Then there’s the upcoming 2 Wilco shows in one week (CRAZY and INDULGENT, sez I). I thought I’d qualify that and let you know that I don’t really want to see them 2ce in one week, but we were COMPED tickets by a rather famous local guitarist, a co-parent from our school. So I sez to Hubby, I do not want to go to the show on Wednesday in Hartford and Hubby sez to me, you will want to once you see them on Sunday and I thinks no, that Wilco show last September is when my tinnitus began.

Now you try typing sez without it coming out as sex. GO ON, get on your keyboard and try! Blogging is harder than it looks, I tell you!

Mark Twain, right? Huck Finn, sez sez sez. At least that’s what I remember. I don’t remember even finishing the book and I took a whole semester in Twain. Hmm.

The poet hard at work a few weeks ago on Cape Cod. Little did she know that a deadline for manuscript submissions was lurking in the wings. (From an Alexander Technique perspective this is NOT how one should look when one is at one’s computer. EGADS!)

I am grateful, I tell you. My manuscript is SO MUCH BETTER than when I started sending out stuff willy-nilly last fall/winter. Probably won’t get accepted, but I’ve become a better writer through the process. Now I have a more polished body of work which I can start to submit whenever the hell I want. How rockin’ is that?

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Wilco Top 10

In honor and preparation of the upcoming Wilco show in VT. Inspired by all things Top 10, including our 2010 Christmas card.

If I do nothing else right as a mother, taking my kids to 2 Wilco shows in one week should carry them to unknown places full of heart anyway. And the week after that? GOGOL BORDELLO BABY!!! I’m hoping Eugene’s pants are a bit looser than the last time we saw them.

1. Misunderstood (how long can Jeff hold an unresolved chord?) Here’s a recent live version, the opening number from a concert down in Alabammy this May

2. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart

3. Handshake Drugs (best-ever version was pulled from the youtubes, copyright infringement being what it is)

4. Radio Cure*

5. Airline to Heaven

6. Passenger Side

7. Born Alone

8. One Sunday Morning

9. A Shot in the Arm (you might also like to look up the live version in which Tweedy dons the Gram Parsons tribute suit)

10. California Stars

*Radio Cure

Cheer up, honey, I hope you can
There is something wrong with me
My mind is filled with silvery stuff
Honey, kisses, clouds of fluff
Shoulders shrugging off

Cheer up, honey, I hope you can
There is something wrong wit h me
My mind is filled with radio cures
Electronic surgical words

Picking apples for kings and queens of things I have never seen
Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable

Cheer up, honey, I hope you can
There is something wrong with me
My mind is filled with silvery stars
Honey, kisses, clouds of love

Picking apples for the kings and queens of things I’ve never seen
Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable
Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable
Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable
Oh, distance the way of making love understandable
Oh, distance the way of making love understandable

Cheer up honey, I hope you can

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Provincetown Mass: what’s not to love?

 The Red Inn, bayside, Provincetown, Mass

Last week, Hubby and I got to Provincetown BY OURSELVES for a couple of nights. It was sort of my birthday trip (July), sort of a belated anniversary trip (June), sort of a belated Hubby birthday trip (February).

Highlights included us not using our car for 2-and-half days. After we arrived at the Inn and parked, we used our commuter bikes to do whatever we needed, not hard considering how small Ptown is and how little was required of us. We biked up and down Commercial St. every day for coffee, the library, lunch, dinner. We biked to an ocean beach and walked in the Province Lands. The ocean side is only about 2 miles from The Red Inn which is on the tippy tip of the Bay side. It’s on the harbor, where the swimming is not so great, but where I find more sea glass than anywhere else on the Bay or the ocean. Any theories on this?.

There were 3 John Waters sightings (not unusual) but the great thing was this very snazzy blue blazer he was wearing. Maybe it had some sort of shiny dark blue fibers with a black slash pattern throughout. But it’s rude to stare so I can’t be sure.

Absolute highlight? Meeting William Sanderson and his wife at breakfast on our last day at the Inn.

William Sanderson, the amazing character actor who we all remember from Blade Runner and many other roles, but we’re not exactly sure which ones.

Hubby puts it best when he says that the reason you can’t remember Bill Sanderson in some roles is that he completely embodies his characters. He disappears into the role absolutely.

When I looked for a bio on Sanderson later in the day, I was amazed to find that he has a degree in law and that he was an army medic.

He’s a sharp one, that Bill Sanderson. He quoted Robert Frost and he got goosebumps when we told him we were from Amherst and that we’d recently visited the Emily Dickinson installation. His wife was also very friendly. I sure wish we could have talked to them some more.

I had a happy and funny interaction with the owner of Joe (whose name is Scott) about an unfortunate incident involving getting my favorite coffee-blended made. He was a peach and my coffee-blended, which I ordered from the beautiful man behind the counter (SO beautiful, I know his mama loves him), was fabulous.

Another highlight was our trip to Savory and Sweet Escapes on our way out-of-town on Thursday evening.

I have decided that the SWEET ESCAPE POMEGRANATE CHIP ICE CREAM ranks in the top 5 best ice cream experiences of my life. YOU MUST GO AND EAT THIS ICE CREAM!!! In the homemade waffle cone. Who cares if it is dripping all over your hands and legs when you are only halfway through? I don’t even like fruity ice cream. I don’t get ice cream in a cone most of the time. Unfuckingbelieveably amazing flavor. I’ll buy you one just to prove it to you, just tell me where to send the 5 bucks.

Though we are in a drought, it did rain in Ptown last Wednesday. We watched the storm roll in, lightening striking off in the distance, probably on the ocean side. The air cooled and the sky was beautiful.

I leave you now with the following song which is featured in the Wes Anderson flick Moonrise Kingdom (who among you remembers Music Monday?)

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I tell my sorrow to the stones (William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus)

When we were in Truro a couple of weeks ago, on one of my trips down to the beach, I began to dig in the sand at what promised to be a beautiful, black, smooth rock. The kind you find on the shore all over the beaches of New England. I love these smoothed-out ocean rocks and bring some home on every trip. I love all sorts of rocks, really, and with too many to count to choose from the practice is one of seeing, choosing, letting go, non-doing, randomness, and contemplation.

I am part of a larger whole, I am smaller than nature, I am one with nature, I am part of nature, I am perfect, I am beautiful, I am imperfect, I am flawed, where I am is by chance, who finds me, who finds me beautiful, who holds me. I am subject to forces beyond my control.

I dug the smooth black rock out of the sand. As I walked and held it, rolling it around, moving it from my right to left hand and back again, my palms began to turn an orange-y rust color. AHA! This was not a rock, but some sort of iron ore or a shot. The strange thing is, it does not smell like iron and only a slight undertone of rust is visible in it.

I have looked up iron ore on google images, and what I’ve found is definitely rust-colored and not uniform in shape.

I looked up images for cannonball and for the most part, what I found there is much rounder than what I’ve got.

My mother, who grew up during WWII in Nazi Germany with a violent, drunken father, is often in a state of high alert. As she advances in age, I notice that this state of fear is harder and harder for her to recognize and to release herself from. Still, when I spoke with her on the phone yesterday and she said I was really afraid, I knew she had more legitimate cause than usual.

My brother lives in a suburb of Denver and has been to the movie theater where the shootings occurred. I did not for a minute think that Dan was anywhere near the theater the night of the rampage. He is planning a trip to China right now, packing up many belongings for long-term storage. He is cautious with his time, he does not go to many movies. He is not the type to go to a late-night screening of the latest block-buster.

I know you are in a state of bewilderment, same as I am. I know you know that mentally ill people should not have access to guns. I know you love your family and your fellows.

I know you know about human nature and you know that I know, too.

I know we are all in a state of grief even though our lives go on and that we need to stick to the tasks at hand.

Good grief, people. I hope none of you lost someone in Colorado.

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How about this for 49?

Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought

Emily Dickinson

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Take Back Your Mink

Speaking of pearls (poils), there’s nothing quite like the Goldwyn Girls to liven things up.

I love that it’s a strip tease, but for different reasons…

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Time what an empty vapor ’tis!

This is me, singing, again. The video is grainier than usual, not sure why.

There are a couple of other examples of the same song on youtube. Check them out.

Fleeting Days

Time, what an empty vapor ’tis!
Our days, how swift they are!
Swift as an Indian arrow flies,
Or like a shooting star.

Our life is ever on the wing,
And death is ever nigh;
The moment when our lives begin
We all begin to die.

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twinkly on the Cape, June 30-July 7, 2012

Provincetown: a pair of little dogs in a pink doggie stroller being fed ice cream by their owner. Egregious behavior? Not until she licked from the same cone and then tried to force feed one of them when it roundly rejected the ice cream. Other details available, just ask.

Window at one of my favorite galleries. On my way to a body and hair like this? Time will tell.

3 flying seahorses grace the handles of the Lipton Cup in the Provincetown Library. The cup was awarded to the great sailing ship the Rosa Dorothea, a reproduction of which is on the 2nd floor. When I say reproduction, I mean half-size, 66 feet long. Part of it is lit in pink. A Cape Cod must-see.

living sculpture:

Advertising for a show, The Naked Boys, I think. After you walk past these guys night after night, it’s awfully hard not to pull that terrycloth down and see what’s going on under there. And such pretty legs. Dang.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch:

Yes, this is the pool that I loved. High tide was often on either side of my poetry writing workshop. The Bay beaches lost a lot of shoreline a couple of years ago in a severe storm, so when the tide is high, there is just water next to a fence; this is why I jumped in the pool morning, noon, and night, naked when possible (also hot flashes are abundant ’round my these parts). I want to go back to the same house. I want to live in the pool.

The full moon last week. It makes me think of the nursery rhyme boys and girls come out to play, the moon doth shine as bright as day….I swear I’ve posted that song here somewhere, but I am too lazy to find it. Perhaps a video is in order?

4th of July, fireworks on the beach. This was a kick, fireworks dotting the shore as far as the eye could see with the closest large display in the harbor at Provincetown. The great thing was that everyone was happy and running around in the cool windy air. Beyond Ptown, on the ocean side, we could see lightening. What a night. Here you can see what someone was shooting off right next to us. Tide coming in, but look how wide the beach is still…

All the girls (lucky man, that Paul):

Back to Ptown: Hubby and my mom, in front of Puzzle Me This, the best store in the world for games and puzzles

a very bold woman or a lost extra from the set of Lord of the Rings:

This is from our last night in Provincetown. We want to laugh at first, but it’s not funny, you know. It reminds me of the Jacques Brel song about the sailors and the whores.

Can you imagine?

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one of those tiny errors that drive me nuts

First, Hallelujah, we have wi-fi from an unprotected network. As long as I sit on the upper deck of our house rental (from which I can see the ocean of Cape Cod Bay, can see the sand peeking through the water at low tide—even without my glasses—can feel breeze on my bare skin), I get reception.

BUT WAIT! I have now adjourned to the bedroom, on the same side of the house as the deck, and I have connectivity! No mosquitoes, just the sound of the bullfrogs from the huge pond below! This Cape gets better every minute!

I made a mistake in my recent post, thinking that the puzzle-head sculpture was in front of PAAM; as I was walking in town later in the day, I realized it was in front of one of the many galleries on Commercial Street. You know how I like to be accurate if at all possible, so I thought I’d let you know.

Here are two more photos of sculptures of heads, both of these from the excellent sculpture park, deCordova in Concord, Mass:

I don’t really know why I am putting these here now except that they are extremely cool works of art….

I have much more to share. Provincetown; my poetry; my poetry workshop; the amazingly cool, inspiring, fun, beautiful, poetic, art installation at the Emily Dickinson Museum, “Dwell in Possibility,” which we managed to sneak in on Friday before we left town for the Cape. I’ll give you a peek:

You know, this exhibit has been up for weeks and weeks and although I’d driven by parts of it a number of times, the family waited to see it until the day before it was to be taken down. BUT, oh, how worthwhile. So much to tell, so many poems to post….where to begin?

Internet is sketchy unless I’m on the deck and tho the moon be full and lo I want to write and post, I will retire for now. I think the poems I have been working on in the last little while of my life are good. I am getting better at editing.

Just know that I can see the flat ocean in the distance; it is close, not even a quarter mile down the slope

July is the month of my birth

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