How could I forget?

How much I love(d) Sarah McLachlan… whilst listening a soul sucking mean social media music provider, this song came on: Drawn to the rhythm and afterward I fell in a rabbit hole. The second CD that I ever bought was ‘fumbling towards ecstasy’. I think I was 13 or 14 and I spent the next few months with it on repeat constantly. I really felt connected to the words/songs and thought that they meant one thing, and I suppose then it did. I listened to the entire album today. I found myself instantly reconnecting. It was like visiting an old friend, one that you held secrets with and wax nostalgic but realize how much you’ve both changed. You realize with age and hindsight your previous way of understanding things are no longer the reality. 

To you at least, everything has changed and you have a hard time remembering what made you love them before, because you didn’t even know then, the things that make you love them now. Ha. Perhaps this doesn’t make anymore sense in written form than it did outloud, but in my mind it was quite a profound thought to me. 

Which led me to the train of thought about sharing things with friends or people you consider to wise, as you respect and value what they think and say. I’ve been having some pretty big contemplations as I’m want to do, as soon as things slow down, become complacent, comfortable (usually during the winter). I started thinking about the people that I would talk to then, and now, and the differences in how I would make decisions based upon what they would say. For example, I need to make a couple big decisions in the very near future and if I asked ten of my “go to people” (ha, ten is a stretch of people I would talk to about things) and how I could anticipate the ten, very different opinions they would give. They would be based on who they are, what they know about me, what they know about the situations, where they are in their own moods, lives, development, maturity, what they could have to gain or lose based on the outcome of the decision, etc. etc. etc.

And like the lyrics and meanings of songs, it’s all up to the listener’s present, their parallels to draw, their position to filter through. 

So how does one make a decision about big things? Do you meditate? Ask your parent? What if that’s not an option? Peers? Siblings? Bosses? Therapist? TAROT for goddess’s sake? (Which again, is just like the lyrics… concrete definitions are applied to the words which communicate the meaning of the song but what is heard and inferred, well… that’s on the listener.)

Who knows. Maybe I just think too much. Just watch the lovely Sarah not trying to guilt you into gifting to the ASPCA. Isn’t she beautiful? Ughhh it kills me. 

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Strychnine Summer

An oldie but a goodie…I always remember this poem this time of year.

Impending Summer causes

State dependent memories to invade my mind

Nostalgia triggered by a combination

Of the sun, STP’s “Creep”, and the linger of the sugar factory

Drifting around curves in a maroon ford tempo

Kisha hitting puddles, then American Beauty

Things that I had forgotten

like his brother’s birthday

Left like residual strychnine on my spine

Chlorine, boys and cigarettes

Morrison Hotel and the cliffs

Sheepherder bridge and you.

Waves of Homesickness

Hit me occasionally. I blame slacker. Most of my memories are fully associated with music and/or scents. Not unique, but still true.

This just came on and I for a minute, I was 19 again.

Sigh.

I still want to be friends with Tom Petty.

And a new guitar.

And to go to BC.

The bars are overrated.

XOXO

Tetrachromat

And I thought of you today,

in a comparative fashion.

It made me feel nostalgic;

To reflect on what must have

Simply been

my tertiary period;

cause that mud was so deep

It covered your brush guard and bowtie.

 

And I remembered everything

The good

The bad

The ugly.

Things I wish I’d forgot

Things I wish I hadn’t reframed

Eidetic pictures of

Red flags I painted over

Made into romantic pirate flags

 

And I wonder what he smells like

Will it remind me of you

Similar epigenetics;

chemistry

Evolution’s early warning system

These days I naturally rest around DEFCON III

(That’s just yellow these days)

 

And I was just recently informed

Only 2% of women recognize that color

You men, you don’t.

You go straight from blue to red

How fast depends on the green

Green like the quarter panel of your truck

With the slider I floated in and out of

Just to get you a Miller

Goat trails and water bars, right?

 

And I guess innocence was bliss

But this one surpasses those credentials

This one has photographic evidence

Proof that he was there

In fact, he’s already here

In ways you never could be

Not a bootleg version

Some recording you picked up or

trucks that you wrecked

like stories you retold

And I just don’t swallow anymore.

 

 

 

Gees I am such a slacker….

but…….only when it comes to my blog.

Seriously…Sorry friends…been doing the job-search-grad-school-hippy-hippy-shake (no really, its a thing) and then this week I’ve been in trainings….next week I am going to the ocean for a conference…it’s rough I tell ya, rough.

BUT every time I think the Universe is done throwing me curve balls, I get another one….this time it was an ok one though.

Facebook has this magical effed up skill of knowing who I have thought about or talked about recently and then WHAMO…they pop up on my radar.

Some people I am like:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I had almost forgot they existed!

And then others, I have a real soft spot for….

…sometimes I have “known” these people for 25 years…Oh my dear sweet ancient alien baby space monkey Jebus….25 years? Really?

I don’t always know anything about them except what has trickled through the rumor mill over the years….

What I remember from childhood is often very different from the people they have become…and yet, they are still those same people in my head.

Memory is a bittersweet thing.

But still, I wish them so much happiness it makes my chest hurt. Huh.

It really is all about love and energy. Even if you don’t know it.

I’ve been through some emotional roller coasters lately and the one concrete thing I have realized is that loving others makes me feel good, but they don’t have to love me back for me to get that benefit.

 

 

back in the day

I would make mix tapes. I would call a radio station repeatedly and sit with my finger on the pause button (on the tape player that was already on record) just waiting for that first few notes of a song so I could record it asap….

That was special.

If you got a mix tape from me, you knew I was madly in love with you and I had been obsessively thinking of the perfect order, perfect songs, perfect everything….

Now you just make a lame playlist and click burn. It’s relatively easy if you have a nice collection of mp3s, which I do…..

I have made one just today (granted I had to purchase two songs to complete the theme…) but I did it.

I was proud of myself and yet, I missed my tape player. Especially when I saw the scotch tape I no longer needed to record over something and the pencil I no longer needed to rewind ever so lightly to use the tape length perfectly…

Kids today? Lazy. 😉

And yet, I miss the KK.

This is an old poem I wrote…about the banality of going to the same bar.  I read it tonight and got all nostalgic.

I wanna go now.

I miss Kober.

I miss beer pong.

I miss Chuck.

I miss Dennis.

I even miss that hoochie that suckered TeaBag into buying her bazillion dollar shoes.

Fuck your couch.

I wanna sing!

Do we HAVE to go to the Klover Klub, really?

Smoke filtered colored light

Tequila egos

Trashed girl crying

Cue ball clack

Spotty conversation

Sticky table

Rancid toilet

Inappropriate song choice

For a good time call….

Herds of girls

Pairs of boys

Angry drinkers

Painted women; laugh

Stained ceiling tiles

Uneven stools

Broken bottles

Incense sales

Sound layers

Tobacco and Clinique’ Happy

Tippy chairs

Tipsy idiots

Drunken debauchery.

Mens et manus

I was thinking, a little nostalgically I suppose today about people I have loved. And the oddest thing occurred to me, something I have briefly pondered before but really examined today: I remember hands.

Some people remember a lover’s eyes, lips, hair, voice, whatever.

Poets write of lips and hips.

“Eyes are the windows to the soul….”

Not for me. I had to really try to think of some people’s eye colors who I should just KNOW but their hands? I can instantly picture them:

How they looked.

How they felt.

If they had callouses or not, and where.

The shape of their nails.

Length of their nails.

Size of their hands.

Whether they chewed their nails or not.

Scars on their hands.

Tattoos on their hands.

Rings that they wore.

Whether their palms were smooth or always wrinkled.

How they held a cigarette.

How they played a guitar.

How they held onto a steering wheel or a gear shift.

Whether they were right-handed or left.

Just a casual thought that makes me smile, I wanted to share.

 

To be 15 again…

Summer breezes speak of puppy love,

boys on skateboards and innocent kisses.

Well meaning lies that drip from lips

like bodies on docks,

firm breasts and cherry chapstick…

Laying in grass, holding hands

counting clouds and freckles; skin constellations

Lemonheads and hair brushed behind ears by a fingertip

the first indications of ancient secrets to be discovered

pupil dilation and shivers of longing…

Wind ravaged hair from the back of a motorcycle

in the cool crisp musk of late night,

Camel filters and Dr. Pepper

your incoherent sleepy whispers

and promise.

 

In honor of his birthday, a poem from 1996….

The Traveler

He’d been traveling a long while in the back of a Greyhound bus

Searching for Happiness, who eluded him with a come hither/go far lust.

For many years now, he’d been lonely, longing for someone to hold

Knowing all too well the cliché, ‘all that glitters isn’t gold.’

Somewhere along that road, our paths had slightly crossed

We both came to realize what we had gained and still had lost.

What a coincidence it had been, that right turn at New Orleans!

(Apparently, we had a psychic bond ~scientifically impossible~ like twins…

“Unconsciously, somehow” he supposed, he’d always been looking for me.

We’d spent all our money and were still ravenously hungry.

And then, he gave me his last sunflower seed, a small but meaningful gift.

Someday to be returned he said, “In the place of a little kiss.”