LaurieWrites

I'm on my way.

Everything is off kilter. Everything. It's all knocked around like crazy shit gets knocked around.

I hate it.

Let's see. The list of everything that's akilter is boring, so I'll spare you. It's nothing that sounds that terrible even in the aggregate. It's just a bunch of...

Like, wait. See? Just there? I had to stop writing this because I was overcome with a sudden urge to purchase "Goodbye Stranger" as performed by the almost-elderly group Supertramp and so I stopped and bought it and then got further distracted by the opportunity to acquire a Skid Row EP. Problems. No focus. 

GOODBYE STRANGER, IT'S BEEN NICE. HOPE YOU'LL FIND YOUR PARADISE.

Also? PARK AVENUE leads to SKID ROW. FYI.

Well, that little problem's solved, but I still can't write for shit. I feel stupid all the time. If I've interacted with you in any way in the past two months, I probably feel like an idiot for some reason related to something I said or did or wrote. I can't finish e-mails. I can't make decisions. I am deleting this post in my head right the hell now.

I don't know what happens to my brain. I do know though that after much internal whatever over a whole bunch of different whatevers since the end of August, the other day I was so humiliated in a meeting by someone I generally trust that something further snapped. I admitted to a chorus of agreement that I sucked at something I do routinely in my job, and what it meant when I finally could think again was that (brace for this quantum leap) I am bad at everything. I have no aptitude for what I do. I am a terrible person with no skill whatsoever at interacting with the people I need to interact with daily to accomplish what I am charged with accomplishing.

I wanted to walk out the door and never come back and make good on that continued threat that I really only make to myself to drop out and rent beach chairs in coastal Carolina.

AND I WILL GO ON SHINING SHINING LIKE BRAND NEW. I'LL NEVER LOOK BEHIND ME MY TROUBLES WILL BE FEW.

Cue ironic Supertramp interjection.

If I could sum up this period photographically it would be thus:

Hi, that's my last New York hotel room when I was there a couple of weeks ago. 22nd floor, no screen, and a weird compulsion to jump - I'm Super Girl. I can fly - in spite of zero desire to end my life decimated on the sidewalk.

I know. It's horrible. It's not good. What it is is the truth, and after weeks of not showing up here to dump my thoughts and feelings into this little white box, I feel it's the least I can do.

Good news? I have a little bit. The Washington Capitals bring me joy. I'm spending money I ought not to spend on tickets to home games therefore because it's actually fun to go (Except for when they lose to New YORK, the lowest ranked team in the Southeast, that was AWESOME.) and if there is something I believe is underrated it's fun. I mean, I'm on Twitter, and I read the litany of activities, some of it family/kid-related, some of it personal, and mostly it just sounds like...a litany, which in the Catholic church is basically the repetition of something over and over and over and over until you feel you've reached the end of the list of the saints or the popes or the rosary, whatever it is you're litanying. Fun? Probably not. And no I'm not saying these daily activities can't be, I'm just saying a lot of times it feels more like a list to check off than something genuinely fun. 

I don't like where this is going now. I don't like preaching about fun because if you want the opposite of fun that's probably up there.

THE WRITING'S ON THE WALL.

Anyway, it's not all bad, I guess that's the point. I had what might count as a minor breakthrough yesterday. I have some ideas of things that will make things better. And what's more important is that I had the crystallized idea that I could make things better, that I could change them intentionally and mindfully just by resetting the dials, by rebooting - like my blog friend Leah is doing, but not exactly. I don't have to do what I'm doing. I don't have to stay in the same ill-advised place. That was the old way. It doesn't have to be that way anymore. And my incessant feeling of disconnection to anything - a family of my own, a home, a community - is not so much a destiny as it is a current state of affairs that I don't particularly care for and that in the next chapter I have some say over whether it remains the same or completely, positively changes.

And that's really the heart of the matter, gentle reader. It's not as bad as it sounds. It's actually the best possible outcome of this year of transition and change and pervasive, underlying grief.

Maybe that's why I'm buying the Skid Row ep. Maybe that's why my Thanksgiving plan this year includes a roadtrip and the beach with my family for my uncle's milestone birthday and a week with my college best friend in a southern coastal city. And I'm so counting the days, counting them over and over in my hands. I will be in the sun and the warmth on your birthday, that also happens to be the birthday of two little girls I'll be visiting, who will be high on a trip to Disney and will be all the promise in the world that everyone needs to see. I will not be in the space I'm in that is currently a space of biding time, of not feeling good about where I go at the end of the day.

Maybe that's why I have this and a couple of other numbers on repeat.

Oh, what the hell. Bonus!

Points if you guess which one contains part of my high school yearbook quote. And at which erstwhile lead singer's concert I broke my dress this summer while making a completely overaged fool of myself but having such a good time I didn't give a DAMN. Lord, will live and die a closet groupie.

I think sometimes I have to go back to go forward, and right now in my mind a lot of the time I'm in a concert parking lot with a pint of Jack Daniels in my jean jacket pocket, looking over the next 20 years, looking at a few forks in the road where although I went left now I have new ones and a chance to go in a different direction.

It can be worse than that, is all I'm saying.

Recollection

Memories slip down the sidewalk in a golden Ohio autumn.

I think they took you, but I’m not certain.

I can’t grasp onto it – anything, really.

There are things I can almost touch,

but they don’t seem relevant.

Boston, 1964. Summer. Your eyes. Canada.

Some things you did. You always did good

things. That’s why when she comes in the door

and talks for a minute, and I see your eyes,

older, I get twisted. My mind sketches

ideas, chases shadows into the valleys of memory.

The things I want to say to make it (what is it?)

right circle back to my brother

on third base, a man’s angry

eyes. My father? That seems obvious.

Why do you ask?

You do seem like the sort

who would want to know. You seem – quite –

helpful, in your way. You seem sad,

wishing for something,

and it passes.

I have several things to show you, but I don’t

know that they’re what you’d like to see. Still,

they are mine. Come with me.

I'm clearing off an old hard drive. I wrote poetry pretty consistently for awhile, a few years ago. I wanted to do a series in the voices of people who had Alzheimer's disease, because I'd just come to the end of my time working as a social worker with them and their families.I stopped here. 

Now's the Time the Time is Now

This was written as part of Genie Alisa's Living Out Loud project for October.

Music is one of the most important things in my world and I've spent most of my life chasing the kind that moves me, makes me happy, makes me think, makes me feel better, or quite simply allows me to rock out - an essential component of my mental health. It's impossible for me to name one theme song, and I can really barely stop at less than ten. There have just been that many that fit at various times and seasons, for reasons that made perfect sense at the time and usually still do. I've latched on to some - Closer to Fine by the Indigo Girls, Change by Blind Melon, To Live is To Fly by Cowboy Junkies, Coming Home by Cinderella - for a long damned time, such that they've become part of my eternal playlist. But when it comes to a theme song, what could really be more powerful than the one that includes the lyrics I've had as my Facebook "About Me" since I set up my page?

Don't answer that. Just know that these two lines from Led Zeppelin's Ramble On are as close to a lifelist as I've managed to get in the past few years that have held an almost unbearable amount of change:

"Now's the time the time is now

to sing my song."

You know, I'm not going around the world and I do not have to find my girl. I had, however, been that way - whatever way that was I was - very nearly (at least) ten years to the day, and it was getting really old. It was move forward or die, sing or go mute, live, or, predictably, die. At least inside.

I grew up on Zeppelin. My parents saw them live, a bit of trivia I held up proudly at parties in college where one of my clearest memories remains of my friend Joey jumping on his bed to "D'yer Maker," singing "Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, you don't have to go," etc. That was when I came to own them, learned all the words, really got that the bands I knew from my own era had stolen pretty much everything they had from them but oh well - all the good stuff has to start somewhere, right?

I moved on deeper into rock 'n roll, as deep as it may be possible for a person in a life like mine to get. I listened to Led Zeppelin continually, repeatedly, and when the time came where all the roads I'd taken had led me to a place I did not want to be in any way, shape or form, I found in Ramble On the lyrical permission I needed to grab onto something that gave me something to grab onto. It wasn't much - shouldn't seem like much, anyway, just an old song. But when you don't know what your original work is anymore, when the words run dry, I thank God that I've immersed myself in some really good stuff that other people have written and played over the years, to help me get back on track until I can work it out on my own.

It's a mantra now, in the car, in a meeting. "Now's the time the time is now." And sometimes I don't even get to the second line, because the first is enough - all I need to ground me, a weird, British rock zen koan.

But it really should be taken further, because if it's time for anything it's  to sing my song. I get it, even when it's hard, I get it.