Nothing bad happened again today.

Kings of Convenience w/ Feist – Know How

Anybody got any talent at 3rd grade math? Because, um, I think I flunked that or scammed my way out of it or something:

My greatest digit is a 9, but I’m less than 900. I’m 1 more than a multiple of 10, and the sum of my digits is 12. What number am I?

[I have no fucking idea whatsoever.]

bruce springstein - pink cadillac
I love this song today for some reason, I dunno.

post-thanksgiving

Alls I did was run, nap, and vacuum out my laptop keyboard. This thing has seen a lot of wee morning toast, and it is nice to have the g and a keys back without bang-banging them, but it’s hard to really call that a WORKday.

Snow Patrol guy and Damien Rice girl :
Gary Lightbody and Lisa Hannigan: Some Surprise

Lenny Kravitz – Can’t Get You Off My Mind

Eddie Vedder - Hard Sun This is from the Into the Wild soundtrack (book by Jon Krakauer):

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal – that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. But they are the highest reality . . . The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indestructible as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of a rainbow which I have clutched. Thoreau-"Walden, or Life in the Woods"

I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one—that my body might—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The SOLID earth! The ACTUAL world! The COMMON sense! Contact! Contact! WHO are we? WHERE are we? Thoreau-"Ktaadn"

bonus track from DmS : "Always Be My Baby," Mariah Carey [the mood-name you’re looking for is girly(?)]

over the rhine – trouble

Thievery Corporation - The State of the Union

xmas shopping

st. germain - sure thing

Nine Inch Nails - God Given (Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert)

"Funkier Than a Mosquito's Tweeter," Nina Simone

don’t be a stranger – perfect problem repost

pearl jam - better man [acoustic]

jeff tweedy - simple twist of fate

"Sweetness," The Waifs

They save his life once an hour, she says. Jacking him w adrenalin and a breathing machine until the blood pressure hits the point at which it’s safe to give him more morphine. Repeat. He’s 89. I remember him solid like a little wall of a person, with hands like old growth root tangles. (Stop.)

I tell her I’ll send a box full of the jams he likes, and I do send it. Why not?

My sister says, Ma you should tell him everything is okay, that We Will All Be Okay. My mom hangs up on her.

And you feel like such a traitor, every time, bc he does come back and then you take the baby for a visit and he pets her fat arm and he knows enough to know he likes that a lot. And if they had stopped dragging him back, then he’d not have seen the baby. So you’re an asshole.

Still (I'll prolly eat my words but) it seems having oxygen blown down your throat and 20 drugs (AT LEAST omg) running through your system forcing your heart to beat with your children by your bedside sobbing DON’T GO!!!! is not a pleasant way to go. Absolutely nothing is more unnerving than your child in tears and in pain. That puts me in the highest state of distress that I ever get in. To die in that state seems like the exact opposite of what I’d hope for, i.e. I’d prefer not ever to be in a state of annoyed terror but especially not if I’m trying to concentrate on something as big as dying. (FYI, when I get ready to die, do not tell me THEN that you love me so much your eyeballs are gonna melt outa your head – speak now.)

My sister says hell maybe they’ll figure out how to taxidermy him with a heartbeat and we’ll see him at Christmas. (We laugh like assholes.)

Otherwise it was a really nice day. It was warm and rainy and I canceled class in the afternoon and did some xmas shopping online and felt good to be alive. I miss my grandparents. I wish they were still alive and not nothingbutsuffering, and that I could visit them and sew with my grandma while Doug fried eggs over hard. He was always laughing.

"The Way I Am," Ingrid Michaelson

riding to K-mart for an Icee

Everyone says a funeral in Chicago for Thanksgiving dinner is in the offing . . . we’ll see. I can’t, literally can’t, find a reaction . . . I used to think that you were alive a long time, then old (odd/annoying/amusing/inspiring/achey), then dead. But some people spend a long time at DYING, which is a very different thing than either old or dead. And it’s so absorbing in its way that it obliterates the aging process and it also makes death itself so remote that, really, it’s like planet death – you know it’s out there, maybe you should even be planning for it, but then again how could/would you anyway except to try in a general way not be an asshole cz life’s short(?)

I dunno how I’m gonna feel when it becomes a real fact. Some kind of really lousy. They, my grandma in particular, always thought I was fantastic, the wonderful one, most able and most blessed, as if all the others were good too but watered down kinda. My sister still resents it, and I don’t blame her. It was very important to me to have their expectations bolstering my own, otherwise I would have expected a whole lot less. Even when I was miserable, deep down I expected to be happy and was pissed that I wasn’t and kicked up dust making a fuss to get the story back on track. Then I’d visit them and tell them all about it and they’d say ‘That’a Girl!’ It’s not that they expected me to “be a doctor” or any specific thing, they just always said “that one will be blessed”, and so when I wasn’t I felt as if surely there must be some mistake(!) I’d get back in the line of life and foot-tap-tap, honing my re-application argument, armscrossy.

The Aliens - Robot Man (Hot Chip remix)

ANA CAROLINA E SEU JORGE - É ISSO AI

[who'll be my role model?]

"You Can Call Me Al," Jens Lekman

the dog got a bun. huh. what makes him think, I wonder, that marrying a dog wouldn't be as bad as stoning one? I mean, I don't mean to be crude whatever, but I have a feeling the bitch doesn't see the wedding night coming and might damn well curse him, eh?

(I really should be working, I am working, but grumpily and with stupidity thrown in outa spite.)

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (Cyndi Lauper) -Six Figure Transatlantic

pissed (and pissed some more)

very long day. very tired. will sleep a bit then bounce arino.

Tom Waits — Straydog
Tom Waits — Walk Away

The studio owner emailed me. I went. He didn’t have insurance, lost everything. Like the Amish, they don’t believe in insurance. For the ones who can’t not, the practices will resume in his home, which turns out to be an artist loft one-room typa deal – the BMW I thought was his belongs to a doctor who rented space in the church too – that he shares with one of the instructors. We went to see alternative rental spaces for the new studio. I’m not sure what this will mean. I have the feeling it will mean something.

He was smiling. I thought that was kind of . . . I dunno, kind of mostly admirable and a bit nutso. He/they, the rest of “us”, really and truly believe the mantras: that one has nothing to lose because one came into the world with nothing. The only thing that is real to them is themselves, and the self is fleeting besides. Ultimately their own selves are their works of art, but sand art, not to be clung to [in fear]. (pause) Indifference is part of despondence which is hopelessness which is a NO NO for me too much to unclench. I can’t get to relinquishment of clinging to life and to things I love. I want to want to . . . but end up wanting to build a house more hahah :/

The Twilight Singers (w Mark Lanegan) - Live with me (Massive Attack cover)

good enough is not good enough

I don’t want to merely survive (a "survivor" is a bar-set-too-low category, hrrmph) - I want to thrive. In relationships that are solid, mindful and safe. In works that feel purposeful. In some way better than I started before each kick in the face. What really kicked me about the fire is the loss of those people. The owner, the ex-Marine with the PTSD body like a box of rocks he’s been re-mastering for years, and the instructor who went through the windshield of his car and at 24 years old has had to re-learn to walk already as one of his lifetimes . . . all those people who were concentrating too.

But. If I’m standing in shit, I don’t feel like sitting down much. So I went out to the bale site and made clay slip and then plaster all day long and practiced how to trowel and had coffee with Bale-D and the pastor, both of whom are on their 2^nd or 3^rd lives of what they expect to be a pile of them. Like the yoga people, they talk about their lives like they would about a house they’re building, and swear at it when something doesn’t work right and re-arrange it endlessly and grunt and shove at it. And like the work. Mostly. Or try to anyway.

I can’t say as I ended up “la la la if at first you don’t succeed” these last few days – I was and am pissed as hell that I have to sustain any more losses and get around another impasse as I try to get to some kinda HEA (Happily ever After). But when we couldn’t find the comb I scored plaster with my fingernails:

It's gotten another coat since this pic, and the corners are being built up to taper at the top, and those are pagoda-style trough gutters made of wood - I'm not sure how those carry the water properly, but I'm scheduled for carpentry this coming weekend so I guess I'll find out.

p.s. Doug's eating, not much but he can't resist KFC entirely.

janis joplin - maybe
(yee ha)

Raul Midón - Pick Somebody Up (high rec)
video: (Windows) (Quicktime) (Real)
World Within a World (buy) ; Web

state of mind:

yesterday I found out my grandpa is refusing to eat, a couple days now, and my high-strung mother is with him flipping out . . . so I got up early, thought about how endlessly cheerful my grandpa has always been, set my mind to hold steady, and dressed for church(s), i.e. the studio and then a candle - but when I got there, I found that the yoga studio burnt to the ground yesterday, taking the entire landmark Elmwood church that housed it down to ashes

self help reading + music

A world claimed to be the creation of a good and powerful God, but which nevertheless contains so much evil and suffering --This is surely the greatest difficulty holding people back from religious belief, and it is one that continually troubles religious believers. One could not claim that there is a complete and straightforward answer available to remove the perplexity. Interestingly, science is of some assistance in this regard. Its understanding of how the world works shows that natural processes are inextricably entangled with each other. They cannot be separated out, so that those with good consequences could have been retained by a competent creator who, at the same time, eliminated those with bad consequences. The integrity of creation is a kind of package deal. For example, the process of genetic mutation produced new forms of life, but it has also resulted in malignancy. You cannot have the one without the other . . . Why are there not repeated divine interventions to avert evil consequences? Because such things could only happen in a magical world, and that kind of world is not this one, because its creator is not a capricious magician. Only a world with sufficient reliability for deeds to have foreseeable consequences could be one in which moral responsibility was exercised. These insights do not dispose of all the anguish and anger that we feel in the face of individual human suffering, but they suggest that it is not simply gratuitous, easily removed by a God who was a bit less callous.


-from “One of the Hosts”, John Polkinghorne

"If I Lie Down," Aloha
"If I Ain't Got You," Alicia Keys

(omg) – standing around making ‘do you want to touch my boobies?’ faces for a living is painful-looking, truly, as if someone should call in a humanitarian effort to put an end to the horror

davy jones - personal penguin (moo ba lalala)

long day

Benny Bentall - A Man Is (web)