I taught my first yoga class tonight.

It’s about an inch shy of the wettest June on record here, cosmic wah wah.

My class was on the throat, exercises for strengthening and clearing. About the time Elmer was heading outa town, something knocked my car sideways and even Ears, who was sitting right next to the subsequent dents, didn’t see a thing. The witch says I was Godsmacked, which was exactly my interpretation even before she said it. In short, been 'choked up'.

I can offer a modified exercise, based on the ancient wisdom of women who pound on their chests and keen when they’ve lost something: Sit on the floor, put your hands behind you, let your head fall, lean back (45 degree angle) and make a moaning sound that vibrates the throat - give it at least 5 minutes. Look at the wall behind you or close your eyes and roll em back into your head. Think of (for example): What you tell yourself about how you’re a fuck up and you’ll never do this or accomplish that or get free of whatever; stuff you say in your head to someone who is dead that reverberates back in a boomerang of wah; stuff someone said to you to hurt you that you can’t forget; a picture of a face you can’t let go – any image that you’d rather avoid but sometimes can't; anything and everything that gives you nagging grief; what you would try to say with your last breath. I’d say, “I’m sorry, so so sorry.”

Maybe I was hung for a crime that I deeply regretted in my last life and “I’m sorry” was the last thing I couldn’t say – it feels that way, like I’ve had “I’m sorry” stuck in my throat since my first wail. It’s not a lie, I am really sorry.

So lean back and push your throat up to the sky: I am bad, I remember, I will miss you, I see your face, I am sorry . hMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm it loose, (wah it out).

Cuz the thing is, people are counting on us all.

So ya can’t go around being a choking hazard.

----

hi rec acoustic covers:

kt tunstall - I want u back (MJ again)
Laura Tsaggaris: Can’t Let Go

To see a ring in your dream, symbolizes emotional wholeness, continuity and commitments. To dream that you lose a ring or someone has stolen your ring, represents insecurity. A ring is the idea of a commitment, whether romantic or non-romantic.

we were hunting for it, him trailing me but only because I'm smaller and quicker not because he didn't want to be there (I think), and we were looking for it in crowded places overgrown like pawn shops full of flotsam, a thick ring (wedding band?), a tube/circle that I could fit my finger into with cut outs and made of bone, ivory maybe, and I kept putting the ones we'd find into my hand, testing them with the skin of my palm but they'd be wrong bc they were too cold as if mixed with metal, and bone is cool-warm not cold and there had to be carved holes, and I felt purposeful and was beathing evenly, trying to stay calm and focused [note the feeling, the witch teaches me, because it is the feeling that makes the symbols readable], so that we'd find it eventually but not get hectic about it meantime - I was with Mark (I'm pretty sure, but he was always behind me - a man, bearded and bigger and stronger and slower [than me] and familiar), so when I woke up I wondered if it were a memory or . . . then I read this (randomly, under "science", my fave Sunday morning category) in the news, and that's what we were looking for, just like that only shorter and thicker enough so that my finger would block the holes along it but fit into either end

dream symbol, bone: Support of self. Personal integrity. Strength of character (as in being a "solid person"). See also the particular area of the body

To notice your palm in your dream, suggests that you hold all the knowledge you need in you own hands. You need to reach and utilize your full potential. It also symbolizes openness and if you have a generous nature

. . . the flute is the human heart, and a heart which is made hollow will become a flute for the God of love to play upon. When the heart is not empty, in other words, when there is not scope in the heart, there is no place for love. Rumi, the great poet of Persia, explains this idea more clearly. He says the pains and sorrows the soul experiences through life, are like holes made in a reed flute, and it is by making these holes that a player makes the flute out of a reed. This means that the heart of man is first a reed, and the sufferings and pains it goes through make it a flute, which can then be used by God as the instrument for the music that He constantly wishes to produce. But as every reed is not a flute, so every heart is not His instrument. As the reed can be made into a flute, so the human heart can be turned into an instrument, and can be offered to the God of love. It is the human heart which becomes the harp of the angels; it is the human heart which is known as the lute of Orpheus. It was on the model of the heart of man that the first instrument of music was made, and no earthly instrument can produce that music which the heart produces, raising the mortal soul to immortality

Shivaree: Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough (MJ cover [with flute])

went to a thing last night, some presentation by peace gurus - I dunno, so I go to a thing or not go to a thing, waiting for the end of the world or not. so I go to this thing, they hand me a stick, and I just stand there a second trying to think of a good word but all I can think of is ________ so I say "quiet", dead quiet

Sara Watkins: Lord, Won’t You Help Me

[couldn't have written it better myself]

"Galaxy of the Lost (Lightspeed Champion cover)," Florence and the Machine

Mike and Ruthy: Hang Me

In midnight sleep of many a face of anguish,

Of the look at first of the mortally wounded, (of that

indescribable look,) . . .

Long have they pass'd, faces and trenches and fields,

Where through the carnage I moved with a callous

composure, or away from the fallen,

Onward I sped at the time - but now of their forms at night,

I dream, I dream, I dream.

--Walt Whitman, "Old War Dreams"

Girlyman: All Through the Night (Cyndi Lauper)

soltice storm 6-20-09

Glen Tomasetti: Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier

The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we could even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. . . . but souls never really touch their object. - Emerson

eels - climbing to the moon

I wash your ankles

with my tears. Unhem

my sweep of hair

and burnish the arch of your foot.

Still your voice cracks above me.

I cut off my hair and toss it across your pillow.

A dark towel

like the one after sex.

I'm walking out,

my face a dustpan,

my body stiff as a new broom.

It is the old way that girls

get even with their fathers --

by wrecking their bodies on other men.

--Louise Erdrich, "Mary Magdalene"

Kristen Vigard: Man from Mars (joni mitchell)

bye Elmer

I hope his woman was waiting w/ budweiser on other side. (wah)



mazzy star - into dust

"I grieve that grief can teach me nothing." - Emerson

talked to K - Geod, I'm chokin round the pain and it's not even mine. who would you trust to give a shit if something was really bad (like if one of your folks were dying in intolerable pain)? heaven help you if you don't even know = the wretched lesson of today

for virgo: When I was 19 years old, a so-called psychic predicted I would die when I was 24. As much as I scoffed at his careless quackery, his words subliminally worried me for years. On the day I turned 25 I celebrated extra hard. Partly because of that experience, I've always tried to be impeccably conscientious about how I conduct myself as a fortune-teller. I've vowed never to manipulate you with melodramatic prophecies that could distort your free will. So it's with a cautious sense of responsibility that I offer the following augury: The weeks ahead could be one of the most illuminating and successful times of the last five years. [sounds frankly ominous]

"The Book Of Love (Magnetic Fields cover)," Catherine A.D., seems like a good vigil song for Elmer, my friends' father, who is reported as both panicking and funny in the face of death

denison witmer - these days

To see a swimming pool full of water in your dream is lucky, symbolizing that you will find much happiness and pleasure in friendship and love. An empty pool means trouble in love and friendship, or that you are not feeling enough affection in your life. A swimming pool is about your spiritual side. These dreams normally focus on specific spiritual abilities which are indicated by other symbols in the dream. (a man finding and fixing and filling it, the kids swimming in it, I was underwater watching [holding my breath])

bonus - hip- honey please

counting crows - start again

Human Highway: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

solomon burke - none of us are free

new pup pic

alex

"Take It to the Limit (Eagles cover)," Etta James

It's "International Disturbed Person Day" - you're supposed to send a disturbed friend an email, like "I don't care if you pee your pants sometimes on the special bus, I think you're great" typa deal.

I've gotten one email so far, and am not sure if that means I'm unloved or seem less disturbed than I imagine. Boringly, it's probably both.

Mary Lou Lord: I Don’t Want To Get Over You (Magnetic Fields cover)

sarah vaughan - lover man (jazzelicious remix)

hung out w milk-n-cookies and officer tonight - ya just never know about people. turns out she's teacher to the village witch's kid . . . I appreciate what is (authentically) prefaced by "never told this to anybody but you're ok so", don't you? I got to see pics of the ghost (whoa), 2 of em almost exactly alike, taken by MnC herself at different times, and heard all about the sighting at the top of the stairs of a woman, a story which matched the 'homeless spirit guide' dream of mine in almost every detail. made the hair on my arms stand up.

fyi the spirit of wayne gretzky might be spending a chunk of eternity in the basement next door on one of those barka whatever loungers they've got tricked out for him ;)

Jurassic 5 - If You Only Knew

for virgo: Up to one-tenth of the population is left-handed. Yet for centuries, even as late as the 1950s, there were social stigmas against left-handers -- similar in some ways to the perverse prejudice that has been directed toward homosexuals. So strong was the taboo that many parents tried to convert their naturally left-handed children into righties. Thankfully, this absurd form of repression is now defunct. (Five of the last seven American presidents have been left-handed.) But it's a good reminder that there are countless other ways in which our culture still attempts to coax us or force us into not being who we really are. But here's the good news: It's an excellent time for you Virgos to reject the pressure to be someone else and get back to where you once belonged. Reunite with the person you were destined to be!

Chuck Prophet – From a Buick 6

Matt Nathanson - Car Crash (live)
more live tracks here
artist website

John Butler Trio - Message in a Bottle [the police]

Peter Delaney - If You Become Impossible

There's something I heard 'bout white white folks that bothers me, and it has to do with fishin . . . I heard that when white folks go fishin they do somethin called 'catch and release' . . . That really bothers me, I just can't figure it out. 'Cause when colored folks go fishin, we really proud of what we catch, and we take it and show it off to everybody that'll look. Then we eat what we catch - in other words, we use it sustain us. So it really bothers me that white folks would go to tall the trouble to catch a fish, then when they done caught it, just throw it back in the water . . . Bein a friend is a heavy commitment. In a way, even more than a husband or a wife. And I was selfish. I could take care a' myself, and I didn't need nobody else's baggage. Besides that, friendship to me means more than just somebody to talk to, or run with, or hang with. Being friends is like being soldiers in an army . . . But then I got to thinkin about it some more and thought maybe we might have somethin to offer each other. I could be his friend in a different way than he could be my friend. But that's an even swap still, straight down the line.

from A Same Kind of Different as Me, Ron Hall & Denver Moore, a love story of a lost do-gooding rich guy and a found homeless musician, given to me by Rick, TJ's piano teacher, who said he knew these people once upon a time and upon reflection on the narrative, I'm pretty certain he means from the homeless side of the tracks. That explains the slightly jumpy, post-AA cigarette smoking way he has, as well as the backlessness of his stare and his interest in my religious studies (i.e. he's clearly born again some kinda way). I can't tell yet what more it might mean

"Don't Take Your Love from Me," Ike Quebec, tenor sax; Grant Green, guitar; Paul Chambers, bass; Philly Joe Jones, drums

for virgo: The scenario I'm about to describe is likely to happen only in your dreams or fantasies, not your actual waking life. But it will later have a correlation in your waking life, and perhaps will be instrumental in preparing you mentally and emotionally for the triumph you'll be able to accomplish in your waking life. So here it is, the mythic tale that I foresee unfolding in the subtle realms: A python will slither up and begin to coil around you. With an apparently irrational instinct that turns out to be quite smart, you will hiss loudly and then bite the snake, causing it to slip away and leave you alone.

dreamed Yogi Bhajan showed up to tell me that if I were more disciplined w the kundalini rules/sets/etc. that I wouldn't have to have dreams and so to get the hell outa my own dream and get to work - I was like, Dude, can't you see I'm feeling sorry for myself over this thumb thing?!

no song - wa wa wa

:/

ripped ligament of rt thumb early this morning - cry - puppy is chewn on splint while i type w lefty - no song - wa wa