I previously posted a photo of Jackson Pollock’s painting Number 31, painted in 1949.
“My mind is a jumble,” Riley wrote in a poem (I mentioned this here once before, sometime in 2020). I tell the people who live with me or interact with me now, and who’ll hopefully be around if I, like my parents before me, grapple with some form or degree of dementia in my last years, that they must, absolutely must, tell the people in whose care I’m placed that the population I talk about, the people whose skins and brains and lives I seem to shift in and out of, are not a sign of madness, multiple personality disorder, or some brand of schizophrenia (a disease I barely understand and probably shouldn’t even reference).
No, I am afflicted by characters. I contain multitudes of lives and minds and hearts who never leave me. Each of them can, all at once or at different times, be my own heart, my soul, my memory, my past, present, future. In all the folds of my brain, they coexist among a lifetime of friends, colleagues, family members, heartbreakers, healers, poets, liars: shining examples of all that is flawed and sublime about humans. When my last chapter unfolds, I may not be able to say who is real and who is imagined.
Frank… I’ve never taken Frank Sinatra out of the box since I found him at an estate sale before the Pandemic Years™.
Since I haven’t been writing, I wasn’t pulling music from my K to R binder, though I know exactly where I left off. Because of the migraine vision, I haven’t done much at all since March 1. I appreciate your kind words, but I’m fine. Or I will be fine. I’m mostly frustrated. I have to figure out some way to work around the vision thing, like maybe very limited periods on the computer which will be used for writing only. No research. No scrolling social media. If I get two hours a day, I need them for writing. I couldn’t get scheduled for surgery until June 12. Three months make a season. My season of… adapting? Accepting? Accommodating? I don’t know.
Back to Frank. I didn’t go without music. When I made myself rest, eyes closed, remembering to breathe correctly, I listened to Frank Sinatra: The Best of the Columbia Years (a four-CD set), and Frank Sinatra: The Capitol Years (a three-CD set). At some point around the time of the Harvey flood, I lost the third CD in the Capitol set. I finally repurchased the entire collection and gave the two extra first and second CDs to Debby.
Thus ends my blogging time for the day. There isn’t a version of this song by anyone I don’t love, even though it always gives me a knot in my throat. It was written/published in 1938, so just before WW2, but it will forever make me think of lovers in the war years.
Extra points if you know the song my title quotes.
Is it the full moon this week that’s made things…complicated? My eye issues that keep me offline and off the phone and unable to really even write by hand if I could write that way, or do research for when I can write again? A week when I have to go places (three doctors this week, plus one meeting with a friend who’s generously chosen to help me with post-pandemic “re-entry”), meaning that when I drive, I have to stop if my vision messes up and wait it out.
One of those doctor visits is tomorrow, when we’ll be discussing eye surgery. Here’s your hold music while we wait for an update. =)
A photo previously posted here was of a 2021 painting by Chris Rivers, Neptune.
What I listened to while I wrote Sunday. The great Annie Lennox with Diva; Medusa; and Bare. I hope to get a lot more writing done today if things go well.
Today is the new moon, a good time to set intentions. It sounds significant this month, so I’m including this link to Kevin at Body, Mind, and Soul if you’re interested in hearing more.
If you watch it, the expression on the dog’s face is probably akin to mine the night my first boyfriend/true love, he of the great fringed jacket and Easy Rider helmet,* lowered the needle onto the record so I could hear “Stairway to Heaven” in his room one night.
Friday evening I was catching up my day planner when I did this prompt: “Draw and label an ‘ideal version’ of yourself.” I shot this photo with my iPad, with the phone covering my self-portrait and the things I wrote, to focus on: the fact that I did a prompt and drew something AND those four silly dogs, bottom right of the sketch, who I show watching me in case I decide to eat anything or plan to take them out and then give them treats. All four are highly food motivated.
Items show ways I keep up with what I write in my planner and the stickers I use there, appointments, activities, nutrition and meds, and social media/blog. Can’t say I’ve done a ton of writing the past couple of days, but I’m inching along. Keeping the planner helps hold me accountable. Patti Smith is my 2023 daily muse.
When skimming through a few photos on my laptop, I found this screen cap from October 2020. I don’t remember what I said, but David Crosby liked it, and that was one of the highlights of that dreadful year for me. Oh, how that man’s voice has been part of my life from teen to whatever I am now. I will miss him. I will miss his acerbic tweets, music commentary, memories, wit, and the way he’d respond and rate the joints people rolled when they tagged him in their photos. Carry on, Cros.
I barely scroll Twitter now, maybe two to three times a week, because Musk so thoroughly ruined everything that was fun for me, and boy, if people thought there were haters there before, now they don’t even try to cover their viciousness with a wink and a smirk. They are unapologetically vile, and thanks to the new algorithms, they show up in my feed. So many of the people I enjoy reading have left or are quiet with a wait-and-see attitude. I purged my account of tweets and retweets, which meant I lost a lot of my memories and photos. (Some of those tweets keep reappearing, and I delete them again.) I’m keeping my name ownership on the site, but there’s no reason for me to leave my content and photos on an even worse hellmouth than Facebook became.
Your mileage may vary.
Finally, along with Patti Smith’s A Book of Days, pictured in the top photo, which I continue to read daily, in January, I read these two books.
Writing as T.G. Herren, Greg Herren’s A Streetcar Named Murder, A New Orleans Mystery No. 1. A fun introduction to new characters in this cozy, with the ever-compelling city of New Orleans as the backdrop.Prince Harry’s memoir Spare, which thoroughly absorbed me, particularly as the daughter of a veteran. Whatever sensationalized scandals people might have expected and raged about, that’s not what this is.
Previously, I posted a photo here of Machine, a pencil on paper work by the artist Stefan Zsaitsits from 2013.
The first six-plus hours of my day have been spent dealing with tech issues…and certainly not writing or any other fulfilling activity.
Even if you don’t have a mood guess for the art, feel free to drop a comment so I know you can see this and your comments are being published. Been dealing with website issues. Thanks!
