Okay, so the journal has been a little dull, in my opinion, which warrants an explanation, I feel. I’ve been sick for the last week or so, ducking out of a couple open mics to make it through last weekend’s gigs and to prepare for the onslaught of this weekend’s. What was nose-down is now chest-up – unpleasant, but progress. So, when you’ve spent two full days in bed, there isn’t very much new to talk about. But when you can’t get up and do much, there’s no easier road to travel than Memory Lane. There are the things you forget you have that conjure the memories you forget you have. I’ve been going through the box contains the triggers for a hundred neglected neural pathways, a hundred forgotten versions of myself that once existed. In one case, a manilla envelope contains the remains of an ex-boyfriend as if they were his unscattered ashes. Not revered enough for an urn, and yet you could never burn the thing and scatter it to the winds, ya know? There are two mix tapes, mailed to me from a friend’s roadtrip, that have never been listened to. There’s a postcard (as well as letters) sent from a friend in the Navy of a temple in Asia I’ve always promised I would visit. There’s a printed e-mail from a woman responding incredibly emotionally to an obituary I wrote for a University of Maryland student who died. There are the three strands of beads I earned during my New Years trip to New Orleans. There’s a view-finder with a picture of the gang, bathing-suited and on the beach during senior week in Ocean City. There is a stamped, addressed and written postcard that I never sent. I have every love letter ever written me in handwriting and every card that ever came with flowers. I have incredible insults hurled at me in print. The sacred and the silly: There’s also a little Cleveland Indians hat on a keychain that is autographed by the coach and “Bubba” from the movie Major League, from when they filmed it at Camden Yards in Baltimore and I went (freeze the frame as they come out of the dugout, and there I am in head-to-toe blue and red). The Chinese jump rope I asked for for a teenage birthday because it was something I’d always admired other girls doing when I was little and had never owned my own. So that’s what I do when I’m sick. I’ve also been known to watch The Last Unicorn, the animated version of Robin Hood (Oodelalay!), read a little. Having a laptop to busy myself upon is an entirely new concept.
Dangerous Music for Dangerous Times.
