My feeling that Norway is living eternally in the second half of the 1980s is not going to change, even if all the rest of my perceptions shift constantly. Evidence to prove this: every time I get in my car and drive somewhere, Norwegian radio is playing Michael Jackson. Never the same song, but it’s Michael all the time. And when it’s not Michael, it’s Richard Marx, it’s Bryan Adams, it’s Berlin, it’s Billy Ocean or some other thing I don’t want to hear – in the 80s or now.
As a corollary to this everlasting musical 80s timewarp, I have become known as the harbinger of death because I seem to trip over news of celebrity deaths accidentally (am watching or listening to news almost constantly) or just know about past celeb deaths.
I was in the car the other day, and got immediate proof positive of this 1980s assertion: Jermaine Stewart‘s one-hit wonder, “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off”, blasted from the radio. I listened to the lyrics as if for the first time and could not really figure our why a song like this would exist. And who the bloody hell would drink cherry wine?
My firewall and I spent the whole evening singing it and reveling in the cheesy nostalgia.
But then, being me, I just had to know: what became of Jermaine Stewart? One hit and then gone… well, DEAD is what he is. Apparently he died in 1997 of AIDS-related liver cancer. What? Maybe because he was not really that famous, his death came and went without much fanfare. Or I was just not paying attention.
Whether or not Stewart knew his infection status in 1986 when the song was a hit, knowing this information, I hear the song filtered through that mid-80s terror of AIDS. It is more a safe-sex anthem than anything else (like many songs of the era) but it had never once occurred to me that that song fit such a bill. But listening to it armed with this information, it’s like a completely different song.
But there are new filters and lenses for everything, really. I was listening to Jim Croce the other day, remembering listening to him and looking at an album cover (a close-up of his distinctive face) when I was 4 years old. My mom explained that Croce had died a few years earlier in a plane crash. He was 30. I recall even today what I was thinking when she gave me this background information, “So what? He was old. He did everything he needed to do.” The level of a 4-year-old kid’s reasoning: 30 seemed like a good, full life. Looking at it now, of course, I am taken aback reflecting on his youth, the promising career cut short, the 2-year-old son he left behind.
I admit it. I am feeling nostalgic, contemplative about the shifting filters and perceptions that come with age and time. I am feeling mortal.
The Goldbergs was a bit over the top for me in the beginning, but as I continued to watch, the 1980s nostalgia eventually won me over. Many, many moments choke me up with tears. The show manages to evoke nostalgia, emotion without being overly saccharine. And I suppose people who did not grow up in that era might not feel as strongly about it. But they can find other points to connect with emotionally (the importance of family, the connection the crazy mother has with the kids, the sense of not wanting your kids to grow up, the feeling that everyone is awkward in youth but eventually, with the right guidance, they find their voice and path). It is interesting to watch the Goldberg kids grow up.
A recent episode made me laugh out loud. The dad wonders why someone would destroy a perfectly good Fiero to make a robot when the youngest, Adam, enthuses about the greatness of The Transformers (toys and cartoon). Adam pits the “stupidity” of a game “where grown men hit a ball with a stick” against his future run by robots. Argument ensues about baseball versus robots – America’s pastime (past) and its robotic future.
“Robots aren’t even real.”
“Oh you’ll see how real they are when cyborgs take over and outlaw your precious baseball.”
I started yet another conversation with a reference to attending Japanese language camp. This never ceases to amuse others, some thinking it sounds like the height (or depth) of total geekery, some thinking it sounds too similar to something like a forced death march or a Japanese internment camp. But alas, no, I studied almost all the languages my high school had to offer (German was the only exception, which made the Frau teaching German feel quite left out). Back in those fearful days of American decline (ongoing), when Bush senior caused an international incident by vomiting at the Japanese prime minister’s residence, and we all thought Japan was going to take over the world, we on the American west coast were hedging our bets, picking up our hashi and “nihongo o benkyooshimashita” 日本語を勉強しました. The Japanese were in fact helping us – subsidizing us – giving us money and camps and all the rest so we could immerse ourselves in Japanese language and culture for weeks at a time in the rural woods of western Washington. Never mind that I was never a “camp going”, group activity kind of girl – I tried to tell my teachers that I did not have the money for such a thing, but the school district had money to burn, I guess, and had never had a student like me (not that I was remarkable – it is just that I was the only one who ever willingly took so much language study at once). They paid for the camp.
The point of this – although I am not terribly nostalgic about those days, some characters from Japanese language camp come to mind sometimes. I only keep in touch with one guy – and got a letter from him yesterday. He shared some rather alarming news after a long (an entire adulthood) correspondence of mostly mundane stuff between us – sure, each of us moved back and forth between countries and had things happen, but nothing that does not happen to everyone. And suddenly, almost like a postscript, he added something rather serious, even stating that he “did not want to make a big deal out of it” – which I completely understand – but still I had to stop and catch my breath and suddenly reflect on… the deceptive, wicked nature of time. Even if time is just a manmade construct and has no inherent evil whatsoever. All that is truly deceptive about it is our human caprice and wont to waste time, playing games – or rather waste feelings, being petty and not doing what our heart really desires in life. Time and our perception of it imbues us with false confidence, with fear, with nostalgic sentimentality.
I am sitting in my car hanging out in a parking lot, reflecting on the way time has passed since meeting this Japanese language camp friend – we met each other in 1991, which still feels a lot like yesterday except that it was almost 25 years ago. This is how even the unsentimental start to feel the pull of nostalgia.
”I wish nostalgia had a body so that I could push it out of the window! To smash what cannot be!” –Odysseus Elytis -Οδυσσέας Ελύτης
It starts to weigh them down when they can talk about how a quarter-century has passed and it felt a lot like the blink of an eye. I may not be overly sentimental myself, but this is how I have lost myself in poetry. The words I feel have been captured somewhere else. It’s a Ryuichi Tamura-田村隆一 kind of morning.
I sink into bed
on the first Monday after Pentecost
and bless myself
since I’m not a Christian
Yet my ears still wander the sky
my eyes keep hunting for underground water
and my hands hold a small book
describing the grotesqueness of modern white society
when looked down at from the nonwhite world
in my fingers there’s a thin cigarette-
I wish it were hallucinogenic
though I’m tired of indiscriminate ecstasy
Through a window in the northern hemisphere
the light moves slowly past morning to afternoon
before I can place the red flare, it’s gone:
darkness
Was it this morning that my acupuncturist came?
a graduate student in Marxist economics, he says he changed
to medicine to help humanity, the animal of animals, drag itself peacefully to its deathbed
forty years of Scotch whisky’s roasted my liver and put me
into the hands of a Marxist economist
I want to ask him about Imperialism, A Study–
what Hobson saw in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century
may yet push me out of bed
even if you wanted to praise imperialism
there aren’t enough kings and natives left
the overproduced slaves had to become white
Only the nails grow
the nails of the dead grow too
so, like cats, we must constantly
sharpen ours to stay alive
Only The Nails Grow-not a bad epitaph
when K died his wife buried him in Fuji Cemetery
and had To One Woman carved on his gravestone
true, it was the title of one of his books
but the way she tried to have him only
to herself almost made me cry
even N, who founded the modernist magazine Luna
while Japan prepared to invade China
got sentimental after he went on his pension;
F, depressed
S, manic, builds house after house
A has abdominal imperialism: his stomach’s colonized his legs
M’s deaf, he can endure the loudest sounds;
some people have only their shadows grow
others become smaller than they really are
our old manifesto had it wrong: we only looked upward
if we’d really wanted to write poems
we should have crawled on the ground on all fours-
when William Irish, who wrote Phantom Lady, died
the only mourners were stock brokers
Mozart’s wife was not at his funeral
My feet grow warmer as I read
Kotoku Shusui’s Imperialism, Monster of the Twentieth Century, written back in 1901
when he was young N wrote “I say strange things”
was it the monster that pumped tears from his older eyes?
Poems are commodities without exchange value
but we’re forced to invade new territory
by crises of poetic overproduction
We must enslave the natives with our poems
all the ignorant savages under sixty
plagued by a surplus of clothes and food-
when you’re past sixty
you’re neither a commodity
nor human
But it is so much more than just Tamura lamenting the sentimentality of old age. It is also the nostalgia – looking back at people, events – what has deeply affected and wounded us, things we carry for years, imprinted on us even when the person or event is long ago and the deep impression we have belies the brevity of these memorable encounters.
“With the incomparable feeling of rising and of being like a banner Twenty seconds worth twenty-five years” (from “To Marina” by Kenneth Koch)
That sudden sense that one second you were an awkward and completely artistically inept kid fumbling imprecisely with the Japanese art form katazome. And the next you are shaking your head, remembering the details of that time so clearly, wondering, “Could that really have been twenty-five years ago?” (The twenty-five year mark comes up a few times in Kenneth Koch’s masterpiece, “To Marina” – possibly my favorite poem of all time.)
“We walk through the park in the sun. It is the end.
You phone me. I send you a telegram. It
Is the end. I keep
Thinking about you, grieving about you. It is the end. I write
Poems about you, to you. They
Are no longer simple. No longer
Are you there to see every day or
Every other or every third or fourth warm day And now it has been twenty-five years
But those feelings kept orchestrating I mean rehearsing
Rehearsing in my and tuning up
While I was doing a thousand other things, the band
Is ready, I am over fifty years old and there’s no you—
And no me, either, not as I was then,
When it was the Renaissance
Filtered through my nerves and weakness
Of nineteen fifty-four or fifty-three,
When I had you to write to, when I could see you
And it could change.”
thumbprint cookies and a lot of dangerous tinfoil!
Long ago and far away when I lived in the enchanted land that is Iceland, full of bitchilized public workers/office clerks and the kind of otherworldly strong wind that could knock you on your ass (or face), I baked at least as much as I do now. I used to “entertain” (yes, the quotes are intentional and meaningful. I am not just putting quotation marks around a word the way I see people gratuitously do these days. That is, for example, in this case, if one put quotation marks around “entertain” you would assume that it is meant as a tongue-in-cheek, perhaps euphemistic term that really means something else. That’s how I mean it. But I often see people putting quotes around words when they do actually mean exactly what they are writing. And don’t get me started on the air quotes!) more back then – I was more centrally located and invited people over with relative frequency. I experimented a lot with cookie recipes, making candy and with ingredients in general (since I was taking many stabs in the dark at substituting materials and ingredients I could not find that figured heavily into my recipes). I experimented a lot in general. I suppose if my company were not sweet enough for people, they could turn to all the sugar-laced goods I put on offer.
a big table of baked stuff – long ago, holidays in Oslo
In baking, the “grunt work” (although all the work that goes into baking could be referred to as grunt work) is the part I really don’t like. What I mean by this is the rolling out dough, choosing cookie cutters and cutting and decorating the cookies. It’s for these reasons that I almost never make things like sugar cookies or anything else that requires rolling and cutting. But back in the old days (ha) in Iceland, I had a trusty assistant in my friend Sarah, who used to come over and do the grunt work and always produced something that was elevated to beauty thanks to her decorating efforts. I recently saw some photos of her decorating cookies with her daughter, and it made all these memories come flooding back.
And it was more than ten years ago! My time in Seltjarnarnes was fairly brief – between 2001 and 2003, and there were so many characters who passed through at that time. Most not particularly important or memorable but some who stick in my mind and heart even now despite the fact that, like most non-Icelanders who live in Iceland, they flew to the four winds – because most non-Icelanders don’t seem to plant permanent roots there. It certainly does make me reflect on the people who do, for whatever reason, cross our paths – how very random it can be, and yet sometimes so full of unexpected coincidences.
The CD version went out to the people they normally go to on Saturday morning. Meanwhile, here’s the collection that has carried me through winter and the big changes 2013 has delivered into my life.
City Winter 2013 – The Good Goo of Random (Love) Gum
A stab in the heart is as good as a stab in the eye – anti-Valentine’s Day 2013
The full Spotify playlist. (The songs that are available on Spotify, anyway. Sadly not all are.)
01. “Parting Gift” — Fiona Apple…I bet you could never tell/that I knew that you didn’t know me that well…
“It is my fault, you see/you never learned that much from me.”/ “It ended bad but I love what we started.”
02. “A Night Like This” – The Cure
Summer of 1989. The last time I felt everything unfiltered.
03. “A Good Thing” – Saint Etienne…Pack your bags and move along/before your feelings get too strong…
With love to Naomi. And with love to Ben.
04. “Take a Letter, Maria” – R.B. Greaves
Have always hated this song but last year the artist died and I discovered he is from Guyana (like a dear friend’s “I can’t feel my fingers” dad). I have always wondered with regard to this song how and why, if this guy is so devastated about catching his wife with another man, he can so easily move on to his secretary. And when he questions whether he was wrong to work nights to try to make a better life and cannot understand why his wife cheated, why is he not asking whether perhaps all his late nights at the office led his presumably lonely wife to conclude that he was already having an affair with his secretary, which drove her to another man?
05. “Time It’s Time” – Lia Ices…As bad as bad becomes/It’s not a part of you/And love is only sleeping/Wrapped in neglect…
With love for Jane, for Heather, for Alfa… The song (no YouTube link!)
06. “Pure” – Lightning Seeds…If love’s the truth then look no lies/And let me swim around your eyes/I’ve found a place I’ll never leave/Shut my mouth and just believe/Love is the truth I realize/Not a stream of pretty lies/To use us up and waste our time…
Tenth-grade coming back to bite me in the ass. I got this album from Rodney as a Christmas gift. We all started getting jobs and more importantly, driver’s licenses (goodbye, Hell Machine school bus!). Present day… JKL and references to long-ago “youth” and end-of-January grey Gothenburg days. “Fresh and deep as oceans new/Shiver at the sight of you…”
07. “Dying is Fine” – Ra Ra Riot
xo Jill. “Death oh baby/You know that dying is fine but maybe/I wouldn’t like death if death were good/Not even if death were good.”
08. “Black Belt” – John Grant…What you got is a black belt in B.S…
“You are callipygian/but look at the state you’re in….” Can you argue with a man who fits “callipygian” into a song? For Kyle.
09. “Subculture” – New Order…In the end you will submit/it’s got to hurt a little bit…
The late 80s, early 90s – and all the illusions and confusions of that time.
10. “There’s a Barbarian in the Back of My Car” – Voice of the Beehive…He’s got his eyes on the horizon/he says I can ride his rocket/while telephone numbers are tumbling from his top pocket/dream logic operator/he falls out of the car/he says, “I’ll fuck you later, now just get me to the bar”…
So many barbarians, so many who want things all their way, all on their terms, with no consideration for others. ML, JKL
11. “Aime Mon Amour” – Benjamin Biolay…Quand bien même elle garde ses mystères/Même si tu l’envoies en l’air/Aime Mon Amour/Je te descends…
For Bruno. For Aurélien. Always the French guys.
12. “Wish You Were Here” – Lia Ices…We’re just two lost souls/living in a fishbowl/year after year…
With love for Jane, this almost unrecognizable version of an overdone Pink Floyd classic. “How, how I wish you were here…”
13. “Some People” – Martha Wainwright…I don’t want to be the one to tell you that I don’t love the way I used to…
“If only I believed in God I’d ask him to help me find my way/I am faced with a world that does not have the words to say…”
14. “I’m Leaving It Up to You” – Dale & Grace…Now do you want my love?/Or are we through?…
Who would I be if I were not including songs that considerably pre-date my existence?
15. “The Belle of St Mark” – Sheila E
No clue why – had an urge to hear music that reminds me of the hell of 5th and 6th grades and of my old friend, Danielle.
16. “Healed” – Lia Ices…Just dust…
Always with Jane in mind. And here’s to the shattering of illusions about who you thought people were (Ph).
No YouTube link – here it is.
17. “Meant to Move” – Lerin Herzer & Andrew Joslyn…Some people were meant to sit still/I’m afraid I was meant to move…
In yet another new place, new city, new job, moving on again, as I am meant to do, even if some things never change.
18. “Computer Love” – Kraftwerk
Thanks to Laurent. With ML in the back of the mind. My computer love days are over; goodbye tech world!
19. “Ends of the Earth” – Lord Huron…I was a-ready to die for you, baby/Doesn’t mean I’m ready to stay/What good is livin’ a life you’ve been given/If all you do is stand in one place…
And where is that person who would wander and follow? “To the ends of the earth, would you follow me/There’s a world that was meant for our eyes to see…”
20. “Amor Fati” – Washed Out…What you can’t afford now/Chasing all your thoughts, you know that/You’ll be all right in time…
21. “Hallelujah” – The Helio Sequence…We all want answers anyway…
We faithless few. “And waiting pensive, sad, and look/Up to the stars and counting all the suns and all the moons/How sad it was that we could not believe…”
22. “Hong Kong Garden” – Siouxsie and the Banshees
I have always liked Siouxsie and the Banshees but never got into as much as I have of late. Ecstatic when this comes on during my dark, winter morning walks to the tram. Ecstatic for the sound, not so much for the disorienting, misguided lyrics.
23. “Genesis” – Grimes…Holding on/I am a vagabond /It’s always different/I am the one who falls…
25. “Thru the Field” – Memory Tapes…Walk on through the field, it’s already late/I swear I heard somebody laughing/At all my mistakes…
All my mistakes… luckily the majority are personal rather than professional or big “life” things.
26. “Alone Again Or” – Love …Yeah, said it’s all right/I won’t forget/All the times I’ve waited patiently for you/And you’ll do just what you choose to do/And I will be alone again tonight, my dear…
Here’s to all the waiting around for nothing, empty plans, broken promises…
27. “You’re Still Beautiful” – The Church
Always forgetting The Church – underrated and underplayed. Brings back late-80s memories
28. “Suspended in Gaffa” – Ra Ra Riot…That girl in the mirror/Between you and me/She don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere at all…
Thanks to Jill for the recommendation. Never really been much of a Kate Bush fan, but I’m all for Kate Bush covers.
29. “Argonauts” – The Little Ones…You ought to kick and scream/For every fallen dream, there’s a hard knock on the door/Like stones, yeah we’ll never move to shore…
30. “Crazy Tropical Survival Guide” – Frederick Squire & Katherine Maki…All at once/the world ended/all at once everything in the world became so clear…
I heard this but could not find it for the last Halloween mix – now I don’t like it as much as then but am still including it.
31. “Crucify Your Mind” – Sixto Rodriguez…And you assume you got something to offer/Secrets shiny and new/But how much of you is repetition/That you didn’t whisper to him too…
32. “Heavenly Bodies” – Tamaryn…She’s a fool/But time is a thief/When it comes in to say/Her love has to wait…
33. “Sometime” – DIIV…Oh your body is a mess sometimes/Your brain is just a part of your head it really is a mess sometimes/Your head is just a part of the rest/It’s really necessary sometimes/Your birth is just a part of your death/That really isn’t it this time your death is just a part of your…
34. “Half Gate” – Grizzly Bear…But honestly it’s fine/When I mention how I love you/It’s all I do/Even as I stray/We have the cold to keep/I’m not sure I still believe/My most is nothing more/Than a place we’ve been before…
Regret. A song as dramatic shopping list of regret. “Which of yourselves is truly gone?/Checked out so long/Unhinged unwound/Come help me on/To let lie what’s done/In some great beyond/You’re still there still as you were…”
35. “Working Titles” – Damien Jurado…You could mess up my life in a poem/Have me divorced by the time of the chorus…
For all those who are never quite the right one. “Killing time til I pass through the chamber/Or the room where you keep my replacement/Se fed up still you’re starving on paper/You are no him, but he’s you, only better…” “Leave me an exit to damage/I could use a ledge to jump off of/I wasn’t lying when I said this was over/I have questions that lead to more questions…”
36. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” – Otis Redding…You were tired, and your love is growing cold/My love is growing stronger as our affair grows old…
37. “Teenage Goths” – Jon DeRosa…Do you remember how we ruled/the only teenage goths in school?…
All realistic and pragmatic, but everything is possible.
No YouTube link. Here is the song.
39. “Don’t Drown in Sorrows” – Jakob Olausson
A Swedish thing, carrying me through the winter. Heard first on KEXP in Seattle. The DJ thought he was cool and pronounced this guy’s name like “YAY-kub” – which reminds me of a manager I used to have and his half-assed attempts at pronouncing things – he could never decide until halfway through a word whether he would say it the Norwegian or the English way, so you’d get some crap hybrid. Can’t find a link
40. “Night Will Be Dawn” – Darkness Falls
This might seem a bit dramatic and dark but … then, so is getting through the darkness of Swedish winter. With love for Roxane.
41. “Victoria” – The Fall
This version of the song will always remind me of New Zealand and Qantas – this was part of a sound program they offered about The Kinks. Rarely is a mix complete without The Fall.
42. “Do the Du” – Certain Ratio…My heart was just an open sore/which you picked at ’til it was raw/it bled away my existence/shriveled under your insistence…
43. “Flutes” – Hot Chip
Naturally all references to flutes tie in to Annette and “blowing meat flutes”. ☺ I’ll join that orchestra. There is a sound in the end of the song that sounds a lot like Skype when a call is coming in. Haha. Another good song for tram waiting and riding.
44. “Cherry” – Chromatics…Cherry/Tells me some things I don’t want to know/And I can’t see /A light at the end for us anymore…
I love the sound of this, with visions of nearing the end of the long drive between Gothenburg and rural Swedish woodland, passing a weird dot on the map called Gustavsfors that boasts not only an oddly placed German bakery but also a campground called Alcatraz.
45. “Say No to Thugs” – Lost Animal…Never get lessons in love from an angry man…
Good advice. “Don’t sweat the little things, love…”
46. “Shapeless & Gone” – Porcelain Raft…In a strange kind of way, lifeless landscapes have so much to say…
“So good to know you’re out there/So good to know you still care…”. The words people say to me over and over…
47. “Your Ex-Lover is Dead” – Stars
Many to whom I gave; got nothing in return. Not sorry but have I ever been brave enough to say so? “There’s one thing I want to say, so I’ll be brave/You were what I wanted/I gave what I gave/I’m not sorry I met you/I’m not sorry it’s over/I’m not sorry there’s nothing to save…”
49. “Nice Without Mercy” – Lambchop…And the sky opens up like candy/And the wind don’t know my name…
Love the title; perfectly sums up my ongoing campaign to kill with kindness.
51. “Lord Knows” – Dum Dum Girls…I want to live a pure life/I’d say that it’s about time/Don’t judge me for the things I’ve done/To get off the only one/The bliss I’ve found in ignorance/A slow burning Icarus…
52. “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” – Nina Simone
53. “The Dark Age” – Widowspeak…We only have ourselves to blame/We had our years to play/It’s getting kind of late/Don’t know what you’re waiting for…
54. “I Wish I Had an Evil Twin” – The Magnetic Fields
“My evil twin would lie and steal/And he would stink of sex appeal/All men would writhe/Beneath his scythe/He’d send the pretty ones to me/And they would think that I was he/I’d hurt them and I’d go scot-free/I’d get no blame/And feel no shame/’Cause evil’s not my cup of tea”
55. “Shy Song” – Containe…I want you to fuck me/Like I’ve never been before…
“If you let me, I will show you a good time/I want to come over/Every day and every night…”. “I’m shy, too…”
No YouTube link. Here’s “Shy Song“.
56. “All I Want” – LCD Soundsystem…All I want is your pity/Oh all I want are your bitter tears…
A strange Echo & the Bunnymen quality to it, especially at the end. Constantly amazed that every LCD Soundsystem song sounds completely different. “Look for the girl who has put up with all of your shit/You’ve never needed anyone for so long…”
57. “So Good at Being in Trouble” – Unknown Mortal Orchestra…Memories, they mess with my mind…
“She was so good at being in trouble/So bad at being in love…”
58. “Looking for a Sign” – Beck
“If I ran across your picture/if I called you by mistake/ and if I ask someone about you/It’s a habit I can’t break/Looking out for a sign/How can I tell what’s right/Changing my ways to spite myself/Cause I still want you”
59. “Ruin” – Cat Power…Bitching, complaining when some ṗeople who ain’t got shit to eat/Bitching, moaning, so many people you know they got…
For Naomi. Even some Finns who think 1,200 EUR will last a year ain’t got shit to eat (ramen and cheap liquor!).
60. “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” – The Smiths…I’ve seen this happen in other people’s lives/and now it’s happening in mine…
While it did not bother or devastate me as it did others, I became one of the masses who was downsized from a job (but already had another lined up when it happened). These lyrics, which always remind me of reading a bio of Marie Antoinette back in 1991, seemed applicable and relevant. “Time’s tide will smother you/And I will too…”
61. “Just Make It Stop” – Low…You see I’m close to the edge/I’m at the end of my rope/the rope is starting to thread/I’m trying to keep my hold/you say I’m something I’m not/but I’m not what I seem/get my back off the wall/if I could just make it stop…
Haven’t we all wanted it all to stop?
62. “Passage” – Exitmusic…Words of promise weigh down on us, settle in our bones/Once the dawn falls down upon us, I will let you go…
Unbelievable layers in which to get lost. “You’re so incredible, why can’t I touch you? Hold back decayed love and light.” For RC.
I am going to start baking and see where it takes me. I made a plan and made a list but these lists easily get well out of hand with more than 20 things on them. Is this excessiveness necessary?
My dreams last night were weird. I was living at least some of the time in France, but nothing seemed at all like the France of reality. I spent most of my time in a cafe (that was a lot more like cafes I frequented in Iceland) that served coffee in French presses (which of course is what Americans call coffee presses… and French people call them Italian – and they ARE an Italian invention. Aussies and Kiwis call it a “coffee plunger” and Icelanders call this a “pressukanna”…). In the dream people went to this place specifically for the coffee, and then one day a law passed that forced all places to serve coffee in the same way (not French press). Another law was introduced at the same time that required all EU countries to harmonize car license plates!? I don’t know where any of this came from.
The anxiety and annoyance of the US election will finally be over on Tuesday. Hearing Mitt Romney speak just makes me sick. The latest global prosperity index knocked the US out of the top ten countries for the first time. Not surprised to hear that. Norway is number one (not surprised to hear that either), with Denmark and Sweden right behind. (And lands of plunger coffee and Anzac biscuits, Australia and NZ, round out the top five.) Not surprising in the least. Confirmation that I made the right choices about where to live and work (not that I had any doubt).
