I am a word person.

I love writing.

So why do I get the jitters whenever I have to reply to a request for my band's social media / online shop?

Because we suck at both.

None of it involves writing.

I hate advertising, it's an industry dedicated to talking people into buying things they don't want.

The idea of having to stay on top of every new social media fad so we can endlessly throw our aging faces out into a scrolling universe full of younger ones just exhausts me and makes me sad.

And yet I know this is not how it is. My brain is backing up on me, and it's not reading things aright.

I'll come around, but sometimes I have to write down exactly how I feel in order to see all the flaws in it.

Gimme time, I'll come around. I've been feeling down and useless lately.

--but not too many to write down, which is unusual.

Reasons I need therapy:

because I honestly do not know if the symptoms I am experiencing are the result of an innate disorder, or the result of my family and acquaintances augmenting their own status by constantly reminding me of my faults. Is that an identity problem?

Because I let things stop me. Is that laziness? Executive dysfunction? Plain disorganization? Is disorganization itself a problem when it's on this scale?

Bob Bielefeld died last Thursday or so.

I haven't been able to deal with it, we just rolled back into town that day, I just couldn't. We were tired from a week long move - I was numb.

Last night I finally went to the Dead Wren Dancing and Singing Society, and scrolled down the page so I could feel something. Bob deserves to be mourned, even if I don't feel like I have the right to mourn him.

He was such a lovely, gentle man for one so talented and committed to excellence. He was always so receptive and welcoming, and always wanted to include us in projects. He stretched out and played with everyone.

I could never step over that line and include myself. He was too good. He played with people who were too much better than me, I couldn't get there from here. He offered to change keys on jazz songs so I could sing with the Monday night jazz group, but I wouldn't do it. I tried a couple of times, but I was too self-conscious. They were having a great time, I didn't want to be the one who screwed up their night. Part of me suspected he was inviting others so that it would keep a practiced group on their toes. I could never convince myself to do it.

This is so blurry, but it's a video instead of static pictures. I like seeing Bob move, pictures are so static. He was so playful, his flute playing had a puckishness that showed his gentle sense of humor. And everyone else here is so good right along with him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqWxuzeiBcs&t=130s

This has been a year of trying things I have written off in the past. As may be expected, it has mixed results.

American Gods was much better second time around, and reading the 10th anniversary edition with like 10,000 more words in it oddly made it better. I still think Shadow is a total cipher, but there is an understandable reason for it. He lost his love and he's dead inside. And for other reasons revealed in the story.

Game of Thrones is proving to be more difficult. It's brilliantly written, directed, acted, produced, costumed, lit, all that - and it's also about as joyless, loveless, lifeless, and humorless as a show can be.

It's purportedly about a few heroes in a difficult, complicated world, but 90% of the screen time is taken up by sadistic, stupid, arrogant or greedy people, occasionally all four, who for the most part have things go their own way. The few characters that are supposed to be good or likable go through a process of torture or death or corruption, occasionally all three. The show is full of toxicity. Everyone with an ounce of any positive quality is quickly ridiculed and rejected, while betrayal, cruelty and murder are swiftly rewarded with trust and power.

This is what happens when you take fantasy and cut out all the infrastructure of fantasy - the metaphor, the poetry, the heart.

Oh, except dragons that can burn everything down and shitty demonic magic. Let's keep that by all means, and add lots of female debasement and rape, everyone loves watching that it's so sexy! We'll call it realistic.

Obviously, the convention wisdom of this shitty world says, the only good way to live is to fuck over anyone you can get something from before they do it to you. And because this is the value expressed the majority of the time, and the two or three interesting "heroes" with any other perspective only get about 5 minutes time apiece, the general shittiness becomes the value expressed by the show, regardless of who eventually wins the stupid throne, which - oooo, look, it's a metaphor! How clever! -- yes, is a massive metaphorical trick. It's a throne made out of fucking swords. The second you try to sit on it, it's going to stab you in the ass.

I would only watch this show when I hate myself. Which fortunately happens to be the case.

One of the gifts of Scarborough Faire is the lively music community, largely maintained by Jim Hancock. Sunday night jam, Monday night jazz night, Thursday night acoustic jam at Peter's glass booth,Saturday night concerts from on site artists. Heard there's a blues night at the hammock booth, but I don't know the crowd.
Tonight I brought the upright bass to the jazz night. Seriously intimidating crowd, everyone there is really good, but bass is, shall we say, not rocket surgery. :) It's still hard and embarrassing to be such a rank beginner, but it's obvious no one expects virtuosity,and Jim has been picking a lot of easy numbers so I can get my feet under me with the open strings. My left arm is super tired, but I feel like I'm contributing and learning, so I'm happy. :)

Other things I'm doing: ditching the $300 Rosetta stone Italian course my aunt sent me in favor of daily drills on Duo Lingo (Man, that is fun!), occasionally going over violin drills that I learned from TJ up in WI, and learning new songs for our new project, the BTM. :)

When I was a kid I was told over and over again that I didn't have to accept what was offered - if I didn't want to go to church I didn't have to; if I didn't want a toke of weed I didn't have to accept and it was cool; that if I didn't want to have sex I never ever had to; that I didn't have to have a beer just because everyone else was having one.

So I didn't - I didn't get up in Catholic School for confession - I've still never been. I didn't get up for Eucharist, I stayed in the pew. At my brother's parties I said no thanks to the joints which made me dizzy, and didn't drink beer, which tasted awful. And I wasn't interested in casual sex. And everyone said "that's cool", and I felt great about my choices.

But you know you're never going to be friends with those people. Because you're not toking when it comes around, you might give them up. Because you're not having a beer, you might be judging them and thinking they're lame because they can't relax without a drink. Because you're not kneeling and praying with them, you might try to point out how it's all bullshit.

Well, that was okay by me; what kind of friendship hinges on these things anyway?

Out of loneliness and curiosity I did go to my brother's parties sometimes and smoke weed, but I didn't get a very good impression of stoner culture - or maybe I did. In any case, I wasn't much interested in their company, since they didn't care if my brother beat me up in front of them, and since I was still not interested in sex I wasn't interesting to them either.

I did go to a Baptist church for awhile with a super-religious girl bent on saving my soul, but since she would only talk to me outside of school and carefully explained that while in school she had to act like she hated me so her friends wouldn't abandon her, I didn't get a really good impression of the way Christians acted either. By the time I was going to Catholic school I was pretty ok with the idea of just going for the education, which was the intention of my parents. I still didn't have any friends, and after awhile it became a bit of a deliberate thing. I was kind of waiting for other people I could relate to.

By the time I met a few people who liked reading and thinking, in high school, I had under-developed social skills and even less social standing, so we didn't get to be friends. The best I could do was some people who were going off to college the next year, so we conducted friendship on a limited, two-or-three visits a year kind of basis. But that's another story. My point is, I've never been interested in relationships that revolved around drinking, drugs or kneeling in the same place on Sunday (which is nothing at all like morality, ethics or philosophy, things I am all about putting in the spotlight.) Ironically, those were the only relationships that seemed to be available to me as a kid. That might make me feel slightly better about the whole no-friend thing.

See now that I'm older I have all kinds of friends who do all kinds of drugs, religions and drinks, and none of them care which of these things I'm into or not. Tolerance is learned, or maybe re-learned. I can't speak for other ages or other cultures, but here when we're kids we're just scared, and left to create our own social structure (SUCH a bad idea) they clump into cliques and that's pretty much it.

Preamble-- I have not been idle, I've just been on FaceBook. Which is absolutely being idle, but I *have* been writing and posting. On the app FaceBook Notes. When I realized (about 5 minutes ago) that what I would have normally posted on this fine blog I was actually using Notes for, I tracked back to the date of my last post and put up everything I've written on notes - like five or six entries. Including, lucky you, today's post.

*and now, after a day of delightful crowds and excellent co-workers is marred by a persistent tummy ache that had me lying down between sets, we're overdue for one of my utterly unfounded and narcissistic rants, wherein I perorate enthusiastically on subjects that mean nothing to anyone else, solely to exercise my sarcasm and release a lot of tension while offending no one. OK, probably no one...*

I popped out to the store last night after faire to pick up Iron Man 3 (6 years, iron anniversary, get it?) and hit the grocery for my deeply troubled tummy before heading home. At the door to the Best Buy I am greeted by a portly old security guard doing the power stance in the middle of the doorway, like the heavy in a lame rap video. He steps aside at my unchecked stride and says in a no-nonsense, this-store-is-mine tone, "You have 4 minutes to do anything you came here to do."

Really. Thanks for greeting me so courteously. I satisfy myself with breezing by without breaking stride, assuring him "that's fine, I'm only here for one thing". I wonder in passing if Paul Blart, Mall Cop there would have stepped aside for anyone besides a white woman in a pretty skirt. (just trying to be aware of my privilege)

A helpful young employee exerts his powers to track down the blu-ray for me (not as easy as it sounds), and I check out and get to the Safeway. I locate my few items and decide, what the hell, everyone's on the self-checkout, I'll go to the express lane, which only has one order finishing up. However, in the time-honored "best practices" of grocery stores since I was fresh out of college, the checkout person in charge of the line called EXPRESS is the person who least epitomizes the term. At this hour our woman has stopped any pretense of the claim made by her helpful sign, and goes on to complete a rambling conversation with her customer about the advantages of where her daughter just moved before starting on my small pile of things.

While she's ringing things up, I make a massive mistake, and ask if they have any cloth shopping bags left. In doing this I commit to a course of action that will make this transaction take five times longer than it should, and which, in my sorry digestive state, will feel even longer.

It's not like I haven't been there in Customer Service land. Somehow when a new and inarguably inferior product replaces a better one, store employees can come to respond to the repeated requests for the old product with a natural, albeit utterly unjustified, fit of pique. Our lady stops dead and looks at me as though she has never heard of anything of the kind, and is politely wondering what in all of creation I could possibly be on about. I hang on to my pleasant face, and say the words I really don't need to say: "Last year when I was here, you had very nice cloth bags. I bought three, and loved them, but I accidentally lost two of them. I was told earlier you might have some in the back, do you know if there's any around?" I already knew the answer, but the path had been chosen.

Seeing that it was no good to deny the very existence of the bags (In the past, the words "I have never heard of that" delivered with as passive and vacuous a stare as can be mustered is the response that has had me an inch from grabbing a store employee by her chicken neck and shrieking "It's Guinness! GUINNESS you hopeless cow! You run a beer and wine store with a single lane of instant soup and a rack of gum at the register so you can call it a convenience store; tell me you don't stock it, tell me you're too 'Murican to carry an import, but don't sit on that stool and tell me you've NEVER HEARD OF GUINNESS!!")

Sorry, back to our woman at the counter. Still staring like I'm asking for cappuccino flavored potato chips, she replies "I don't think so, but I can ask a manager."

"That won't be necessary," I say quickly, and am handily ignored while she strides purposefully off to confirm her assertion. While she's gone I ring up a few more things, because I'd really like to get out of here. When she returns she chastises me for touching my groceries and confirms her statement: "We don't have those anymore. But we have *these* bags which work just fine." and she gestures to the brightly colored bags made of recycled milk cartons that have disappointed me so in the past.

"No," I reply firmly, "I like the cloth bags the best. They're very strong, and I can launder them". "Well *these* bags are strong too, and all you have to do is wipe them out." she persists, countering my unreasonable demands for quality, while bagging my half gallon of milk in a plastic bag by itself, and unnecessarily double- bagging the next two bags of items. I start to twitch. I don't feel like explaining that I live in a trailer, and the gargantuan pile of grocery bags that accumulates in my tiny kitchen ends up causing more chaos than I want to deal with.

"Thanks, no."

"And you know laundering the bags doesn't necessarily help. People have been getting horribly, horribly sick from reusing bags. Just don't put any meat in them." she continues.

Now I'm really lost. I don't know what the hell she's advocating here. She's shooting off into some dark corner of her own brain, fuelled by back-fence biddy chatter, and I just can't follow. I try being jolly.

"Well, that's why I like bags I can launder. I like your bags the best. I was hoping to buy more of them from you."

"Well *these* are very good bags too, I was only trying to explain, you know." She manages to actually sound affronted. Now she's getting insulted about my stubborn refusal to be open-minded about new and alternative bagging methods, and my small-minded clinging to this whole "cloth bag" fantasy that she was tricked into having to admit even existed in the first place. She's ready to debate this thing with me all night if need be.

Honest to God, this only happens to me in D.C. Is it the proximity to Congress that creates this whole atmosphere of debate? I'm all about a good argument, but I'd like to decide how I carry my own things, thank you very much, and the check-out line isn't the place to have my carefully thought-out opinions called into question. I pay for my things and roll my basket over to the service counter, where I might find a sane manager.

While I'm talking to her, and she's at least succinctly, if not regretfully, saying they have no such bags anymore, and in the five stores she's worked at in the last four months she has seen none of them, I re-pack the five bags of groceries into two reasonable, carry-able bags. As I finish this the check-out lady (who has watched me, obviously undercutting her authority, bitch that I am) comes sailing over, waving two items she failed to bag (you had one job, lady), saying loudly, "Ma'am, you forgot these items! Ma'am, you left these at my register!" for all the world as though I had littered on her front lawn.

At this point I've had it. This is now over. I open my mouth in surprise, and start to effuse, "Oh, you are so sweet, thank you, thank you for being so nice - *nonononono*, please don't bother -" as she picks up one of my discarded bags from the cart and starts to shove the items into it - "it was so nice of you to bring these over, thank you so much!" I enthuse, quickly stuff the items into one of my other bags and hit the door, successfully ditching the unhelpful lady and her less than helpful bags.

Now I know why the self-checkout lanes are so popular here. Holy crap on a cracker.

Back in the nineties I worked at the legendary Oxford Books in Atlanta. People didn't take the job for the money; as far as I can tell they took it for the brilliant conversations available from nearly everyone in the store. It was certainly why I valued the job.



One of the many conversations I got to have was with the fellow in charge of newspapers and periodicals, a bodybuilder who wore those adorable round brass-framed glasses and talked like he had enjoyed his education. He was very smart, and loved debate, so our conversations were often lively, contentious and enjoyable. On some occasion the subject of homosexual relationships came up, and my friend commented, in a very egalitarian way, that he had no problem with people doing that at all, "I just don't want to hear about it."



I came up a little short on that. "What, people can have relationships like that, as long as they keep it secret?"



"I'm not saying they have to keep it secret." he said, "I just don't want them talking about it here. I don't want to hear about that at work."



I thought about this for awhile. "OK, I want you to try an experiment. For a week, come in to work, do everything normally, nothing different - but don't talk about your wife. Like, don't even mention you have one. When you think of mentioning her, say to yourself, 'people don't want to hear about that, it's disgusting'. He looked at me like I was making no sense at first. He had a great relationship with his wife, and mentioned her often. "When you spend a week willingly marginalizing the most important relationship in your life," I said, " let's talk again."



It amazes me still how incredibly easy that was-- not because I was smarter than him - he usually got the better of me in debates - but because of his blindness; how completely the label of homosexuality removed from his mind the idea that gay relationships were potentially as intimate, important and lasting as the one he had at home. It also startled me how powerful it was. My friend had not a word to counter with, and for the day our game was over. I don't know if he tried my idea, but maybe he thought about it.



It really isn't every day you get a chance to change someone's mind. I'm just glad I was talking to someone who was open to it.



I don't know if anyone would be willing to try this little experiment, but if they were - then they might understand a little bit of what it's like to not be able to admit to the biggest, most wonderful thing in your life - forever. When they got to the end of that week they might feel just a tiny, tiny bit the way many of my friends felt when they woke up and discovered that they could be legally married. How this little thing, the act of some politicians shuffling around some papers and passing this thing that changed nothing for anybody else, somehow also changed everything.



Let me amend that: that law did change something for the rest of us: it made us a better nation. Yes, in these latter days of 'corporate people' and executive power-grabbing, there is some little change that we made that let some people - friends, neighbors, co-workers, and always, always, more people than we think - be happy. A law just made a bunch of people happy. Just like that.



Wow.

I see surprisingly few abortion-based discussions on FB. Feelings tend to run so high its often hard to have more than a few exchanges without reaching a point where you can't decently keep the posts on your page. So it's nice to see something like a discussion.It's a tough subject, that tends to attract a lot of shouting, and I think sometimes we just get tired of the shouting, and long to have a clear, permanent solution so we can all stop shouting about it so much. I'd like to turn that idea about for a moment. I know that we're shouting a lot, but shouting itself isn't bad - it's discussion, passionate discussion. When people are uncertain of what is provable, the shouting gets louder. Well that's not bad either. The fact is this is about life versus choice, even in the language of Roe v. Wade. The law doesn't attempt to define when life begins, it only acknowledges and protects the choice a woman has to make, that it is invariably complicated and personal, fraught with fears, sacrifices, and dire consequences on all sides, and that this is therefore not a choice that can be overridden by the state. It acknowledges further, and this is important, that even were the fetus a full grown, established person, another person cannot be required by law to give up their own body to its support. This conflict that we pursue in public life is, ultimately, a reflection of the conflict every woman or girl confronts inside herself when the situation arises. And be assured, that the conflict - the choice - is affected, but not eliminated, by making abortion illegal. The Choice is there all right, as old as shame. And what happens in that woman's mind is where it's really at, no matter what we shout about or what laws we make, so here's the long-torn product of my judgement: A good society will always leave that choice to the prospective mother. But like the woman herself, a good society will always think hard about it, and worry about it, because no law can cover every situation with perfect justice, it can only do its best. The rest as always, is up to us.

Where Gregg reads, I write. He works out the finances, I look for work.The contract comes in, he reads it, we sign it, I get it in the mail. It's a good arrangement most of the time, because I like my half and he likes his. Here in St. Augustine it can be hard though, because looking for work is different here, and we haven't exactly worked out the best ways to do it. It's getting gigs in a small town, where we'd be playing for a few hours at a time.

To complicate things, I'm in one of those times where I constantly feel as though I should be doing something else, like Cheryl Wheeler's Unworthy. I am mystified by greeting stuff done. I mean,i get stuff done, but it's not pretty. I start one thing, then switch to something more urgent, then something comes up and I go to that, then I have to go out and mail something before the postman gets here, and while I'm out I pick up some things we need, and finally I switch back to the first thing and the second thing lies around unfinished for weeks, and the third thing gets forgotten about. There's got to be a better way to get stuff done. How? What do people do?

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