I wrote this song in Nashville… moving to Nashville after living in L.A. was something of a culture shock. In L.A. I didn’t have a car or even know how to tune my own guitar- asking strangers for rides or tunings wasn’t a big deal, because after all, we’re all one, man! I could even walk around wearing antennae on my head, and although it did make me stick out a little, it didn’t create a division- people would just ask why I was wearing antennae on my head and then proceed to share their own alien abduction stories. But in Nashville everything was colder, heavier, more serious. Conformity was the chief value, for people and music, and anything different was cast in a dark and sketchy light. To conform was to be clean, intelligent, wholesome, loving.
And conformity begins with clothes, which is why I had trouble right off the bat. For reasons I can’t remember, I was determined to wear only white clothes (in addition to eating only white foods and living in an all-white apartment). But especially on a limited budge, white clothes were not always easy to come by, and I sometimes ended up wearing things that were definitely white, but not altogether clothes- like Christmas decorations and tablecloths, for example.
Why didn’t I just try to make life easy on myself by fitting in?
In the movie Brooklyn’s Finest, a Brooklyn cop goes on a killing spree in order afford a safer home for his family. I can totally relate to his feelings, and yet, I kept wanting to yell at him, “Move to Indiana! Why don’t you just move to Indiana!! Don’t you realize there is cheaper housing there?!?”
Why does Brooklyn even exist- why doesn’t everyone just move to Indiana? What is the upside to Brooklyn? As far as I can tell, there isn’t more stuff to do, there isn’t greater earning potential… so, what gives?
At any rate, this is another song I wrote while struggling to keep my head above water in the belly of that concrete monster. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the hardest things to deal with was feeling deprived of all the things that make life feel happy and comfortable, like friends, nature, a happy home, a slice of pizza that hasn’t been held in a stranger’s dirty hands. My mind would spin around and around trying to think of ways I could bring this lost pastoral energy back into my life (Because somehow, just as in Brooklyn’s Finest, the idea that I could simply leave never seemed to enter my mind.)
At one point, I was convinced that the color orange was the answer. I saw Brooklyn as basically being the Kingdom of Gray, and thought orange might be the color that could cut through the thick dullness that gray represented, and bring in the energy of the Harvest, that time when all your efforts are rewarded and all the seeds you have planted come to fruition.
So, not having much money to spend on the color orange, I bought a basketball, a pair of orange high top shoes (the only orange shoes I could find for $9), plus some orange tissue paper and candles. I taped the orange paper to my wall and lit the orange candles beneath it. But when I opened my door, the paper caught fire and flew across the room like a giant orange monster, landing on the floor where I stomped it out (and then extinguished the wall). I decided to put the orange candles on my kitchen table instead, and let them burn through the night so I could wake up and enjoy my harvest in the morning. Instead, I was woken by a strange sound that turned out to be the entire surface of my kitchen table burning. The spirits of the harvest at work!
When I lived in Santa Fe, a man asked me out for a drink. He was a slime ball and I was married, so I knew it was a bad idea. And YET, my (horrible) philosophy was to say yes to everything lest I accidentally miss a golden opportunity in disguise. How could I be certain he wasn’t really a magical unicorn planning on teaching me the secrets of the universe?
Still, I had been around the block enough to recognize a predatorial man when I saw one, and I knew I should take some action to protect myself. Being a practical person, I decided the best protection would be to fill my apartment (a weekly motel suite) to the brim with giant pink pyramids topped with bunny rabbits. I figured he would walk in, see all these pyramids topped with rabbits, and then… well, I just figured he wouldn’t mess with me after that.
So I spent the next week walking to a nearby lumberyard to buy bricks, which I carried home, painted pink, covered with iridescent silver stars, and then stacked into pyramids. I ended up making seven pyramids (in a very small motel room), each one topped with a candle, a crystal, and a rabbit figurine. It took the whole week and all my money.
When the big day arrived, the man didn’t even show up. I wasn’t surprised, actually, since standing people up is a hallmark of this particular breed of predators. They forget an engagement, the jilted party calls them (angrily) to remind them, they apologize and ask to make it up to you, and then the two people meet again, with the predator on slightly higher footing. My disappointment (after all this work!) was equal to my relief, and all in all I took it as a sign that the rabbit pyramids had protected me, just as I’d hoped.
Later, while living in Brooklyn, I saw a movie this man had made which described his romantic philosophy of cutting people’s pride in order to seem more desirable to them. A very low down approach to life, but still, probably better than saying yes to everything.
Probably the most traumatic part of living in Brooklyn was the cockroaches. When you lose control of your personal space, and cannot make it safe and clean despite your best efforts, you lose a part of your mind.
Moses was a black man, and his favorite color was red.
The first time I saw one I didn’t think it was real. I had just turned on the bathroom light in my newly rented apartment when a three inch long creature- that looked to me like an Egyptian scarab- quickly scampered down the drain. I didn’t see what a magical scarab would be doing in my apartment, and I didn’t see how something that large could have disappeared down the drain, so I figured it must have been a hallucination- and hopefully a sign of good luck! I thought- like the phoenix- it was the sort of creature I would only see once in a lifetime.
But unfortunately, it was just one member of a very, very, VERY large tribe, that tormented me day and night, and that is about all I can say on this subject without losing the contents of my stomach. Suffice it to say, this was just one more element of my life which felt intolerable, out of control, and left me turning to magic for answers.
Perhaps because I lived in a black part of town, most of the magic I learned seemed to have African-American origins, like Hoodoo for example. One book I read was called the 8th, 9th, and 10th Books of Moses. In the preface, it refers to Moses (if I remember correctly) as the Great Hoodoo Man of the Bible. It caused me to see Moses in a totally new light. Before, I had always thought of him as someone chosen by God to do God’s bidding with little will or volition of his own. Which isn’t very relatable, since most of us don’t have burning bushes to turn to for advice and have to figure out life for ourselves. But in the hoodoo version of Moses, he was more of a self-made man- a powerful, wise magician who led his people to freedom through his own knowledge, strength and cunning. Which makes sense when you consider that “God helps those who help themselves.”
To be countrified means to be made of stone and earth.
My life in Brooklyn was a constant struggle to avoid being countrified, but in a world so hard and gray that was pretty much impossible. Maybe, when it is your time to die, you should just do it peacefully.
But instead, I chose to rage against the dying of the light. Whenever I had a dollar, I headed straight to the neighborhood discount party supply store, where I would spend as much time as I could gazing (inconspicuously, I hoped) at the plastic party decorations in every color of the rainbow. In the end, I would usually settle on a plastic tablecloth in a color I had never bought before, which I would then take home and nail to my wall. Why? Because I was convinced there was one color out there who could magically change my life for the better. And once I found this color and nailed him to my wall- BAM! the world would transform in an instant.
When I had several dollars to spend, I went to a discount greeting card shop, where, once again, I would nonchalantly loiter for as long as possible, before buying as many cards as I could afford and taking them home to stuff with glitter and feathers. I mailed these cards to everyone I knew- no matter how distantly- and learned there is no better way to alienate an acquaintance than a string of “I’m Glad We’re Friends!” cards with cute baby ducks on the front.
I wrote this song while living in Brooklyn, when my mind was beginning to decompose from endless periods of solitude… first a year living off the highway in Santa Fe and then- I don’t know how long- living in the scary filth of Brooklyn, cut off not just from other humans, but also from the natural world since it took hours of expensive transportation to escape the urban grid.
My one connection point with nature was an abandoned lot that contained a metal rod sticking out of the ground. If I stood on the rod, I could see what appeared to be a creek in the distance, although it may have been a drain.
In Brooklyn, I started doing strange things I would never have done before, like buying tabloid magazines and reading them from cover to cover, eagerly devouring every story about celebrity weight gain and two-timing ex-boyfriends. And I would read them while polishing off family sized bags of Combos in flavors I used to hate, like Pepperoni Pizza Pretzel.
You might think someone with a lot of time on their hands and the freedom to do as they wish would make the most of it, taking up all sorts of new hobbies and interests. But instead I found that, in the absence of friends, money, nature, love, and beauty, it was difficult to be interested in anything at all. The only books I could bring myself to read were books about magic. I was especially interested in spells for invisibility, and would rarely leave the apartment without trying out one spell or the other. My favorite was to hold a crystal pointing downwards and imagine myself being swallowed up by the earth. I also began dressing for invisibility, and really constructing my whole personality around being as inconspicuous as possible. Because when people DID notice me, it was not a good thing.
Once I was walking down the street, when out of a window an invisible voice shouted “You’re ugly! You’re ugly! Hey you in the orange shoes- You look ugly!!” It was mortifying and he kept shouting it over and over again until he finally yelled “You’re not ugly, but your shoes are! They don’t match your skirt! Don’t wear those shoes with that skirt!”
Another time, a group of twenty or so kids who had just gotten off the school bus started throwing glass bottles at me. Equal to my fear of the bottles was my confusion and humiliation when none of the other adults did anything to stand up for me. I don’t know if this is because I was the only white person, or if New York is just a culture where everyone minds their own business regardless of what is going on around them.
It seemed commonplace for people to talk about me as though I wasn’t there. Once, two girls a couple feet away from me had this conversation: “Oh my god, she looks like a ghost!” “That’s what white people look like! Haven’t you seen a white person before?” “No, look! She looks like a real ghost! Like a white sheet!”
Another song from the Odyssey… Telemachus visits Menelaus who treats him like a king- far different from the way his mother’s suitors treat him (in fact they are planning to murder him on his trip home).
I remember playing this song in Nashville at “Coffeehouse Survivor”. Two musicians would play a song, a panel of three judges would score them, and the winner would go on to compete in the next round. I didn’t want to participate in something so savage and degrading, but since it was my philosophy to say yes to everything, I went anyway.
Treating art as something that can be scored and judged like that is… well, it is beyond ridiculous in my opinion, and harmful to everyone involved. It is like ranking people’s souls. Not to mention that art frequently deals with perspectives that are new, while judgments tend to stem from the values of days gone by.
But at any rate, I played this song in the first round, and lost by a landslide to a man in a cowboy hat. One judge even gave me a zero. Ouch.
Another song from the Odyssey… Odysseus’s encounter with the witch Circe… in the background you may be able to hear the snow plows & I really wish I could run away from New England at the moment… it is not the snow or the coldness that bothers me but the fact that they last forever. Two short months of spring/summer and then the struggle to survive starts all again. Plus, there is the lack of sunlight, which has the positive effect of making the thoughts and judgments of other people seem far away, but the negative effect of making your spirit feel like it is gasping for breath.
The prevailing philosophy on how to handle winter here is “Don’t fight it, embrace it.” When I press people for details, they generally recommend skiing. Which is a costly embrace. I think waging an all out war on winter may be a better idea for me, though I haven’t decided how to go about it just yet. If money were no object, I would buy hundreds of lamps and keep them turned on all day long, turn up the heat to 80 degrees, and fill a humidifier with the scent of ylang-ylangs and grapefruits, so I could live in a sunny and moist paradise.
As it stands, my best winter survival tips are tons of vitamin D and long car rides to ward off the dreaded cabin fever.
Another song from the Odyssey… Odysseus leaves Calypso’s island where he could have lived forever as an immortal sex slave in order to face probable death on the ocean, hoping that he can make it back to his wife and son on a pathetic homemade raft.
One of the last Odyssey songs… I was so enamored with fire at the time, that I would sometimes light up to 100 candles in a single room of my house. The air would get all hot and swirly and it felt like sitting in an oven. In addition, I was addicted to the fiery stimulation of performing. I couldn’t go one day without it, and if I had to, I would find some kind of trouble to get into to make up for it. Soon after writing this, I decided to move to Las Vegas so I could be free from the dampening, depressing effects of water once and for all.
But, in this song, are already the first cracks of doubt that fire is really the answer to everything.
