Music Moment: The Zombies, “This Will Be Our Year”

The Zombies – This Will Be Our Year

The warmth of your love
is like the warmth of the sun
and this will be our year
took a long time to come

I haven’t been writing much lately, not because I have nothing to say, but because I have had too much to say, and too little free time in which to say it. But thankfully I’ve had the chance to talk things over with good friends both in person and on the telephone this week, and that’s released a tremendous amount of pressure.

Don’t let go of my hand
now darkness has gone
And this will be our year
took a long time to come

Besides the counsel of Miss D, which is always uplifting, I also got to hang out with Panda Eraser, Mr. Kite, and the Mister earlier this week. Lady K called several times and I also got to talk to the o.g.b.d., who was again surprisingly encouraging, kind, and thoughtful. They all really helped me clarify the things that were on my mindgrapes and squeeze some goodness out of them.

And I won’t forget
the way you held me up when I was down
and I won’t forget the way you said,
“Darling, I love you,”
You gave me faith to go on

My grandmother has been staying with us. It was a move that was supposed to be a brief visit but is now most likely going to be as permanent as possible. While her physical health is still great, her mental decline is staggering. She had always had a sharp tongue, a quick mind; if I had ever dreaded her visits or had negative feelings about her in the past, it was because we had equal minds and could clash over things (especially her daughter, my mother, of whom I was defensive and felt she was too critical). That mercurial and impish figure of my youth is gone. My grandmother now is a million miles from the Dorothy that I thought would be living with me. I am so glad she’s here, and that I’m able to have with her even those few minutes of a time where she has drifted “in,” but the pain of the remainder of her waking hours, her confusion and fear, her redundancy and pacing, is sometimes breathtaking.

Now we’re there
and we’ve only just begun
This will be our year
took a long time to come

What I am now fearing even more than the pressure of her moments of anxiety and loss now is when a physical declination in her health sets in; when I and, when she’s free, my mother are no longer adequately equipped to provide for her physically. I hate to picture her completely unaware of her surroundings, somewhere where no one knows her. I know places like that are full of loving and compassionate people, but what scares me is the times when Grandma has enough on the ball to know that she is in an unfamiliar place, and expresses fear and the sense of being lost.

The warmth of your smile
smile for me, little one
and this will be our year
took a long time to come

She told me several days ago when I came in to get her ready in the morning that she’d woke from a nightmare and been up for several hours, reading, to settle her nerves. “Bethy,” she said, “I dreamt I flew home and I didn’t know a single soul that was in my house. It didn’t look like my house. Other people lived there, people that I had never seen. It was all completely strange to me.” She said the worst part was that then she woke up here, and she thought her dream had come true until she saw a picture of my daughter and I on her nightstand and remembered she was here for what she thinks is a visit. (Given her nightmare, I suspect part of her knows this visit could be permanent.) She concluded by saying, “I don’t mind telling you — I’ve never been so frightened in my life.”

That’s what I’m scared of. That’s why I feel like no matter how hard it is, or how hard it continues to get, I can’t let her go.

You don’t have to worry
All your worried days are gone
this will be our year
took a long time to come

And that’s why I value so greatly all the kind ears of my friendohs right now. I am so lucky to have a support system to whom I can slip away and bitch and moan and noise my anxieties. Whether it’s over sushi, pints, the phone, or wherever, thank god for them. I had thought last year was going to be the most challenging of my life, but this year is shaping up to build on the growing I did then (to put a positive spin on it, rather than say, “this year sucks too”).

And I won’t forget
the way you held me up when I was down
and I won’t forget the way you said,
“Darling, I love you”
You gave me faith to go on

One of the things I’ve been doing to keep Grandma from getting agitated and restless during the day, which is when she paces the house and starts to worry about her money, her belongings, how she is going to get a plane ticket home, etc, is I’ve begun taking her on little day trips and out to stores and such. Even to just window shop, because a) to be brutally frank she does not know the difference whether we buy something or not, and b) it is not as if either of us is made of money and she is happy to people watch.

Tonight, I’m taking her to a vintage-through-the-present hair show at Panda’s cosmetology school, and she seems to be looking forward to that, because she keeps asking me when it is; if they will be videotaped or live models; and whether we have the tickets already. (“7:00 pm,” “live,” and essentially “yes.”) So that’s hopefully going to go well!

Now we’re there
and we’ve only just begun
and this will be our year
took a long time to come

This Sunday, after church, the o.g.b.d. is taking kidlet and I to lunch, and then much later in the day he and I are going to what is probably the last theater in America showing Sherlock Holmes right now. I’m looking forward to seeing it one last time before it leaves theaters. He had expressed interest in it last week after surprising me by suggesting we catch a movie sometime together when my mother was free, to give me a break from caring for my grandmother and have a fun night out, but he said that he was pretty sure it was no longer showing in our area. So he was super-pumped and surprised when I talked to him today to confirm our lunch plans with kidlet and told him that I’d found a nearby second-run theater that was still showing it through this weekend. The way Robert Downey, Jr. plays Sherlock as very herky-jerky, pugilistic, intense, and accidentally brutally honest really, really, really reminds me of the o.g.b.d.; I wonder if he will notice it, himself. I’m not going to say anything and we’ll see if he brings it up first.

Anna Karina with Jean-Claud Brialy.

Yeah, we only just begun
yeah, this will be our year
took a long time to come.

I had talked with Panda about how I am persona non grata with all the women in his life, and, just by talking about it, I started feeling less horrible about it. As Panda pointed out, even if I don’t understand it and it hurts me, the bottom line is I can’t change someone else’s mind, and I’ve done my best. And we agreed, as I had done last weekend with the LBC and Miss D before the drag races, that probably his wife will come around, and she is only acting this way because she is still hurting from whatever chain of events lead to their split (I have not felt it was polite to pry into any specifics about that). I pray that will be the case, but it’s good to know all my girlfriends agree on this, too. So I’m hoping to have the opportunity to talk to him about these revelations, because I really feel like we are in this cool new place where we are a simple team again, in our queer and broken way.

All in all, I’ve had time to adjust to these new turns of events and I think I am going to pull through. And thank god for it.

Advice: Marilyn Monroe and cats edition

You can be Catwoman without understanding cats or women, it seems.

Photo of Marilyn via nevver on the tumblr.

I have this very hackneyed and cliched theory that women are like cats and men are like dogs. It’s overarching and misogynistic and probably a bunch of hooey, because I can’t even apply it to my own good girl friends, but the thing is sometimes it feels like it is just exactly the truth. In talking to my daughter’s father this weekend, I found out that his wife, from whom he is very recently separated, apparently doesn’t like me. By which I mean, hella does not like me. Historically, even. This is pretty distressing to me because, like an idiot, I thought we were cool.

Not only had I been really excited about meeting her, about which I clearly remember writing in several entries, but in the actual event of it I’d made a point of being polite, respectful, friendly, and talkative with her on the occasions we met. We talked at various times both in person and in letters about my move down here, about cooking, about our families — I really thought we’d hit it off. I gave her a card for Valentine’s day and tried consistently to be as friendly and upbeat as possible when she wrote me about her troubles with my daughter’s father, encouraging her and saying I was praying for the best possible outcome.

Photgraphed by Andre de Dienes.

To find out that she not only never liked me before but I am thinking pretty much actively hates me now was upsetting, but it was not the hardest blow. That was still to come. I don’t understand it, and I’ve known for a long time that his sister didn’t like me, never really understood why she had a bad impression of me but eventually gave up hoping she would change her mind and have just continued in as friendly a way as possible, but things are really compounded now. The toughest thing for me to grapple with is that Grandma P, who I’d always counted as a friend and counted on for sitting for my daughter and as a sounding board now and again in my own life, actually thought that my daughter’s father left his wife for me. That she would even consider drawing a conclusion like that, after knowing me all this time and knowing the separation and pain that I myself have been going through this year, is shocking and devastating to me.

The thing with his wife was bad enough, but the thing with his mom is stunning to me, and, as the time has gone by since he and I talked this weekend and I’ve had a chance to work through the jumble of feelings I have about all this, it turns out that’s one of the things that I’m having the toughest time with. I guess I was a fool? to imagine I had a connection with Grandma P, a) because I know better about myself and how some people just don’t like me, and b) I know that connections with many people are illusory and couched in ulterior motives. But I really did think that we were friends. I’ve welcomed her in to every home in which I’ve lived, always looked forward to her visits, encouraged her to call frequently and to have a relationship with my daughter even when her father and I were not in touch. So this has been a big surprise.

I don’t know why they dislike me so. If it’s because he and I hurt each other five years ago, then, isn’t that between us? I understand. When people hurt my friends and the ones I love, I want to tear them apart — but I also trust my friends’ and loved ones’ judgment. And if they tell me that it’s okay, then I have to know that that’s the end of my anger, and they know the way of it better than me. So if we can forgive one another and rebuild a friendship for not only our daughter’s sake but for the redemption of our own selves, then why in the name of heaven is that a bad or threatening thing?

This is what I mean about cats and women. They are full of secrets and you can never know what they are thinking. When dogs don’t like you, they make no trouble to disguise it: they bark and growl at you and try to bite. Cats are so much sneakier, you think they are fun to play with and you can trust them, and all the while they are stalking around and then coming out of nowhere with their claws … These women that I thought I could tentatively call friends made me think I was doing an okay job of becoming something like close and bonded with them, convinced me to offer up parts of myself and my personal backstories which I have a terrible time doing exactly because of situations like this, and it turns out that I guess I was wrong. I failed to meet the mark in some way, or could never have done so for some reason that is totally shrouded in mystery to me, like when they were handing out the woman-cat brains I was at a Polish sausage stand and missed the memo. It’s a real bummer.

There is nothing I can do about it except keep upbeat, focus on the daisies and bluebirds, and keep offering the olive branch as I have tried again and again to do — and pray that it “takes” at some eventual time. Because we have all got to know each other basically until we die, and I don’t understand why that has to be unpleasant or filled with drama, when we can just as easily choose to find the good in the situation? Until then, until they come around, I guess, I have to concentrate, have to try and stop dwelling on it and stop feeling sorry for myself, accept what I cannot change, and go forward. It’s just harder to do than say.

That went well.

Just came from lunch with the o.g.b.d. No repeat of the well-understandable bottle thing of the last visit. I told you it would work out! Kidlet took ill halfway through our mutual lunchtime and demanded to be taken home. While swinging the o.g.b.d. back home after dropping her past the house, the o.g.b.d and I stopped off for “a coffee,” which is a trite phrase that in this case means “a pint.” (Now you are speaking our language.)

We came clean about a lot of sadness through which we’ve both been paddling, essentially rudderless, and, I think at any rate, ultimately the topics upon which we touched in our rambling but wonderfully amicable chat basically agreed with the age-old saying that is one of the ones I have always loved best. “Seek the headwaters of the river of pain.”

I think that we discovered that for both of us we are for one other indeedy some of the chief of those there ol’ headwaters. And we are forgiving each other first, ourselves second, and figuring the godforsaken rapids of the fallout out together, in the best and most platonic of ways. Absent of the prospect of sex and the agony of romantic entanglement, it turned out we had all manner of wisdom and laughs to offer one another. It was an amazing talk. I have great hopes for the future. Thanks for the vibes!

I’m packing now and gearing up to scootch down to C-town to have a gal night with Miss D and the LBC (I travel armed with Mean Girls, Josie and the Pussycats, and Anchorman — my go-to feel-good flicks) and then in the a.m. we are driving to Famoso for the last day of the drag races to ring in Gorgeous George’s 30th with Geo, Paolo, and the Gentleman.

I am feeling really upbeat and positive about the future. Always room for another friend in the circle, even in the most unlikely of circumstances. I am really excited to welcome someone back in to my life that I cared deeply about. So thanks again, and catch you on the flip!

Never throw out anyone

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. — Audrey Hepburn.

We’re having lunch with the o.g.b.d. again today. I really hope it goes well. I mean, it went well last time, actually: the bottle only concerned me because I don’t want him to be feeling dissolute or inconsolable in general, and I know he’d hate to accidentally go too far in front of kidlet. That would hurt her image of him, and I know ultimately he would regret that terribly. I don’t want either of them to have to go through that, but particularly not him, because he does not need to hate himself on top of everything else he must be feeling right now with his breakup with his wife. I don’t want him to have to deal with that and compound any unhappiness he is already having to go through.

I want to tell him that I know what it’s like to have that inconsolable sense that life, taken straight, is intolerable; the feeling that you have to physically “take the edge off” of the knife blades of your thoughts and shield yourself from the “muchness,” the crazy coming-at-you-from-all-sides agony of crushing reality. I know the necessity of the filter: how it is to shield yourself and to see things through a veil in order to keep from seeing all of it at once, because you couldn’t take that because you feel too deeply about all things, and fearing the overwhelming magnitude of the difficult emotions you’re working through.

We have always been two peas in a pod in our way of being lost in this universe, oversensitive and underattenuated to proper socialization, and so of course we have brought suffering on ourselves, and of course we have both of us had terribly abusive relationships with anything that will alter our moods. I understand that alcohol and drugs are a handy, popular, easily attained crutch (long-term health and usefulness: debatable; short-term-pain-dulling and turn-to-able-ness: undeniable) that can help you come at your emotions sidewise, do that little crab scuttle over to them that keeps them from smacking you in the face and knocking you out. I know that.

But I know that it doesn’t work forever. There is always an ugly day that you face on the natch and you have this gnawing desperation and anxiety that mounts and mounts, and everything is unbearable and your eyelids are crawling and you just want to scream — but then that day passes. And then the next one, and another, and pretty soon you get in to the swing of mainly sobriety and it is not so bad, and you have the side benefit of not despising yourself quite so much.

I have no plans and particularly no grounds to get preachy: I just want him to know that I get it, and that he will want to set boundaries for himself around the kidlet, or he will regret it and hate himself all the more later. And I want him to know that I’m here for him. That’s a trite expression that in this case means I am physically willing to go pick him up from somewhere, or spend a long while on the phone, with disregard for personal inconvenience, talking him down from a ledge. I am actually here and present for him in a way that I never was when we were together, and I think that we have chanced in to a situation where we have a unique opportunity for renewal and redemption: where we can truly both benefit from one another’s company.

Please send vibes that I will find the right words and the convincing gestures to express to him my very ardent sincerity and my genuine love and concern without saying anything that turns him away.

Music Moment: The Song Remains the Same — Nina Simone, “I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl”

Nina covers Bessie Smith.

Nina Simone – I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl

I want a little sugar
in my bowl
I want a little sweetness
down in my soul
I could stand some lovin’
Oh so bad
I feel so funny and I feel so sad

I want a little steam
on my clothes
Maybe I can fix things up
so they’ll go
What’s the matter, Daddy,
Come on, save my soul
I need some sugar in my bowl
I ain’t foolin’
I want some sugar in my bowl

You been acting different
I’ve been told
Soothe me
I want some sugar in my bowl

I want some steam
on my clothes
Maybe I can fix things up so they’ll go
What’s the matter, Daddy,
Come on save my soul
I want some sugar in my bowl
I ain’t foolin’
I want some sugar – yeah – in my bowl.

A few weeks ago, the o.g. babydaddy treated me and the kidlet to lunch at the Soosh Gardino. He and his wife are mysteriously on the outs this month, I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’ve been trying to be neutral and supportive. They’re not living together any more, though, so I’m not sure what to make of it all.

I drafted her a friendly and supportive Valentine’s card and left it at a place where I knew she had a gig that night; a few days later she wrote me thanking me but then added some surprising stuff about “needing time as newlyweds.”

This was confusing to me because I had just talked to kidlet’s father the day prior and he said in no uncertain terms that he would only take her back to avoid living with his mother … then the next day he phoned and I asked if they had patched things up and he said sort of, but not really, then the following week he said they had certainly not, and were still living apart, so like I said, I am just staying out of it. Because I truly don’t know what’s going on.

I wish there was a way for me to wave a magic wand or wish on some special star and make things perfect for both of us, but I don’t have those kinds of means at my disposal, and I have never been much of a great shakes at relationship stuff.

Apparently neither has the o.g.b.d., for which I can vouch at least during our time together lo five years ago, and also because he asked me abruptly on our way to the Gardino, “Can I ask you something? It’s bad.” He is in the habit of blurting things out so I wasn’t as surprised as I would’ve been with someone normal. I said okay and he asked me, “What happened? With your marriage?”

My stomach lurched but as my kidlet’s father and knowing he wants to support her and be able to be a sounding board for her anxieties and dreams just the same as I do, so why would I not arm him with all information possible in order for him to succeed?, I felt like he deserved a specific reply and not my usual shrug or head shake. I answered as best I could without going in to too many details, but as directly as possible because the o.g.b.d. has a lot of tics and one of them is a strong dislike of roundabout bush-beating. I’ve always thought that was a fair bugaboo and done my best to respect it. I wound down my short explanation as we pulled in to the lot of the Soosh Gardino by saying:

Woman as banquet.

“You know how it is.” (he does) “Growing up, people like us don’t plan on someone loving us, because that means letting them know us. I thought I could let someone in and it didn’t work out. For right now, I’m just not interested even at all in trusting another person, not like that. The jury is out for me on the human race.” He made a tsking sound and started to shake his head, and I held up my hand and said, “Just for now. We’ll see. But maybe I was right, all those years; maybe I am supposed to just be alone.”

Still from Pierre le fou.

I had just parked and killed the engine so I was able to look him in the eye when he suddenly grabbed my hand. He said urgently, “No. Beth — don’t say that.” This is not a story about how I got back together with the o.g.b.d., or how there is still some unwritten chapter about us. I just realized that might be inferred.

That’s not at all the way of it. You don’t know him — everything he does is spontaneous, overemotional, and urgent. He can’t even brush his teeth without doing it slightly “off” like he is coming down off of heroin or flashing his eyes around like Rudolph Valentino. He’s an intense guy, that o.g.b.d. It was one of the things that attracted me so strongly to him when we were together: he is not like other people. He’s more vibrant. Like other people are watercolor and he is painted in oils.

Rudolph Valentino smoking a cigarette with probably much greater restraint than the o.g.b.d. might — less wild gesticulation and hair pulling — but the eyes are the same.

What this story is about is this: You are pretty low when your recently-split, moving-back-in-with-his-mother, hated-you-for-years ex feels sorry for you. I thought, “Wow. Maybe we are moving in to a new phase of our lives where he will be a good friend and confidante to me. That would be pretty unexpected and neat!”

After lunch, we went to a park and it turned out he’d been drinking sub rosa from a fifth of whiskey all day. I was kind of bummed that I’d thought we’d been doing so well and it might have not really been heartfelt on his half. Quelle surprise, I guess. I will never learn, it seems. I don’t want to sound pathetic, I just felt pretty stupid for thinking someone gave a crap about me.

I found this out when he took a hit out of the bottle in his pocket. In front of a bunch of kids. I said, “Um, no thanks, dude.” He said, “Oh, I know. I wasn’t offering. You’re driving.” He had me there: I was indeed driving. And it was a visit we were both in charge of. And he’d literally split from his wife the day before. And the day before happened to be Valentine’s. So I’m not going to judge or flip out unless it happens again. “Everybody gets one,” right, Spider-man on Family Guy?

The point is: Yep. Probably meant to be alone. At least for a good long while.

It’s lonely to want some sugar in the bowl, sure, but the trouble is it’s tough to tell the sugar from the rat poison. Better safe than sorry.

Passin’ ON the laudanum while I pass the time

She’ll be here in 30 minutes, the Grandma P. We have a good relationship, my daughter’s father’s mother and I. It’s all the other people in our lives who fuck us up. They are always putting us in awkward positions. She and I have similar perfectly fucked up backgrounds and are as a result perfectly insane and so perfectly capable of functioning in the tight little space we have carved out in which to negotiate our friendship and play with the kidlet. Seriously, the only tension comes from outside forces, which is to say the many individuals, predominantly men, in our lives who we have striven to please and be taken care of by and who instead have hurt, bullied, or disenchanted us both. If I was going to start a Utopian women-only cult, I would hella take P with me right out of the gate. Look at that, I found a positive in today’s agonizing piecework of weaving together some kind of central rope to pull myself out of my bullshit mental problems:

(“Rope play at supper club” by PreciousLittle, on deviantart.)

Grandma P brings out a side of me that is very empathetic to women and can admit that men are as capable of being flawed as a sex as that Other Gender I’m always bashing away at despite being among its ranks. Thanks, Grandma P!

I guess I will not be needing this after all.

Matryoshka dolls and pulled teeth, or, pass the laudanum?

The mother of my daughter’s other father is coming over today. Oh, look at the little layers of insulation, like a set of goddamned matryoshka dolls, this is how I nestle away my feelings and keep myself safe from them. I start with myself and erect shell after painted shell all around me: this means I am very tiny inside. Did you know?

You see, he got married in the last few weeks (stab), and has another child, now, a boy (twist), and has apparently totally turned his life around and aren’t I such an awful person for thinking him a stranger to me and to my daughter? I know it’s more, I know it’s more repressed and deeply painful even than the obvious things I can think of to say about why it’s bothering me so much, why it’s like a sliver of glass in my heart, cutting deeper and deeper with every breath. Am I holding him responsible for the fact that I and my daughter were not enough to make him want to become this awesome new person his friends tell me he is (not at all the person I miss anymore, I guess, I guess that person is gone forever), not like his New and Improved girlfriend, I’m sorry, wife and his New and Improved baby. They are the ones who get to have him around and hear his voice every day, whereas I get to wake up every day and know very specifically that I will not see him and will not hear from him that day. And as that pain is on me, I have to let go of that hurt.

I am glad he found someone who seems faithful and kind and full of grace, plus someone who is, like him, really good-looking and also musically talented like he is, I honestly am, they will probably go far together. But the son…and the wedding…and the probable amazing amounts of pure happiness, when I am in the midst of this waking-up to my old repressed self and this marital separation, that is such a kick in the stomach, especially coming from someone that I loved so much and so wrongly (in a way that poisoned the well instead of making it clean, you know? like a hell-version of soulmates that was best walked away from despite how hard it was to disentangle myself from it, because it was too enormous for me to see any other way out of) that I’ve shoved those feelings about that breakup so far down that I don’t even know what shape they will take when they come out? I guess, this shape. Matroyshka dolls, aimless crying over shit that doesn’t really affect me, events of my own life spinning outside my control, no way to keep myself or my daughter on what I think of as “normal” footing, so maybe it is time to redefine normal for us and stop letting my family judge me the way I let them break us up.

Oh hell, what was THAT.

Fucking jesus. This talking about your feelings stuff is some heavy shit. Like pulling teeth. That’s all for the day, sorry. Please send vibes for this visit that my daughter’s father’s mother will continue to pretend like our friendship is totally normal and continue to pretend as though the main thing we all three of us (daughter, grandmother, me) have in common is not her son.

I didn’t know it was possible to be ghetto and full of emo bullshit at the same time, but I am nothing if not amibitious.