Sometimes A Storm Is Required

The wind tore through the Catskills last night. Living nestled at the foot of the mountains generally means we don't get extreme weather. Between the mountains and the Hudson River, the screaming storms tend to soften for us. I've lived in a spot just a couple of hours away that seemed to be a weather vortex - the most massive electrical storms, the heaviest snows, the howlingest winds. Last night it felt like that again.

I woke to a constant roar - the wind was screaming while rain pounded down. I'm a heavy sleeper; storms don't usually wake me. My guy was up on an elbow, peering out the window.

"Is it a hurricane?"

"Sounds like it," he said.

And I went back to sleep.

I really like wind, at least when I know I can take shelter from it if I need to. I've stood outside in 60 mph winds just because it was exhilirating. But I've been outside, a long way from home and lone, buffeted by winds and scared, realizing just how powerful that invisible monster can be.

But inside, safe, hearing it tear around the house and scream up the road, it's wonderful. It feels like the world's being cleansed and it will be all fresh and new in the morning. I don't get that impression when it rains - rain gives the world a dusting. But wind blasts off all the old, rotted, dying things, opens up space for the new, growing things.

The sun's coming up now, I suspect it's cold and not nearly so romantic as I imagine. And I'm sad to know that once I'm out in the car, driving up the highway to work, the wind won't be my friend. Maybe I'll just open up the windows.

Metropolis - Too Disturbingly On Target

I had never seen Metropolis - the Fritz Lang original. I knew what it was, sort of. I knew it was considered a classic and it's influenced many films that have come after it. I've seen some of those movies. What I didn't know that in 1927, it predicted much of what we have become.
I stumbled upon the restored version on television the other night midway through the film. I had no idea what it was until they went to a shot in the lab and I saw the "Man-Machine." I was then thoroughly hooked, as I've always been curious.
Do you know the plot?

The world is divided into Thinkers and Workers. Thinkers have ideas but no idea how to make them practical. Workers know how to run everything but have no idea what it's for.




There's a saintly young woman (who puts in hell of a performance in her first film) whose appearance is stolen so an evil machine can use the Workers' trust in the girl to make them destroy themselves.




Then there's the Messianic young man whose job is to "unite head and hands...with heart."


He has to act fast - the good girl's trying to keep the Workers' children safe from drowning but she can't do it alone.



The Matrix owes Metropolis a big fat thank you. So does Blade Runner.
It's a visual stunner, with art shots I haven't seen since Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. But it's much more than that. It's eerily close to modern reality.

It struck me last night as I made Jello. Seriously.

Jello was such an incredible convenience when I was a kid. A dessert that only required that you mix in water and let it chill. Now it seems like a big deal - we can buy it in little individual containers when we're making a treat for someone who's not feeling well.

Soup, too. It's so simple to make, yet we can get it in a can. Why bother?

Dinner? Order out. Go out. Or buy some pre-made pile of mystery ingredients that only requires heating or the addition of meat.

The final straw? There's a new ad for corn flakes. "Give your kids a warm breakfast!" How do you do that? Microwave some milk and pour it on their cereal.
Good god.



Our lives have become so busy, so mechanized, so exhausting, that the thought of preparing a meal is something just too strenuous for many of us. It's got to be simple and fast. Yes, there are people who love to cook but it's more like a specialized hobby now than something we all do.

I'd love to slow down. I'd like to have the time and energy but when I get home at six and have another job that demands my attention within an hour or so, cooking just doesn't fit in the schedule. I have made a couple of meals in the past few days and it's really pleasant - but it's something that requires a conscious effort or I'll just fall into the "I'll heat up whatever's in the fridge" mode.

We're out of whack. We've lost that balance between work and our own time and even when we've on our few free precious hours, we've got our infernal email and blackberry for work to track us down and demand attention. And right now none of us can afford to demand that our free time be respected- we're lucky to be employed.

It's a puzzle and one I'm trying to untangle. But I refuse to concede that this new society is one I have to fall into step with. I'll march for now, but I'm looking for a path that leads elsewhere. The main road leads to Metropolis.

Backup Vocals, Joyless Meetings and a Kitten on My Shoulder

I started this post before dawn on Friday. I'm supposed to be getting dressed to leave for work. But I've got a kitten on my shoulder and it's just too damned cozy to leave yet.

My morning routine goes this way: Wake up, double check the clock to be sure I really am supposed to be awake before the sun comes up (sadly, I am), go downstairs followed by my much-loved old cat, whose goodness is equalled only by his girth, enter the kitchen to find the other three cats, who do not appreciate his sweetness, clamoring for their breakfast, too.

Everyone eats, (Boris, the kitten and the light of my dark mornings, cannot be predicted - he will either attack his breakfast with gusto or ignore it completely), I make coffee (only a push of a button thanks to the lovely man who loves me), then I go to my computer, sip coffee, check email, Facebook and maybe the day's headlines.
It's a comfortable way to start the day, particularly when Boris finishes his meal and jumps onto my shoulder to knead his paws in my hair. It's a bit awkward, as I need one hand to support him, but it's so cozy that it's well worth a bit of discomfort.

The hard part comes next - walking away from all that, getting dressed and going to work.

I will not gripe about work. I am grateful for the paycheck and I'm incredibly lucky to have gotten a job with a substantial pay raise when many are losing their jobs and their homes.

Here's what I will say - I sat on a meeting on Thursday so horribly dead, so uncomfortable, that it took a real act of will to make preparations to go back to that place again on Friday.

This is what happened: it's a monthly meeting about matters important to my place of work. I attended as an observer for the first time. What I witnessed was a roomful of people not only serious, but sour. I have spoken with many of them individually and they're not that way at all....yet this group had a dynamic so sour that I could imagine their mouths puckering.

They reacted to questions from each other with thinly veiled disdain, they offered information with an "I hope this is okay" plea in their voices; it was a roomful of worried people. Their worry had nothing to do with the content of the meeting; it was their interaction with each other. They targeted one person in particular for a universal sniff of superiority, and that person has been part of these meetings for years. It should have been held in the Google eggs...might have been much better!

I walked out when it was over, nearly ran down the stairs and out the door to breathe some fresh air.

It's not always like that, but some days it is. I don't like it one bit.
But my arrival home was greeted by the news that my composer/musician partner needed me to sing some backup vocals on a track he's working on.

Let the celebration begin!

I love to sing, though I think my voice is of the "that's very nice, dear" variety. It can be strong if required, it's generally on key but I'd love to have a distinctive growl or SOMETHING that sets it apart and makes it memorable. But I have what I have - and fortunately it's good enough for some support work on my guy's records, which is a treat beyond treats for me.



So that horrible, nasty, discouraging meeting was blown out of my head by donning a pair of headphone, cozying up to a microphone and singing along with my guy.
The next day, more Boris-ing in the morning.
I guess the trick is to dwell on the good stuff.

Ghost Bees

Ghosts sound like bees, at least to me.

I've heard them twice.

Let me back up and tell you that I'm a pitiful excuse for a ghost whisperer. My mom was the real deal. She saw them, she talked to them. She didn't talk about it to many people, but she talked about it to me and I can tell you that she had some stories that were absolutely incontrovertible. My favorite was the one where one of my dad's long-gone relatives told her about things that he swore had never existed - until he asked his aunt about it and she confirmed that yes, indeed, that had been the way things once were. He never doubted my mother again.

I used to wish I had her abilities, but then again I was often glad I didn't. I'm easily scared.

So back to the ghost bees.

We were looking for a home in the country when my kids were young. We looked at a lot of old farmhouses and one in particular seemed to beckon the moment we pulled in the driveway. It was an old white farmhouse with a big front porch and a massive lilac bush beside the two story barn. It looked a bit like this.

Something was very wrong inside.



It was tired, to say the least. Wallpaper peeled off aging plaster. But that wouldn't deter me. It was the buzzing.

It started in the kitchen, as I recall. It sounded like a swarm of bees all around us, yet there were no bees. I mentioned it. No one else heard it.

"Maybe they're in the walls," I speculated.

"I don't hear a thing," the realtor said.

The buzzing got louder as I walked through the house, so I finally excused myself to join the kids in the barn, where they were merrily leaping into a hay pile. No bees there.

Another old house, totally remodeled and in perfect shape, was one we seriously considered buying. But then I had the bloodiest, most gruesome dream of my life the night after we saw it. And when I mentioned it to the realtor, he said he'd had the same dream. Needless to say, we walked away from it.

So fast forward to a big old house that had been in my then-husband's family for generations. Dark, a bit dreary and damp as most lake houses are, it never affected me particularly until I stayed behind one afternoon while everyone else went to the store. I had work to do, work I didn't particularly feel like doing, but work that required a clear head and nimble fingers on a calculator.

But the buzzing was making me nuts.

It took awhile for me to identify it - unlike the incident in the old farmhouse, this was a buzz that I knew was in my head. But it was so loud that I couldn't think. And instead of being frightened, I got angry.


"Okay, knock it off!" I was loud enough that had anyone been home, they'd have heard me, even upstairs. "I know this isn't my house and I don't belong here but I have no interest in your damned house - I'm just here with my husband and my kids and THEY belong here. So shut up and let me get my work done!"

And it stopped. Just like that.

"Thank you," I said with a bit less graciousness than I probably should have, and got back to work.

Not long afterwards, we were all upstairs getting ready to go for a swim. My three year old daughter pointed into the room opposite.

"Who's that?"

"Who?" There was no one there.

"That lady."

Cue the hairs on the back of our necks to stand up.

She described her and said she looked kind of cranky. Sounded like a pretty good description of my then-husband's grandmother, "Harriet" - long, long dead.

So I went to see my mom and told her what had happened.

"Will you go and see what you think?" I asked.

We went on a beautiful, sunny fall day when the house had been closed up for the winter and no one was around. We stepped onto the porch and I opened the front door. My mother looked in and froze.

"I'll stay here," she said.

I went in, took a look around to make sure everything was secure, came out and locked up.

My mother was sitting on the porch.

"I wasn't welcome in there," she told me. "There was a woman on the stairs and she made it very clear I was not to come in."



Her description matched my what my daughter had seen. That night, Mom said she had a dream that that same woman showed up next to her bed.

"What were you doing in my house?" she demanded.

My mother explained that she wanted to be sure that her granddaughter was safe. "Harriet" said family was safe there, but no outsiders were welcome in that house.

"Do you want me to pray for you?" my mother asked.

Her dream visitor snorted and said she had no use for such nonsense. And she left.

That house burned to the ground a couple of winters later.

Rally to Restore Sanity - Isn't This News?

I'm watching a live feed of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. The Washington Mall is packed with thousands of people, all laughing, singing and smiling. News reports indicated that more than a thousand related rallies in foreign countries have been organized by US expatriates. There are thousands more rallies in communities across the country.
But it's not news.
Network news, the nation's "top" newspapers and good old NPR made the decision not to cover this event.
Let's see - thousands of people converge on the mall to sing "It's the Greatest, Strongest Country in the World", a satirical and very funny tribute to the flaw in both sides of the liberal/conservative debate; watch musical acts (I saw the O'Jays and were they dressed to kill!) and pay tribute to some people who made headlines for their civil behavior - and that's not news. Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow actually performed a song about frustration with our society that was good spirited and kind.
Now of course, the "news" outlets are going to have to cave in lest they look ridiculous. But how sad they even tried to avoid reporting on a truly positive event.
As Mick Foley just said, "Civility is cool."
But apparently only fear, loathing and paranoia are news.

Left Brain/Right Brain, Do We Have To Choose?

I'm living in two worlds these days. At home, the world is sticky with creative juice. Breathe deep, run your finger across a tabletop, taste it, inhale it, it's inescapable, a tune you can't get out of your head, a taste on the tip of your tongue, colors that are deeper, sunsets that catch fire into Peter Maxx/Maxfield Parrish impossibilities.







It's a world where every building should look like the Dali Museum.




At work, all colors fade to shades of gray and black, with frantic crosshatching of detail.

It's work that needs doing, detail that matters, yet somehow the amount of angst that goes into its production seems so out of scale, so truly ridiculous, that a part of me is always sitting back in wonderment, transfixed by the hyperventilating victims of high blood pressure all around me.






I'm torn between the two worlds. The childish, desperate- to -please -and- excel perfectionist wants to be the best damned hamster on the wheel.

The inner rebel wants her solitude and freedom to express herself in whatever way she chooses in her own little world - paint vines on the doors, write fairy tales, take pictures of the world's most minute details.

Circumstance requires income; I continually remind myself to be grateful that my black and white job pays the bills with dollars to spare.

But I so miss the color - and wish I had more energy to spare for those precious hours when that's my world.

Life is Passing Me By on the NYS Thruway or Where the Hell Am I Going Anyway?

Sorry I haven't been around to write. Even sorrier I haven't had time to catch up with the wonderful bloggers I've found. Life got stupid.

I'm driving an hour each way to work every day, working in an office in a corporate setting, learning the new information I need to know, slowly figuring it out and getting things into a system in my head which makes sense. It took a good three months.

Now I'm able to sit back for a second, at least, and wonder where the time is going in such a hurry.

I'm missing the summer - I just haven't noticed much. I cruise down the highway practicing with my new Spanish CDs.

Tengo trabajar; no ai una hora escribir. Lo siento.

I get home, eat, then march up to my office to work on my other job. I'm still doing a radio show. I still enjoy it. But man - I don't think I'd know how to lie on a beach and do nothing right now even if I could.

I would, however, love to learn again.

My guy, whose new EP is out, is finding himself equally busy. The studio, which for awhile was his quiet haven from the rest of the world, is now hopping with people who want to make records, who need him to compose music for a commercial, and he's still trying to finish off the rest of the songs to release a full LP that coordinates with radio promotion and a tour.

Deep breath.

But I planted some flowers today and I have gotten an inordinate amount of satisfaction from seeing them outside the screened in porch.