ice cold ice cold ice...

I feel bad for my fellow peons who were on their way to work or already there before the powers that be decided to close down for the day. I woke up to my bed shaking and the house shaking, hoping that since it's a hundred years old it's been through these kind of things before.

The salt of the earth people don't get days off like this, the trucking company next door is busy, my dad is still working and so is my kind-of-dad-in-law, while yours truly is chilling at home drinking tea and listening to music.

I could rant about the idiocy in my country and the world right now but I think I'm going to get some things cleaned up, get my paints out, and use this day more wisely since I've already slept away the morning. Noisy guitars, dreamy vocals, and hopefully some beauty created as a result...

and I say I don't like it, I know I don't want it...

There's no sound worse than the dentist's drill going down into your jaw, looking up and seeing gloves flecked with blood. "You did so well," she says as I spit pieces of broken molar into the sink and mentally curse my irresponsible youth, family genes, and the past three years full of car crashes and stress that wreaked general havoc on my little snarky mouth, while thankful to have insurance and live in an industrialized country where there's things like local anesthesia even if half my face is temporarily paralyzed and my grin has a glint of silver in the back like a fortuneteller's.

I'm uncharacteristically bitchy today, still sore, unable to wake up despite having coffee in my system, contending with "I'm fighting the system even though I'm totally the Man and don't even see it" boomers way too early in the morning. Quoting Jim Morrison like it's new and fresh and deep was the last straw and I got a bit more vitriolic than usual. Maybe it's the residual Novocaine still coursing through my bloodstream that made my lips get a little looser but given that I smile so much, most of the snark and generational antipathy went unnoticed.




when the fact of the matter is you just don't care
to comprehend or understand a single word I say

Seriously, I just want to go home and listen to the Bad Brains right now.

The sunlight coming through the ice-covered trees was so amazing that despite my wooziness and aching jaw, I drank tea with my adopted aunt and then drove along Riverside after seeing the the Valley was closed off and took lots of pictures of glittering branches.









Oh well, life goes on. I'll feel better tomorrow.

springwinter

I'm loving the sun pouring through the window behind me, knowing that in another week, we will be plunged back into cold once more. My neighborhood doesn't lend itself well to walk alone at daybreak without a canine companion, so last night I went to my old haunts in Lakewood Park, to walk down the path to the jettys below, where the ice stretches out as far as I can see, with the glittering skyline to the east, and where the west is brilliantly pink fading into lavender and blue.

I soak in the stark scenery of bare white birch trees, the dark filigree of vines, the deep blue sky, the frozen waves. The night falls quickly, but there's enough people out enjoying the thaw that I can be alone with my thoughts and with God.

It's been a good week and I'm looking forward to a weekend of creating, adventures with good people, a whole lot of new tuneage, and enjoying a respite from the chill. Despite the craziness of this world that makes me wish sometimes I could disappear onto an island somewhere, I am thankful beyond words for these things.



And this is the most gorgeous minute and a half of guitar work ever. Even though he's a bit crazy, I love John Frusciante.

songs for cold weather

I keep hearing about these epic snow storms but haven't seen much. Supposedly the big one is coming in tonight, and while I drove down due to being at the station, I'll probably be taking public transit and/or walking home.

We peons always seem to make it in, while the Powers That Be claim they can't get out of their driveways and it's just too much! to get downtown.

Despite the lack of playlist posting, I am still on the air, but decided this morning to theme it with sundry wintry songs. The sweet sounds of Africa/Thailand/the Middle East/Latin America just wouldn't cut it on a morning where my car is rolling over piles of snow and I'm crawling through the dark downtown streets.

I left my playlist in the car, but here's what can be recalled....

Mogwai - 2 rights make 1 wrong
Agalloch - the Hawthorne Passage: Song for a Gray City
Siouxsie & the Banshees - the Sweetest Chill
The Clash - London Calling
John Frusciante - This Cold
Curve - Frozen
My Bloody Valentine - Soft as Snow
Radiohead - Morning Bell
Gil Scott-Heron - Winter In America
Morphine - Let's Take a Trip Together
The Chills - Pink Frost
The Pixies - Winterlong
The Cure - Winter
The White Stripes - In the Cold Cold Night
Cave In - Seafrost
Massive Attack - Weather Storm
Team Sleep - Ever Since WWI
Kristin Hersh - Winter
Dead Can Dance - American Dreams
Husker Du - Back From Somewhere / Ice Cold Ice
the XX - Crystalised
Mazzy Star - Still Cold
Queens of the Stone Age - Long Slow Goodbye

Next time, there will be more planning...

frustrated subgenius

The snow drifts outside my window are several feet tall and sculpted beautifully. People in my fair city like to complain about the winter months as if we haven't gotten snow before ever, but there is a beauty and lightness to it that alleviates the early darkness.

I ventured out last night to get my art fix, having fallen in love with crystalline glazes and wondering what the combination of kiwi green, deep Starry night Van Gogh blue starred with white, and yellow with orange sunbursts will look like on a bowl as the oldies station played on the boombox in the corner and I wonder why I always hear "Lean on Me" and "Light My Fire" every single week in between ads for knockoff Viagra. Damn boomers.

Coming home is wonderful even with the foot of slush at the bottom of the street, the grind of snow plows, and the hookers who still go out at sunset in fishnets and short skirts even with the temperature is firmly in the teens. Every year I wish I bought that Subaru that probably would have died because four-wheel drive in this would be nice.

A friend of mine dropped off her key, since she's escaping for the weekend to celebrate a friend's matrimony in warmer climes. I'll be feeding their fabulous felines (who will pretend that they are not lonely) and make use of their Netflix account and back issues of National Geographic. It's sad that the majority of what feels like vacations are spent at friends' houses a block over, but it comes with the perks of pecuniary compensation and animal companionship.

Working in a place that was once a place for expanding one's knowledge and now is a costly step up a ladder full of buzzwords and networking, I long to take what I've learned and what I see and turn it into something that I'd actually like to read in hopes that there are other starving souls who need something that's got a little more substance than Nicholas Sparks and is better written than Dan Brown and is not written by smug McSweeney's acolytes.

I suppose that the document on my computer is too regional and pedestrian, but I want to capture what I see here, the corner stores and garage bands and awkward dynamics of class, geography of culture that converge in strange way.

I don't think I could write anything thrilling or romantic if I tried, but I'd love to do something that would be funny, heartbreaking, and full of enough details that even if you've never seen the stegosaurus hulks of rusty bridges and broken industry in the valley under a hazy summer sky, the certain ethnics at State Road park swearing and listening to eurotechno next to their tricked out Hondas, or the way that the sun sets over a beach covered with driftwood and stubs from Black and Milds, where kids play in the sewage and men walk their pet crocodiles on the shoreline, you'd see it for yourself the way you visualize places in New York or Los Angeles.

Ambitious yes? Doomed to fail? Probably. Will it ever be accomplished? Maybe. Total Slack is a second religion of this city so we shall see, inshallah.

take a picture here, take a souvenir

I got the day off today because of the weather though it's honestly not all that bad... I did my show at the station so I had to go downtown anyway but did get to go home and catch up on my sleep.

I missed the first onslaught of snow because I got to go through another round of dentist hell and zoned out with a head full of Novocain to watch movies, which I never do, but my coworker loaned me "Clerks II" and I had "Sleepwalking Through the Mekong" and "Alice in Chains Unplugged" to keep me entertained in my numbness.

While Kevin Smith has a sometimes different sense of humor than me there's something about his characters that I love because it reminds me of people I grew up with and hung out with and conversations that seem so eerily familiar.

The roads are clear, it's cold but that's the way it is in Ohio in December. I don't have Internet at the apartment so I'm up at one of my favorite coffeeshops where the people are chill and unpretentious, the citrus green tea is delicious, and the manager is listening to old school REM that my dad played all the time when I was a kid and I realize how long it's been since I listened to Michael Stipe's amazing voice and I always find it funny how he pronounces the name of our river.



I have a final to study for and can't seem to focus on economic policy and Latin American revolutionary movements, having always enjoyed just sitting in class more than taking essay exams. And the space heater is still on at the apartment so hopefully it's not burned down or anything.

I find a weird beauty in these kinds of days when the sun comes through the clouds and the snow makes everything blue and glowy at night. Even the early darkness doesn't bother me. I strung Christmas lights across my kitchen and over the front windows, light candles in the kitchen and plan music for the Christmas program we're going to have at church this year. There's nothing more hilarious than little kids in bathrobes and homemade garland halos singing carols out of tune.



I've got my grandma's papier mache creche underneath the little tree covered with her old glass ornaments and I miss her a lot right now when I think of how much she would have loved to see my sister married with a kid on the way, and her weird sense of humor, and Christmas Eves making Polish food and singing carols with her in a language I can't usually speak.

the ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in...

So I've survived the first great snow of the year, exiting a crowded bus to walk downtown past almost a mile of complete gridlock to catch the train home. I brushed about 6 inches of snow off the car, gave a lady at the stop a ride to the church on the way to Save-A-Lot, and was thankful for the delays because it gave me more time to prepare dinner for some friends.

People act like it's the end of the world when it starts to snow but these are the times when I love public transit the most, especially looking at how my car insurance jumped in the last year between a crash last year, 2 tickets, and living in a city where cars get stolen all the time. When it's icy and gridlocked, it's nice to have someone else driving so that I can be amused by the antics of high schooler and work my way through Patti Smith's "Just Kids."

But once the heat is turned up and the stereo on, the red novena candles are lit, and the kitchen smells like curry and cinnamon, and I'm surrounded with those I love, drinking tea and snacking on egg rolls, it's a beautiful thing. We talk and laugh and share our joys and sorrows and stresses, help each other get through the hard times.

We've had a lot of hard times these past few years, stressed about work or lack of it, family, friends, relationships, ourselves. It's so easy especially in our culture to get into these romantic notions of being a loner and struggling through by oneself, but we need each other way more than we'll ever admit to and more than we'll ever know.

gone on too long.

I couldn't find matching gloves this morning. I was shivering at the bus stop with two scarves wrapped around me but still thankful that I didn't have to drive through all the mess.

They say we're the worst city for winter weather, but I don't think that's true. This isn't Siberia, where it's -26 and your breath freezes when you exhale.

It does feel good to come home on days like this, and my routine hasn't changed much from my college days, come home and change out of work clothes into grungy comfortableness and drink infinite cups of tea while digging for lazy leftovers in the kitchen.

My roommate and I were going to pack more last night but we were both feeling so slackerish so we were nostalgia tripping on Youtube instead and wondering whatever happened to Lauryn Hill and remembering the awesomeness of Sesame Street back in the day.



This one is priceless.



When going through all my stuff with the move, I thought I was pretty good about getting things back to people and I found all these CDs that people loaned me waaaay back in the day. A burned copy of Aceyalone/Freestyle Fellowship? I had all good intentions but I never saw her again after that first week at Kent State. That Can album? I don't even know where that guy lives anymore. I haven't seen him in three years.

And some of these books! I'll probably never get around to reading Kierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling' or 'Gravity's Rainbow,' but most of these are coming with me. I have the Quran and the Satanic Verses side by side in a cardboard box. I'll miss having built-in bookshelves to stack CDs and paperbacks on and forgot how much poetry I own. I was a fiend for library booksales and would come home with bags of books about anything that looked interesting or that I didn't know about. I'm kind of nerdy that way.

I loan books out without expecting them to return home. It's my inner librarian that just wants to see knowledge go everywhere and does so without any kind of profit-making agenda.

I go through cycles where I read tons of poetry and then other years when poets totally irritate me. But recently the power of words has been resonating more, and I find myself re-reading old favorites, marveling at T.S. Eliot, swooning over Pablo Neruda, loving that new Gil Scott-Heron record and hoping that I can stumble across a print volume of his works too, since OhioLINK wanted that back.



I used to hate Valentine's Day when I was in college because everyone acted so darn smug and the one year I was supposed to go see Henry Rollins but my ride fell through and so I was all angsty in my dorm blasting 70s punk and trying to pretend I didn't care.



I can't be bothered now. I haven't done anything in years and it's become almost just another day, especially since. All that candy is nasty anyway. Last Valentine's weekend I was the only white girl dancing at Caribbean Flavor and I used my Monday off to go on a photo adventure where I got some great shots, almost got my car stolen, and chilled at the West Side Market.

A lot has changed since then... the guy I went dancing with I don't see much of anymore and the photography day turned out to be the first in a whole series of Cleveland-related adventures that took us to the Metroparks, various abandoned buildings, and so on. I'm not going to ramble about my issues with the whole love thing and how I don't understand it, but I'm sure a lot will change in the coming year too the way things are going already.

Also, all you Cleveland people need to get outside and hang out on the lake... it's awesome.

fevered

Like I said, I had no New Year's plans this years, no parties, no clubs, no shows, nothing.

Ended up calling up Lindsay for what turned out to be a trip to Akron for fireworks and festivities, picked up Kent & Muk and went to IHOP at 2am, ended up crashing on the east side after staying up til 6am, watched some Twilight Zone, went to the Rockefeller Greenhouse with Muk and came home with grapefruit-sized lemons, hung out with the family, said goodbye to the family dog, who also died this weekend.

And now I'm at home with a sore throat and a fever drinking tea and eating oranges. thankful that the house is mine again... so relieved.

grrr... snow

It wasn't getting out of work yesterday that was bad, it was trying to get there this morning. When I came home, the streets weren't plowed, so I eased myself into a space in front of my double and figured I was all good. It wasn't until this morning when I went to scrape off my car that I realized there was about four inches of tightly packed snow underneath which made moving my car pretty much impossible. So I'm digging it out with an ice scraper as all these trucks and SUV's are driving by and getting frustrated for what I feel is no good reason.

Thankfully, my wonderful roommate gave me a ride to work. I wasn't even super late, and I'll figure out the whole getting home part later.

i hate that song that says "let it snow!"

Once again, public transportation is AWESOME because you can let other people do the driving for you instead of pulling over every ten minutes to scrape the rapidly freezing sheets of rain off of your windshield and driving with the windows rolled all the way down because there's a covering of ice on that too and you can't see a thing. Got all sorts of weird looks from people as I'm driving down Detroit Road to West 25th with the windows down, the heat on maximum and the Afghan Whigs cranked up.

But tonight I'm accompanying my wonderfully talented roommate providing dinner music at a nursing home and hoping that I'll be able to get out of downtown without too much craziness.

playlist 12/9/08

It's a coffee and cinnamon pop-tarts morning. Got kind of folky later on in this set.

radiohead - there there
burial - shell of light
erykah badu - bag lady
soul coughing - lazybones
morcheeba - let me see
people under the stairs - l.a. song (sensitive remix)
tribe called quest - check the rhime
the verve - life's an ocean
U2 - 4th of july
the telescopes - spaceship
manu chao - mentira
souad massi - houria
soulsavers - arizona bay
red house painters - priest alley
nina simone - mood indigo
scrawl - guess i'll wait
r.e.m. - drive
julie miller & steve earle - all my tears
alvin youngblood hart & the carolina chocolate drops - city of refuge
calexico - dub latina
cafe tacuba - encantamiento inutil
john frusciante - a song to sing when i'm lonely
habib koite - i ka barra
sierra leone refugee all-stars - seconds (U2 cover)
bb seaton - summertime
raphael saadiq - 100 yard dash