Five Tools

giacometti: "figurine dans une boite entre deux boites qui sont des maisons"

when i can't deal with my mp3 player, even, as happened this morning -- i have THREE new tools in the distraction/mindLESSness effort.  that's a total, when all is well, of FOUR tools.

if i can read, i now have [ONE] oppen's COMPLETE work, and [TWO] oxford's collection of american poetry. the other big "if," and it's sucky, is that these books are large and heavy, and at the times i need them the most, too large and heavy to be of use.  that's how poetry gets to kick a person in the ass.

if my hands can grip the the little non-skid plastic non-skid plastic corner stick-ons decorating the underside of my workaholic laptop, then if the index and thumb can toss it onto the pillow awaitin' on my lap, then we can try to get to youtube and [THREE] wallow and smile with maru, and now, with and at, maru&hana.

[FOUR] there is almost always an *actual* cat, always there has almost always been a cat, but it's different now.  they take turns checking.  i've begun wearing hoodies to bed, with the hood up. in the beginning, the hoodie went up to aid in sliding up in the hearsepital bed without also dragging hair and whatever sexpot top i sported. then the hoodie stayed up to protect the mp3 wiring, then to keep my head warm, then because it comforted me, and always because it kept my unkempt hair more kempt.  so, anyway, the cats, in turn, snuffle at the perceived entrance to my face, and issue their particular greeting.  buddy, small melodious things. marmy, *::ack::*::ack::* + apologetic purrrrr and approximated headbutt.  dobby, a loud, unmodulated, caricature of a MEOW. dobby always scares me to death, if i have actually achieved sleep, and i squint to perceive a worried pink nose. yes, a nose can worry.  there's more, lots more, to number FOUR, but i'll spare you.

the mp3 player senses change.  it first died and required resuscitation. then twice, then, after a third, almost mechanical, heartless lazarus play, one night found me cursing new curses. "not that song again, no, not again, did we not do that song just, what? twenty songs ago?"

somehow, we were down to 22 songs, and, the odd thing? they were all of an era. go ahead: shiver the creepy-shiver, all at once, as one. here, this will help you pull it off: melanie, candles in the rain. 

ohh, emm, gee, mine people, ohh, emm, gee.

Lay down, lay down, lay it all down

Let your white birds smile up

At the ones who stand and frown

Lay down, lay down, lay it all down

Let your white birds smile up

At the ones who stand and frown.

We were so close, there was no room

We bled inside each other's wounds

We all had caught the same disease

And we all sang the songs of peace.

Lay down, lay down, lay it all down

Let your white birds smile up

At the ones who stand and frown

Lay down, lay down, lay it all down

Let your white birds smile up

At the ones who stand and frown.

So raise the candles high

'Cause if you don't we could stay black against the night

Oh raise them higher again

And if you do we could stay dry against the rain.

so the mp3 now has been reformatted.  and no, i had not been so organized as to save its last incarnation, as each incarnation was a work in progress. which is why we all come back as worms -- don't be fooled.  the universe doesn't save or back up its work, either, not believing it can make a mistake, being the universe 'n all. did i tell you what a god-awful anthropomorphic nitwit i am, and always have been, will be?

so the reloading goes well, and is a pleasure.  

we reloaded less than two-thirds of the former songs, adding a few new ones, and a few that had been removed in fits of pique.  we had a bad day yesterday, breaking beneath the weight of physical, but not mental or emotional, pain.  the perfect day for the betas (in alpha testing, a.b.o.u.t. ready for launch!) ONE, TWO, THREE and FOUR.

don't be jealous because i have five tools in my toolbox.  be happy for me.  and get me a perfect mp3 player, with seamless wireless paid for by, i dunno, you, and enough memory to hold the impossible recordings of all oppen's work as read by oppen, live, before a live audience, and the bazillion poets the oxford edition included, all recorded live, audiences optional.  no podcasts, no video, just the voices. maru and maru&hana are a whole, are "as is." the actual cats stay as they are, too, cannot be improved upon, marmy's breath excepted.  

oh, and with time, i'm sorry to break it to you, the various versions of the serenity prayer fail, usually before giacometti, brancusi, duchamp, modigliani, rothko, beckett. you will have your own sacred list.

now, if the hands fail, well, we'll revisit all this.

© 2015 L. Ryan

Burning CDs

I'm not Buddhist today.  Tomorrow?  Who knows!

Sometimes it's really grand, a thigh-thumping grand, that suffering is life, or life suffering, in case, in translation, the equivalency we accord "is" does not hold true in the original declaration.

Did you think I was going to bore you with YouTube music videos forever?  Actually, there was considerable suppression of the more relevant music being blasted around these parts.  Some fool had me listening to Gaelic and I had a brief -- roughly 20 minute -- rough descent into Andrea Bocelli. There was flirtation with Tindersticks, a lot of lip-synching to Nina Simone, and altars built to Jerry Garcia and these Days of the Dead.

Yes, I was burning CDs, an act I'm new to and that is probably already outdated.  If so, don't kill my buzz.

It's ominous, assembling music for someone important.

You have intent, you cannot escape having intent, and yet you wish to appear to have no purpose leap through the chords, scream through the lyrics.

This is how I feel about this song.
But how will he feel about this song?

The only solution is Suppression of Intent -- and in that brief period of relief from one's self, to go with your gut, and never look back.  You pick a song, you burn it, you move on.

After the items are mailed, there's time for second-guessing to kick in.

Like... what was I thinking, leading off with this?  I mean, I used to be a huge John Prine fan until, late one night, sipping on a sloe gin fizz, I got tired of the facile.

Surely you've noticed?  I veer from the facile, abhor that which is easy, and run (toes pointed!) from observations, no matter how astute, that don't show all their work.

But he gives a good concert, and I'm fond of him, and of the days when we all giggled about getting high.

So when my brother "Lumpy" [still a Grader Boob, as he still insists on haunting a classroom, despite an advanced and evil cancer] gets these CDs, I am sure he'll think something like... "I shoulda spent more time with that kid... Meant to pass on the music that my brother passed on to me, but this sister is clearly, sad to say, low brow."

Or maybe he'll laugh, as these songs are meant to pass the driving time as he flies from campus or apartment to chemotherapy or radiation, a 6' 4" man with considerable skeletal pain, folded to fit into the passenger side of a Mini-Cooper.

I let my intent fly free at the end of the process.  I closed with Nico's cover of the great "I'll Keep It With Mine."




In case you can't tell, it's a heartfelt offer on my part -- to those whom I wish I could rock to sleep in my funky spastic arms, murmuring lies, meaning every one of them as a noble truth.

"It's gonna be all right, sweet one, it's gonna be all right."

You will search, babe

At any cost

But how long, babe

Can you search for what’s not lost?

Everybody will help you

Some people are very kind

But if I can save you any time

Come on, give it to me

I’ll keep it with mine

I can’t help it

If you might think I’m odd

If I say I’m not loving you for what you are

But for what you’re not

Everybody will help you

Discover what you set out to find

But if I can save you any time

Come on, give it to me

I’ll keep it with mine

The train leaves

At half past ten

But it’ll be back tomorrow

Same time again

The conductor he’s weary

He’s still stuck on the line

But if I can save you any time

Come on, give it to me

I’ll keep it with mine

-- Bob Dylan

Of course, another pisser in this whole process is the low brow fear of being derivative.  How many times, in how many ways, has Lumpy the Grader Boob sent me our favorite tune, such that I could not now send it back to him?

But, here it is again, for us.

© 2013 L. Ryan

CRPS Update

I should let you, Dear Readers, know upfront that this is an update on the personal level -- although I've been doing a fair amount of reading "in the field," the reading is mostly above my head or personal interest stories.  Why share that with you when I can bitch and moan on my own?

Remember the fundamental principle here at Marlinspike Hall:  Whose blog is it, anyway?

Since life switched from our Renaissance King-sized bed to my single hospital contraption, decorated with an understated trapeze attachment in matte black, I've been in a steady decline.  Well, it's not much of a leap to needing to ask for a hospital bed to that assumption, eh?

Not that my Purple Prose Gratitude Journal is getting fat with loopy handwritten entries, but I will admit that when my body goes into spastic mode, the understated trapeze attachment softly jingles and jangles, calling up memories of one of my favorite Southern Tête de Hergé's front porches and its many gentle wind chimes. Those same spaz attacks bring waves of desire for the blueberry moonshine that also rise up in memory of that ivy-covered porch.  Ahem.

Many is the time I've sworn that it is the spasms that will one day make me paper my body with Fentanyl patches and mix up a chocolate pudding laced with lethal doses of a dozen sweet drugs.  If I did not think that a peaty single malt would make me lose the pudding, it'd replace blueberry shine as my favorite strong drink.

Ah, ha ha, just joshing.

In any event, I've now become the Manor Resident who grabs sleep where she can, and that usually is long after dawn.  This is something I intend to change, and soon, perhaps as soon as tomorrow.  Tomorrow may also see me pitching in to help the Genetically Indentured Manor Staff, as so many have taken vacation time to warmer climes.  A little vacuuming, mopping, laundry, poofing and fluffing never hurt anyone.

Fevers are up about a degree and I blame those mo'fos for my general decline.  A febrile state makes for great melodrama (Oy! I am burning up, as if in the very flames of Hell, and so on, and so forth) and laziness (Is that cat hair clinging to my electrostatic hospital bed rails?  Ew, gross.  SOMEONE should do a bit of dusting around here, damn it!).

But, fevers also are truly... tiring.  Mostly the parts where they're going up, and the parts where they're going back down.  The steady heat is not bad.  Kind of energizing, even.

CRPS is not causing the heat waves, of course, it's the untreatable osteomyelitis, perhaps a touch of lupus. And yet, CRPS so hates to be excluded, and so tends to get nasty during a persistent fever.  So it's spazspazspaz and burning neuropathic pain married to the deep ache of the bones.

I've mentioned before, or hope I have, that I employ more than a bucket load of drugs to handle these things. Heck, I got me a graduate degree at Berkeley, so you know I turn a quick eye to all that is alternative, complementary, or adjunctive therapy.  What works best is ice... until those medical sadists, the Physical Therapist Gangs, beat it into my head that cold is bad, bad, bad, wrong, wrong, wrong.  So I moved on, but how many times can you watch repeats of Downton Abbey?  So I began an incisive, lighthearted study and practice of mindfulness.

The initial forays into mindfulness for CRPS led to anaphylactic shock until my mentors made an adjustment and removed any references to the "happy place."  Once that was taken care of, it turned out to be pretty simple.

You don't run away from the pain.  Like a cat, and some dogs, you circle three times, wiggle your butt a little, and curl up smack dab in the middle of that pain.  There you stay until you're through it.  You don't speak much about it, beyond what may be necessary.  But you snuggle into it, stare at it, see it, observe it. Thank G_d, you don't analyze it (until pressured by such asshats as physicians).

For long term and unending severe pain, like mine, you mix in the occasional distraction, and that would be best defined as whatever works at the moment.  Mahjong, when played in a zen state, can be very effective. The vogue of marathon reruns of classic television might fit like a glove one day, and repulse the next. Law and Order SVU, for example, has no usefulness any longer in mindlessness/mindfulness sessions, whereas the Criminal Intent version, or the early original shows -- the variety pack -- are entertaining.

When mindless mindfulness is flat out denied by a pouting, infantile CRPS patient, that's when such an ingrate should opt for a comedy genre (literary or televised/streamed) or the infallible humor of felines.  Being fussed at by Marmy Fluffy Butt because you dared shift her tiny frame a few centimeters gets a belly laugh every time.  Dobby in a box is hysterical.  Buddy the Maine Coon cracks a person up just by facial expression. And all three have extensive nursing backgrounds.  A kitty massage is a better soporific than anything Big Pharma can dream up.

Music requires a careful touch.  The mp3 player yields mysterious tunes in shuffle mode, sometimes so eerily reflective of one's severe pain that it's simply not a decent option.  Unless, of course, you need to cry and have not been able to produce tears, either due to the constant dehydration from the constant fever, or due to the aridity of my heart.

Most of the time, though, music is a great aid to treating pain, especially in those 20-35 minute periods before the breakthrough meds kick in.  Also, when the dark is terrifying -- you know, when the threat of dawn edges into the window pane and you think: "No, not again, not another night of no sleep."  Then you must make yourself circle thrice, settle in, and call up Nina Simone and Eric Clapton, certain bits of Neil Young, ending with the Brett Dennen of around 2004.  That's this week's menu.  Last week saw more of the Decemberists, my beloved John Hartford, and the Wainwright family, Loudon, Martha, and Rufus.  I am finding great focus for my pain in Johnny Cash's American Recordings and the very sweet beginnings of Bonnie Raitt, from a very sweet album recorded in her parents' garage, with their supremely sweet jazz musician friends.  She sounds so wavery and young, so un-twangy, that knowing every bit of her later sounds is enough to make me weep.

I'm undergoing a good many variations in the CRPS experience, feeling stuff that I thought would never return, rapid cycling from red to deep purple, cold to hot, electric strikes that produce yips of howls. The everpresent, though, is what makes "suicidal ideation" something to ridicule.  The deep, deep pain, the burning bones that are somehow also ice. The "movement disorder" -- but we've covered that.

On the up-side, I have lost most of my decrepit fingernails and the regrowth seems healthier.

Where did I put that Purple Prose Gratitude Journal?

As for how it's going, breaking in my new Obamacare doctors -- last Thursday, I met the doctor who will be my Primary Care.  She put together a hasty Problem List.  I decided CRPS should top it, and so mentioned it first.

Blank look.

Okay, so I reverted to "RSD" and before I could unpack it, she said, hand waving in the air, "Oh, I know. Something Sympathetic Something."

I shot her a bright smile. "Right!"

And when they gave me their efficient printout record of our brief initial alliance, I saw that my primary problem was "CLPS." Fred giggled.

Sorry, loves, but I have to go.  I feel a need for Townes Van Zandt.  twitchtwitchtwitch.  I think I hear his clunky cowboy boots out on the Front Porch... and the gentle call of windchimes.

© 2013 L. Ryan

The Fevered Pitch and Marmy Fluffy Butt

I will be returning to the blogging world soon.  I know you've been holding your breath in bated suspense.

Guess what?  Times are hard!  Physically, financially, emotionally.  I'd get in line except that, at the moment, I eschew the queue.

Monday, my first eye operation has been scheduled -- it's finally definite.  There were some weird shenanigans around getting information to the right people at the right time, but, as usual, it all worked out.
It will likely be a two-fer:  replacement of the lens in the right eye and poking a little hole in the back to help with drainage, thereby treating both cataract and glaucoma.

Because of my spasticity, it will be under general anesthesia, which does not make me happy.

Oddly, this bit of news cheered my new pain managaement doctor immensely.  He said,"O!  Maybe they will use propofol.  I think you will enjoy that."

I do a lot of just looking at this man, and wondering.

My previous "health care professional" at the PainDude's office will not be returning following maternity leave.  I wish I could say it was because of her simple (profound!) love of being a mom, but it's more driven by the fact that the baby has Down's Syndrome and needs lots of care.  She's a lucky baby to have been born to such a mom.

But it's my loss!  We had just hit our stride, after a rough start last year -- I met her just after freeing myself from the confinement of the Long Term Acute Care Facility, otherwise known as a place to hide the sick and disabled until they can be permanently stashed out of sight.  So when Natalie and I first met, I was a snarling beast, ready to run, trusting no one, and very, very debilitated.

We worked our way through it.  She was smart and reasonable.

This extremely trained and brand new physician who was supposed to just sub for her... is smart, very compassionate, and close to being idiotic.  He knows a bunch of stuff and knows hardly anything about what to do with it.  He's cost me beaucoup bucks already in the pursuit of dream treatments, and has given me advice that proved faulty -- prompting a phone message that bordered on hysteria.  "Disregard what I told you..."

Not to worry!

He is very sweet and extremely over-involved.  He has never seen anyone suffer as much as I suffer.  Do you think I need to hear that?  Would anyone garner anything positive from hearing that?

Anyway, he thinks I will get a kick out of general anesthesia, being unconscious and all, thereby not feeling my usual pain.  I'd love to point out that scoring me a dozen or so joints and letting me smoke them at my leisure would be something more likely to be remembered as relief.

"Hey, man, I really loved being unconscious.  That was great."

I'm sorry.  He'll grow.  I'll grow.  It'll be touching and rewarding.

The second surgery will be on the 26th.  After each surgery, we have to drive every day to the eye doc's office to have my pressures checked, because any eye surgery causes a spike in intraocular pressures.  For most folks, no biggie -- but since I have a pretty nasty case of glaucoma, it could wreck my optic nerve and so on and so forth.  The surgeon asked me if I could handle extra "emergency" surgeries.  That, again, is a weird thing to say/ask to someone.  Were I to say "no," what would that change?  As it was, I told her it was a familiar scenario, albeit never before with my eyesight at stake. Usually just limbs.

She's very cool -- about as tall as my knees, hair down to her ass, lovely, lovely high-heels, beautifully tailored clothes, tough as nails, focused, super technical and precise.  If I had only followed my intuition a few years earlier and ditched the old fart who was following the glaucoma earlier... I'd be in better shape.

He also had a love for reuben sandwiches and garlicky things that did not endear me to him overly much as we communed face-to-face during eye exams.

Anyway.

That's that.

But the purpose of this ramble -- the first decent photo of Ms. Marmy Fluffy Butt in close to five years.  She appears before you recently groomed by moi, willing to be seen (ears to the front, the "i tolerate you" stare), and knowing that the "boys" have been getting all the photographic glory.

Without further ado, here's my girl:

Marmy, August 2013

She remains feral, usually during the daylight hours.  When darkness descends upon our segment of the planet, she becomes a fur ball of flaming love, head-butting for pets, offering up her tiny, warm, round belly.
She's remarkably small, never crossing the 8 pound mark, except for the one vet visit soon after we first took her hissing and ack-ack-ing self in, when her stomach almost hit the floor due to the five kittens she unwillingly harbored.  Only eight months old at the time, you could tell she was hoping to meet the Law and Order: SVU team.


Today, I need to capture her, as she got into it with Buddy the Outrageously Large Maine Coon, and he slashed her face, managing to leave a large puncture wound near her mouth.  She's going to love me -- for capturing her, as well as for cleaning what looks to be a painful wound.  But we are not having any abscesses around these parts.  Not right now.

My other plans to get me through the weekend without going bonkers?  Well, first, I am not naive.  Well, not too much.  The Spaz Attacks have been BRUTAL.  Fred says I've turned part pretzel.  When the Spaz Attacks hit, and they no longer have predilections for the night alone, I darken the room, take meds, put on my earbuds and try to get lost in music.  Still, I end up screaming in 15 to 40 second intervals, with a string of curses to follow.  I have taken to getting very mobile in bed.  Sideways, with legs hanging off.  Head at the bottom of the mattress, allowing me to press the spasming leg into the black metal headboard festooned, festooned, I say, with pillows of various densities and shapes.  This goes on for hours at a time.

Dobby and Buddy are my little saviors.  Marmy would be, as well, but Buddy is so freaking territorial, he chases her -- and not at all playfully or gently -- away.  I will be moaning, attempting to sing along with some 1950s classic on my sweet Sansa Clip player, or belting it out with Nina Simone -- my God, I'd have gone crazy months ago without Nina Simone -- without Mary Black, without Bob Dylan and Neil Young, without, even, Deadman.  Definitely without my darling dead Townes Van Zandt.  I know Nina's dead, too, and that kills me, but Townes... man, did he fuck up.  Bonnie Raitt, JT, the Stones, Michelle Shocked, Sweet Honey, Paul Simon.  Even the soundtracks to The Sopranos, God bless "Tony"'s soul.

Anyway... I'm laying around being a moaning unsalted pretzel and I will feel a rough tongue tentatively flick my forearm, or forehead.  And it's one of the boys, registering their solidarity.  It's a real crap shoot for them as when I move from side to bottom to top to catty-cornered, they get no notice, so there is no deep cat snoozing possible, not without risking a major bonk attack from a spinning dystonic.

Marmy is different.  She would nestle in, and ride me like a broncin' buck.

I should not forget John Prine or Art Garfunkel, solo.  Jackson Browne.  The Raveonettes. The Roches. Phil Ochs.

When was the last time you listened to Phil Ochs?

Anyway, again:  It still takes a boatload of drugs to stop the jerky jerks, and why I don't just take the boatload of drugs first thiing, I cannot explain.  It can't be good for me.  But neither can all that suffering.

The risk of respiratory depression, euphemism for death, versus the risk of insane pain, forever?  What a battle, fought in a truly fevered pitch.










© 2013 L. Ryan

The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World

We like to call it serendipity, a happy coincidence of our senses, but elevated, you know?  


Okay, so maybe there is a touch of intellectual intent driving the rhythms, orchestrating and controlling the flow that would otherwise be just public frenzy. 


Delayed by the garbage people insist on throwing in my path, I set out this morning to catch up on the accumulated recommendations piling up in the corners of the Computer Turret.  Midway through the sorting process, I came upon this trailer to Bill Morrison's The Miners' Hymns which premiered at this year's Tribeca Film Festival in a new section category, Viewpoints, meant to capture the essence of international independent cinema.


It was directed by TFF veteran Bill Morrison, who also gets a writing credit, along with Jóhann Jóhannsson and David Metcalfe.  


{sniff::sniff}  I smell something plural.


You'd have to know my academic history to understand my happiness at the reviews I called up in my search for this works' background -- but I'll spare you that.  Somewhere out there a dissertation director is reaching for Maalox and cursing the interdisciplinary.


First, I found a review for Jóhannsson's score.  The visual element was clearly considered a handy (and gosh-darned impressive) appendage for the music.


Next up was a review by a veteran film festival go-er that wondered much at the skilled manipulation of archived film, all nicely buttressed by an unobtrusive sound track.  Morrison has produced awesome work from such oddities as damaged film stock (Decasia, 2002), so keep an eye out for new trickery hums the hum. The rogue even resorts to enhancing deterioration, quoi!


Chuckle.  


It's a beautiful conversation.


This is the TFF Guide synopsis:

Filmmaker Bill Morrison is one of the leading international artists working within the genre of found footage filmmaking. In his previous work, like The Highwater Trilogy (TFF '06) and Release (TFF '10), he often uses shots replete with signs of chemical deterioration and decay. He then refashions these images via digital processing techniques into meditations on the fragility of human existence. InThe Miners' Hymns, Morrison shifts his emphasis from decaying footage to stunning black-and-white images that have been preserved in the British National Film Archives. From this raw material, Morrison artfully constructs a story of British coal miners at work below the surface of the earth, together with their vibrant, close-knit community above ground. Morrison intercuts this material with color footage that he himself filmed. These contemporary aerial landscapes of nondescript shopping malls and empty fields of green cover over the now-abandoned collieries situated in Northeast England.  

Morrison's compelling narrative pays tribute, in an emotionally moving and formally elegant fashion, to a vanished era of 20th-century working-class life. An original score by avant-garde Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson enriches this tale with a heartrending, elegiac tone.

While the film may have debuted at Tribeca, the music aired earlier.  With all the baggage of a separate-but-equal world view of the genres, FatCat Records had this to say about Jóhannsson's beautiful work:

Icelandic-born composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s debut album for FatCat’s 130701 imprint, ‘The Miners’ Hymns’ is a brand new film score from a hugely exciting collaborative project based around the weighty subject matter of the ill-fated mining community in North East England. A fine addition to Jóhannsson’s acclaimed release history, the album moves from suitably dark and brooding minimalism to moments of rousing transcendence, and showcases the composer's ability to effortlessly unite the haunting with the beautiful. With the majority of previous 130701 releases based around piano and string recordings, ‘The Miners’ Hymns’ is the first to focus on predominantly brass-based material. 

Originally presented as a live performance at Durham Cathedral over two nights in July 2010, ‘The Miners’ Hymns’ album is the result of a collaboration between Jóhann and highly regarded American experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison, whose stunning 2002 film ‘Decasia’ (composed from damaged film stock) was described by The Village Voice as “the most widely acclaimed American avant-garde film of the fin-de-siecle”. Says Jóhann of Morrison’s work: “I liked his aesthetic. His work reminded me of the kind of footage I use for my concerts, these abstract, blurry super-8 textures. His films deal with decay and memory, which are themes I work with a lot also, so there was a lot of common ground before we started.”

‘The Miners’ Hymns’ project was initially commissioned for Durham County Council’s 'Brass: Durham International Festival,' which incorporated the Durham Miners' Gala into a programme celebrating the culture of mining and the strong regional tradition of brass bands. Once the biggest trade union festival in Europe, attracting up to a quarter of a million people, the annual Gala continues despite the fact that coal is no longer mined in a county that was built on it.

You must forgive me.  I appreciate conversation, the back-and-forth of things;  I absolutely delight in it.
We often refer to collaboration between artists, and consider the result some kind of easy symbiosis.  


It's a work;  It's work, a separate third [fourth fifth sixth] creation, with requirements.


The music, in this case, was written before Morrison began the choice and assemblage of film footage.  He set the images "to" the music and then forwarded these esquisses to the composer who sketched and fiddled with them, and so on, playing the evocative tensions of sight and sound.  Process! Juicy process! 


True enough, far too many collaborations come to nothing more than a substantial sandwich, the process mostly trims and chops, academic draconian measures and sleights of hand.  The assemblage is lent heft and anchored by the insertion of a third bun, say -- the fancified architecture of a Big Mac.  Or the whole is brought to manageable submission by the steady coercive force of a "panini" press. 


It's still a sandwich. 


Trust me. I lived for decades on a subsistence diet of julienned ephemera, frenched histories, and matchsticks of reconstituted discursive crudités. Under the interrogator's prop of a hanging naked light bulb, I *made* those recalcitrant deaf-mute genres talk, God damn it.





The cure for my thick and smarmy goings-on?  The work, itself.  I've lost the reference but someone rightly introduced it as an homage -- not to music about, text on, or film of, but to the miner's of North East England, and to North East England, itself.

So.  Right.  {a::little::embarrassed::half-swallowed::cough::action}


Here's a trailer to The Miners' Hymns, featuring The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World.  

From the Cutting Room Floor

When I grow up I want to be an old woman
When I grow up I want to be an old woman
Oh, an o-o-o-o-old, an old, old woman

Then I think I'm gonna find myself an old man
Then I think I'm gonna marry myself that old man
An old, an old, an old, an old, a really old man

We're gonna have a hundred and twenty babies
A hundred and five, ten, fifteen, twenty babies
Uh huh, that's what I said a hundred and twenty babies

We'll raise 'em on tiger's milk and green bananas
Mangoes and coconuts and watermelon
We're gonna give 'em that watermelon when they starts yellin'

Here's what they'll yell...

In the summer we'll sit in a field and watch the sun melt
In the winter we'll sit by a fire and watch the moon freeze
Me my old man and a hundred and twenty babies
Me my old man and a hundred and twenty babies
I said, me my old man and a hundred and twenty babies
Oh, when I grow up I want to be an old woman
When I grow up I want to be an oooooold...


--Michelle Shocked, When I Grow Up

Michelle Shocked is among those artists I like to listen to during ketamine treatments.  It's kind of an odd mix, I suppose, though maybe not:  Sam Cooke on gospel (he was there when they crucified my lord, y'know) The Stones prancing around on my cerebellum, Jacques Brel to satisfy that inevitable nostalgia for accordion-driven café music, Keith Jarrett's Koln concert, anything from After the Gold Rush Neil
Young --
(Hey, hey Cripple Creek ferry



Butting through the overhanging trees


Make way for the Cripple Creek ferry

The waters going down it's a mighty tight squeeze...)

-- early Bonnie Raitt, like before I understood how old she was, Jennifer Warnes, the bits of Laurie Anderson that crack me up, Marvin Gaye -- all the Marvin Gaye in the world, wanting to undo what was done -- but no more Motown because I shake the gurney in some kooky ketamine spastic dance craze, apparently -- though I bet I could tolerate some Temptations -- I don't so much want to dance to their music as pretend to be them, slick with moves... some Jackson Browne but always Your Bright Baby Blues --

(I'm sitting down by the highway
Down by that highway side

Everybody's going somewhere

Riding just as fast as they can ride

I guess they've got a lot to do

Before they can rest assured

Their lives are justified

Pray to God for me baby

He can let me slide

'Cause I've been up and down this highway

Far as my eyes can see

No matter how fast I run

I can never seem to get away from me

No matter where I am

I can't help feeling I'm just a day away

From where I want to be

Now I'm running home baby

Like a river to the sea

Baby if you can see me

Out across this wilderness

There's just one thing

I was hoping you might guess

Baby you can free me

All in the power of your sweet tenderness

I can see it in your eyes

You've got those bright baby blues

You don't see what you've got to gain

But you don't like to lose

You watch yourself from the sidelines

Like your life is a game you don't mind playing

To keep yourself amused

I don't mean to be cruel baby

But you're looking confused

Baby if you can hear me

Turn down your radio

There's just one thing

I want you to know

When you've been near me

I've felt the love stirring in my soul

It's so hard to come by

That feeling of peace

This friend of mine said

"Close your eyes, and try a few of these"

I thought I flying like a bird

So far above my sorrow

But when I looked down

I was standing on my knees

Now I need someone to help me

Someone to help me please

Baby if you need me

Like I know I need you

There's just one thing

I'll ask you to do

Take my hand and lead me

To the hole in your garden wall

And pull me through... )

Sometimes there's some Dylan, sometimes there's not, often he's replaced by Nina Simone -- it is necessary to assess my mood, to make those all-important last minute decisions, sitting in the fume-filled parking garage, getting my last swigs of diet root beer, feeling oh-so-glad I quit smoking all those years ago.  I'm not concluding anything from it, but I get the same feeling at this hospital for catastrophic brain and spinal cord injuries as I did the times I dragged a long ago roommate to AA meetings.  We started going the evening of the day she crashed her orange Vega through the garden wall and smack-dab into my bedroom.  Anyway, I am referring to the coffee and cigarettes.  The smell of them is everywhere, and because they're molecularly linked somehow, not even the coffee smell smells good.  I mean, like, you'd never slip up and use the word "aroma" for it.

My second ketamine treatment, I had not yet made a playlist for the occasion, and managed to land on Jethro Tull's Aqualung.  We're talking major depression.  I mean, there I am, losing myself, falling into the K-hole, serenaded by...

Sitting on a park bench

eyeing little girls with bad intent.

Snot running down his nose

greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes.

Drying in the cold sun

Watching as the frilly panties run.

Feeling like a dead duck

spitting out pieces of his broken luck.

My mp3 player selections for the ketamine experience are hardly remarkable... but they are mine, you know?  A little something of me to have, in case I get lost and can't find my way back -- to Fred, down at the end of the bed, to Nurse Monique, so sweet and learning not to promise me anything, to my brothers, to my friends, to Dobby and the Rest of the Remnant.

We had our first early morning session this week, on Thursday.  You will note that it is now Saturday and that the only blog piece I've published in the interim was something already pieced together.  And I am not sure I should be writing this post, even. 

I've been in a world of pain.  Past caring, really.

Ah, but Friends, I ask you:  Might the fact that I somehow managed to delete all of my music during the ride to the hospital -- Might that devastating loss be at the heart of how awful that treatment turned out to be? Might being stuck with just the radio have set me up for days of suffering, for nights of... well, for plain old long-assed nights?

I did give the experience a try -- honestly.  I lay there and tried to focus on something besides listening.  But I cannot focus on seeing and looking because I cannot... focus.  My vision BENDS with these higher doses -- bends as in I-can-see-around-corners-but-not-right-down-the-middle-of-the-visual-field.  Also, there is the issue of foreshortening.  When I tried to zero in on Fred's legs, which I knew to be stretched out from his nasty plastic chair and propped on my wheelchair seat, they were as badly elongated tooth picks. 

And I know you'll understand that I could only see around the corner (the far left corner, of course) when I trained my eyes straight ahead.  It was, in fact, Nurse Monique who occupied that just-around-the-far-left-corner spot.  Sometimes she popped up at bedside, asking me probing questions like "What's wrong?" and sometimes she was striding -- she has an officious walk -- toward the supply room behind the nurses' station.  I never saw her actually enter the supply room because the supply room extends past the line ending the square of permissible vision.  You know it is there, kind of a humongous maw of emptiness, its door a blind rectangle to my visible square.

It would be ideal to just sleep.  I can't, though, not even with the pre-infusion 10 mg of valium.  I can't because of pain.  Funny, huh?! 

The dose was a hefty 155 mg and we noticed that they gave me considerably longer than the others to try and regain some equilibrium after it had run in.  Normally, everyone gets about 20 minutes, then it's on with the shoes and outer clothing, flush the portacath with saline and heparin, transfer to the wheelchair and weave one's shaky way out.  My shaky way out.  Part of the wait was also due to the doctor failing to show up to sign my discharge paperwork... Even so, I couldn't have left any sooner than I did, and even then, wanted to spew, weep, and be unconscious, all at the same time.

It only got worse as time went on.  We stopped at Home Depot, since we were right there near Tête de Hergé's Lone Alp -- and lone Home Depot store.  Fred ran in "just for a minute" and I pretended to read Dorothy Allison's Cavedweller.  It was hot, people were streaming by, the sun hurt my eyes.  I had to pee and got to, an hour later, when we pulled into The Manor service road and zipped right up to the Emergency Secret Loo nestled in the Orchard Wall.  (There was no toilet paper!  Arg!)

I've tried taking my pain meds. 
I've tried not taking my pain meds.
I've tried opiates, no opiates, biofeedback, crying.
I've slept.
I've made myself get up and work.
I baked a batch of awesome scones, not too sweet.
I promised and failed to deliver on a soup.
I put a kitten under my chin.
I paid bills.
I shooed the kitten away, and felt the urge to hit him.
I ate.
I abstained from eating.
I overate.
I ran fevers, had sweats.
I cut my hair.
I stopped saying "I" -- as a verbal and moral exercise.

The only thing that helped, and then only for twenty minutes or so, was darkness. And silence.  As if my entire body had a migraine.

Some years back, I remember feeling this way -- physical horror wrapped up in depression and regret.  I tossed the remains of my dissertation, and erased the evidence from my hard drives.  I burned photographs. I ran the air conditioner at obscene temperatures, applying ice air to my burning dystrophic body.

The ketamine isn't working.  It's failed.  I came out of this one worse than I went in.  Fred says it's too early to say, that I did get some benefit from the fourth infusion but it showed up way late -- as in the day before receiving the fifth one.  I cannot say if he is right.  (That means that I think he is wrong.)

I'll do the next one as the last one and then keep my appointment with this doctor... who promised me a miracle.  No, I am not angry.  It's what I wanted to hear and longed to believe.

There is one song that will never make the Ketamine Playlist -- I'd never disrespect it so.  But it might be the one and only piece of the Post-Ketamine SongFest -- the only song worth remembering after bathing the brain in toxin, Dylan's I'll Keep It With Mine. This is not the cover I'd choose but it's certainly more than okay:



And so it was in this sorry state that I got up this morning, and then got up again two hours later. I had the urge to DELETE, beginning with videos... before I gave in to it, I made myself do a "Magic Movie" treatment of about 15 meaningless cat clips. This is what the FlipShare do-hickey program came up with, this is what has been preserved.

Buddy has been going through a "leaping" phase. He will suddenly leap in the air, sometimes from a dead standstill, sometimes adding a quarter turn or a twist, always exuding Extreme Joy. Marmy has begun to accept him and now he gives her this really scary, mean hiss-s-s-s when she frightens him, and she never fails to frighten him, just by showing up. He has mounted Dobby several times, and Dobby fairly sighs -- Sammy used to do the same thing. Poor Dobby. Poor Buddy. Sexual confusion is never fun.

I am *this* close to deleting the blog.  It is a tough call.