I don’t understand why categories show when I haven’t clicked them. “Impeach Bush’s” a bit old. “Impeach Cheney for occupying space” would make sense. I don’t mean this post to be a poor me one. My life is great. I would like it to be the best it could be. I do feel I deprived myself of much pleasure but my life has been sybaritic enough. I have excelled in the family, friends, actually be at work areas. Sometimes i was great at job hunting. Sometimes I was horrible at it.

Truly I wish my life remains on the sometimes even wonderful keel I seem to have been getting to.
*I believe that’s from Rhoda–Mary Richard’s (Mary Tyler Moore) Bff. Of course she meant that as in “look out, I’m taking over.” I mean it in “get out your HAZAMAT suits.”

I will be back in a week having seen family, friends and the friends of the Miracle of Facebook or childhood friends I still think about and remember with love. Read more…

This post is schizzy itself. It’s sort of live blogging and the latest “news” is on top.
Saturday morning: 9:50 AM–80% of the fire has been contained. I found an aerial map which shows the fire in depth–it’s real far from the beach side. Read more…

We’re having an uncontained large fire. It’s on the other side of the intercoastal and so far on the other side of North Myrtle. It’s a little exciting and very scary.
Day 2) They’re almost downplaying the fire on the news I live north of it. I would put an article from the New York Times in but unfortunately it’s the best I could find

This is for 3WW Here are parts one and two
Is deceit a vital part of growing up? Between ages fifteen and 24 there were many times I did set out to deceive my parents. By the time I was 25, in 1975-76, I was tired of playing word games with the truth. At 25, I wanted to indulge my long suffering father.

I had been “living” at my parents house for six months by January 3, 1976. I put “living” in quotes as most nights I would stay on my friend Shelby’s couch or in some guy’s apartment. I remember the first time I saw cable TV. I can’t describe the guy but I still remember the building, and his living room where WNEW-FM (my radio station then) played in the background while Reuters News scanned the picture tube. It was, I thought, a miracle. I can’t say the same for the sex as I don’t remember it.

When I came “home,” it would usually be two or three in the morning. My parents couldn’t and wouldn’t say anything as they had raised me without a curfew, and I made it to the train to the city and work each morning. They didn’t know about the little envelope of white powder I sometimes used. I never liked coke as a party drug but as something to keep me functioning I loved it.

When I indulged, which was most nights and many mornings and afternoons for I worked at a hand painted tee shirt company where my boss was a junkie; the art director an alkie, and I the coordinator between departments and assistant to the president, I would indulge in my drug of choice–pot. I tried keeping it to a manageable level.

So yes I was deceiving my parents but they were silent partners to it. I “lived” at their house so I could save my money for an apartment. My father insisted on paying for my monthly train ticket.

Years before after I dropped out of college, lived in Stuyvesant Town, and saved my money for an open ended ticket to Europe and Israel, I went to the travel agency to pick my ticket up:
Oh you’re just a few minutes late. A very handsome older man bought it for you The woman squealed. She thought I was horrors of horrors living off an older man. And I was.
Did he have a large nose, too long hair for somebody his age and a moustache?
Yes
That’s no man, that’s my father.

Whenever we went to restaurants and they tried to seat us in the lovers banquettes I made that distinction clear. I didn’t want my father mistaken for my lover and I didn’t want him to buy me things. I wanted the privilege of paying my own way.

I took a silent oath saying I would return anything he gave me. I tried returning the ticket. He was beyond insulted and told me that I could put the money in an Israeli bank account he had set up for me.

I knew then I was bought and paid for. It wasn’t until recently that I understand the pride a parent takes in being able to give. Fortunately I always knew how much my father loved me. Even in the years between fifteen to 25 when we our language was clocked and fraught with many different meanings.
Life’s too short to spend bitching

This is for this weeks 3WW Totally forgot to put it in! Me bad

I always start the story of Jeffrey and me with the day we met. That sounds normal until I remember I never start at the beginning. But that was one of the ten most incredible days of my life–and 50% of it happened before we met.

The allure of May 20, 1979 is simple. It was an incredibly beautiful day in the city everybody loved to hate. New York was supposed to be dangerous . I was out at all hours everywhere and my wallet was stolen once. I had just cashed my paycheck and everybody in my office pitched in to replace it. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else though I dreamed of a beach house.

I walked from my apartment at 5 East 63rd Street, one of the best addresses in New York though the building itself had and would see better days to Folk City, the club that Marilyn, Robbie and Joe were soon to buy. Folk City was on 3rd Street near 6th Avenue then. It was dark and tobacco stained. With a bar filled with talking people. Peggy the lesbian bartender who married a man gave certain friends of the house triples, though Robbie refuses to believe that. I could hold my liquor. But never there. The Roches didn’t write “Face down at Folk City“(read the lyrics. First time I heard the song I cried from joy) because girls were sober.*

It’s easy to say Marilyn, Robbie, Joe and I are old friends. Truth, the unvarnished truth is always simpler or more complicated. When we were very young Robbie and I had been briefly married. We weren’t meant to be spouses. I had run to Europe to start my life over in 1971. I came home not because I missed him though I suppose I did but because I had a premonition a healthy friend would die. Together we couldn’t figure out how to warn him and JohnnyB died as I became engaged against my better judgement and married a few months later.

By 1979 we were long divorced and had become friends. I wanted Robbie to marry Marilyn; and I wanted to fall in love. It’s hard for many people to understand that I wished them every happiness. I liked, and like, them. Marilyn was perfect for Robbie in ways that I’m not. The once overbearing love I had felt for him had long ago turned to love for a friend. I’m human; I wanted what I saw they had. And I saw it before many other people. If I’m devoting too much time to this, I want it out of the way. It’s only important to the story because it took place in Folk City and Robbie played a part in Jeffrey and I meeting. It’s not even absurdest or ironic humor but truly funny.

Be careful what you wish for had been my motto since I began college eleven years earlier. I should have remembered it as I walked through the various districts Manhattan had then. The sky was a vivid blue; a perfect blue. It was hot but not humid. I was wearing new jeans and stopped at Macy’s to buy some Willie Smith clothes. I didn’t yet know why I went out of my way to buy clothes but they would play a part in the story also.

Then I walked through the flower district so gay in every sense. From his perch on a human’s shoulder, a parrot asked if I was happy and did I desire sex. Yes, I thought, but not with you. I was happy though had you asked me I would have analyzed the thought to death. I tended to over-analyze every facet of my life.

Was it Lucinda William’s debut at Folk City? I’m not sure though I have post upon post, unpublished article upon article about that day; the last truly uncomplicated day of my life.
••••••••••••
*In the 90′s I saw the Roches perform at Steven Talkhouse in South Beach. They asked how many people in the audience had been in Folk City’s basement–kind of infamous. I didn’t raise my hand but almost everybody else in the audience did. The people I was with looked at me as if I were crazy, but I didn’t want to be part of a pretend party.

This picture brought up all sorts of emotions. it was half a lifetime ago, but I’m not sure I ever truly got over–not him–but the relationship. It wasn’t picture-perfect

My sister asked if he was the love of my life. I had to think which means he probably wasn’t but I don’t know who was.

In dreams I’m 30 again but live alone or with somebody not him. Somebody who thinks the best is yet to come. Somebody who wants to grab life and shout “I’m here! I’m young and willing to do whatever it takes to make it.”

In dreams I’m not worshiped but loved for who I am. Imperfections and all. In dreams the boy is more stable than I am, and understands that my work is important to me. That my tantrums are truly meaningless–and hell, if he wasn’t so miserable would I have been?

In dreams the boy is as funny or funnier than he was and definitely as funny or funnier than I could be. In dreams he could check my sarcasm at the door. I’m so embarrassed when I remember how sarcastic I was an how much people loved that trait.

In dreams I do my 20′s and 30′s over. I loved them so much but see all the mistakes I made now. I wish we had second chances but we only have the present and hopefully the future.

In dreams I wasn’t perfect; I was me but whoever the guy was he loved me anyway.
•••••••••••••••••

Jeffrey is the person I called Zachary. We met at that bar–Folk City’s–not that day–I know from my clothes. Jeff Ampolsk–that was his name, only I called him Jeffrey–will go down in “history” for telling his friend Lucinda Williams to submit a demo to Moses Asch of Folkways. I found a tape of traditional songs Lucinda made in 1978. I don’t have a tape player and have never been sure what to do with it. Jeffrey lives on in the Smithsonian Folkways collection. It makes me laugh to think I had a boyfriend who ended up somewhat akin to Archie Bunker’s chair–it too is in the Smithsonian–always my favorite museum(s).

He had two albums out, on Folkways before he was 25. At 27 he thought he was a failure. I was always trying to pull him up. To make him understand that we had a long life ahead of us. In many ways I’m the eternal optomist who believes so, or too, hard in tomorrow. I couldn’t make him see joy in life, and stopped trying.
I wish we had known what our problems were. I suspected what his were. He refused to believe he had any. I’m sure he knew under the bravado. Once he made me apply for a MacArthur Award for him. I was totally embarrassed but…He thought the world owed him much so I worked to support us. Then I woke up….
There’s much more but I sound like such a damn shrew. And there was so much wonderful about him but it’s so hard to remember the good because forever after I couldn’t love with the same innocence or joy. And there was a time I loved him very much and our life was filled with happiness.