Happy Fourth of July

If you’ want to read the post above, email me for the password. It’s about freezing while writing a book and things like that. Just feels so personal. Maybe it’s not.

I was looking for the scene where James Cagney dances onto walls in Yankee Doodle Dandy, my all time favorite movie, in second grade, when I faked a flu so I could stay home and watch it all day and night.

Yankee Doodle Dandy is the story of George M Cohan who wrote very patriotic songs that I loved when I was a child. Also I think both he and James Cagney were born on July 4, and I thought that the utmost in patriotism. I wanted my birthday moved forward a few weeks.

Million Dollar Movie on New York’s old, I think, Channel 11, the station that brought you the wonderful Yuletide Log for those of us without fireplaces, or, uh, who had a father that was scared to light a fire. We didn’t celebrate Christmas but it was our annual night of the fireplace.

My sister and I both moved into apartments with wonderful wood burning fireplaces. Our father tried to ban us from using them, but he didn’t live with us, much as he wanted to.

Every time he would call, he expected the fireplace to have killed me. He would quiz me on my fireplace procedures. Like he knew? I think we had two fires in our fireplace and my sister, mother and I made them. My sister and I went to a camp where we made camp out sites at least two nights a week for years and camped to Grand Canyon and back with our camp. Got over any love of staying in nature itself.

My family excels at useless fears. We’re the Savage Anxiety/Guilt/if you can think of something to fear, we will fear it for you/Society, INC.

I was having nice family memories. Really you begin to cherish these memories as you work very very hard to rid yourself of the neuroses.

Then I came across an article where, surprise, Bush, yeah that’s his name commuted Libby’s sentence so that he can celebrate the red, white and blue in style.

I’m beginning to feel for Paris Hilton.* God help me.

I try to stay away from politics here. This got to me. It’s a bit more important than Clinton pardoning Denise Rich’s ex-husband.

How the Democratic candidates react to this might determine who I vote for in the next election.

I want to write beautiful words like these

I want to feel like the seven year old who was so in love with her country and a movie embodying the best about it that she could think of nothing else.

I don’t want to care about this crazy out of control government. I don’t want to give a damn.

I don’t want to press a button on my tool bar and see the headline I did.

My mood ring button has changed from amber–A little Nervous, emotions mixed, unsettled, to black–Stressed, tense or feeling harried.

I’m beginning to believe in mood ring tool buttons. If you don’t have one on your Google tool bar, they’re amazing. All you have to do is put your mouse under the button. Can’t even say you’re wasting time. It just went to blue green: Emotionally charged, somewhat relaxed.

I always relax when I write. That’s why I write so much.

I’m looking forward to moving to South Carolina, yes that red state, where I can hibernate during the winter, take long walks and write without hearing about how I’m lost to blogging. Though now that I’m spending most of my time writing a book and am available at least three four nights a week, or two nights and weekends, I’m being exonerated.

I want that seven year old girl back, and not in dementia. She cared. She loved her country purely. She had an imagination that wasn’t afraid to leap to the moon.

I need her awe. Her belief that grown ups could make things right. Not sure about that one. I need the girl who had to be chased from the ocean to the shore after four hours.

Her faith was unimaginable to me. I remember her so well. I kept that faith despite my hatred of Viet Nam, despite the family wars, despite Watergate, despite a bum in the bed next to me, despite so many things.

I only lost her a decade or so ago, when family members had died or grown old, when the Newt cuts were taking affect and the job offers were rescinded because the experimental mental health clinics were closed.

Everything began to go crazy. Clinton was impeached, the Florida election…and all the stuff after.

This is my country! Land of my birth! That is part of one of the worst written songs ever. kill me.

I like the sentiment. I’m just a good ole girl, at heart, masquerading as a jaded New Yorker all these years.

I was going to put in the rest, of the song. but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I do love it so much. The country, not the song. Just to get that straight.

The only way to support the troops is to bring them home.

This land belongs to all of us.

My mood is now green: steady, stable, no emotional turmoil. Have to see if they change it every half hour or so.
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*If you ever want to get more hits than you deserve mention Paris Hilton’s name as an aside. Weird but true.