All falls away

Eamon and I went out together, yes, it's true, we went to see the Silos, and unfortunately they were playing with this guy who sucked, well his guitar playing didn't, he was kicking out the jams, but when the Silos were relegated to a back up band for him that's when things went south or should I say southwest. It was sort of Jimmy Buffet meets a bad Tom Waits impersonator doing a Frito commercial.
So, I guess this is what happens to semi successful middle aged performers, they get to continue to make music, but there has to be a lot of compromise in order to make that happen. Kind of like when two middle aged people go to see said performer and there are like twenty people there, who are old too and all sitting down and checking the time on their mobile phones.
It's a hard place to be for me, I still want to go see bands, but at what price I say.

Your darkest mind

On the one day I had to go to work while my kids are on break and my parents are visiting, the refrigerator started to pour fourth gallons of water onto the lino, and the sump pump alarm, which sends Griffin into a frenzied rush of higher than high pitched barking and the need to run to where the sound is, thus causing him to run down into the basement and bark at the hole in the ground, went off, which means that any minute a matching amount of water is at the ready to start shooting out of my own personal version of old faithful.
Now, while this was occurring simultaneously, the phone rang, it was GE the devil people calling back to tell us that one of their minions would soon be there to count out some more money owed on the abacus.
So, how do I know all of these joyous occurrences are coinciding in this magnificent and oh so fabulous way? The miracle of mobile phones I say , and blessed be me for the best reception possible which enables me to chronicle these events having had first hand audio.

Tearing it apart

I'm guessing that if you've been playing games, manipulating and passively negatively affecting other people's lives for more than a century than it really doesn't seem like you are doing anything wrong. My mom as she is aging is loosing her grasp on so many things that her need for control has worsened and in fact become unmanageable for her, and the rest of us. I on the other hand want to let go of all my desire to keep things in check, so being on the opposite end of the spectrum makes for an interesting, or dare I say challenging mix of emotion, reaction and introspection.

If you could

My mom is here; witness my paralysis

That's just the business I'm in

Eamon and I shouldn't have let our children live with us past the age of thirteen. It's not that we don't want to be with them, or haven't taken good care in their health and welfare, it's just that the amalgamation of our issues put into three other human beings was probably not a very good idea, and the end result is double the fun in terms of what ever each of us brought to the picnic.
Jake said to me right after he left for California, that "We just don't know how to be parents to a teenager." And, he's right, neither of us have any desire to tell an almost grown person how to act or what to do all of the time. We are not people who take any joy in controlling the lives of others, so we are both inept and splendidly capable at the same time, which is where the confusion takes hold like a vice, and leaves us spiraling in confusion and misgiving.
We are both far too empathetic to be successful in this arena, we play all of the roles, both adult and child in order to be reasonably fair; and that's where the trouble begins, you can't be on two sides in this realm, you have to be the parent, which neither of us have any sort of frame of reference of whatsoever.

With revenge and doubt

The machine is vast, and it propagates, creates little machines that run the smaller operations. And it continues to consume; people, animals, land, balance. I don't want to be a part of this landscape, yet there is no other; no matter how much I try to convince myself and others that there is a better place just over the fence there.
I wonder about the greed that runs the culture that is based so on having more and wanting it all. It can only be a grander scale of the micro world within each of us, but to what end; we all perish, wouldn't it be better to realize that the gluttony brings nothing but a temporary fullness and that moderation makes for more comfort and delectation. I wonder what drives the engine with such ferocity that even on the so obviously miserable road, people keep on with nary a glance in the rearview.

It's alright

I'm green so I don't have to wear any. I went out last night, to see a local, and for some international favorite. MDID is Mark Edwards who I've known for more than 20 years. We were at the radio station together and shared interests. Last nights show was well attended and there were tons of somewhat familiar faces but due to the nature of both my long and short term memory loss, I was a bit flummoxed.

Gus babysat for the price of pizza and some extra dough. All in all it was good to see such a well attended performance in the ideal smokeless setting with only extension cords separating crowd from band. If all the worlds a stage, where then is the audience?

If it wasn't true

I've been writing for a year now, and I have to say, and will say, it's been an enlightening experience in ways I could not have imagined. For example, actually being able to see some growth at a certain age is always a bit of a surprise. Developing some skills in writing and communicating at the expense of an audience is good, and then there's the response from people, teenagers, friends, moms, people in general who accidentally, much to their chagrin when they were looking for actual teenage moms end up on this site.
So I guess I'm in for the duration, I really can't stop because it gives me focus and something more to look forward to than going to Marc's.

Down in the dirt

The standard for authority, is to get people to do things that don't come naturally, make their lives more difficult and change the clocks on them in order to keep the equilibrium from settling in enough to make some worthwhile and relevant changes. If this wasn't such a constant, and taking place in so many venues, I would think myself a bit daft. It is happening at work during our union negotiations, wherein the new contract the man wants way too many ounces and isn't giving any back; and in the greater realm where everything changes for the sake of keeping the imbalance in order to sustain any sense of peace or dare I say security.

Echos of my mind

When I was young, about Jack's age, I went to Michigan to visit my sister who was going to school there. Ann Arbor is still one of my favorite cities, though it's actually referred to as a suburb of Detroit; odd. Anyway, My sister was working at the Film library and she would bring home old movies and somehow had a 35 millimeter projector at her disposal, so we watched two that stuck. Nosferatu and the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari which I remember mostly for being all crooked and shit.
German and for that matter any expressionism movements in film, remain up there on that list of things I like to watch, but no movie that I can think of, no level of weirdness, can compare to the Burger King commercials. Whom ever came up with the concept, is for sure a fan of the absurd, and rightly so.

Buy me a ticket

The best thing about having been a punk rocker was the blurred line between bands, fans, and bands who were fans. I had been to way too many arena and coliseum shows in Junior High to ever think about going back to that sort of distance. Every show became intimate and if I wanted to see what Keith Morris looked like up close, all I had to do was stick my elbows out and stand by the stage. Every once in awhile I will still go to shows, but I'm always aware of what it felt like when I would see "old people" at a show, the immediate assumption is they were OG or someone's parent; or Jane Scott couldn't make the show so she sent someone else.

These are the days

Now that the smoke has cleared, and I have what I think might be some clarity, I will have to do some evaluating of aforementioned system malfunction. Here is what I think the main problem is; it's the transition into adulthood. Perhaps I'm a little late on this, most likely based on my admitted lack of maturity. The acceptance of aging and the quagmire that goes along with that can be daunting maybe even exhilarating and, it's really hard.
Knowing that there are certain expectations, of behavior, language, dress and general appropriateness, implies that there is even more pressure with aging than there was when I was the parent of young children. I'm sure that I'm over intellectualizing a very ordinary thing, but for me these days, everything is extraordinary, even my descent into madness.

Here to rectify

Breakdown time. Yesterday, the results of patron abuse finally bubbled to the surface. I use the word "patron" loosely, for the most part the consistent problem we have in the library, besides for our sorely lacking daycare skills, is the use of the Internet. People want their porn and their myspace, and they want it now, and for as long as they need. However, that doesn't always work out. So, me being the fucking idiot Internet hostess who always sits at the desk where people stand and wait for assistance in asking someone to get the out of the way, gets the brunt of the level of frustration comparable to loss of limb or foreclosure. Jack and Eamon had me in a messy teary love sandwich when I started to cry into the already salted pasta water boiling away on the stove, apropos in it's illustration of my internal tumult.