Also, I would really like to breathe some new life into this place, so if you or someone you know would like to be a Selector, drop me a line.
Of course, I am not promising anything, and I am still wary of giving entrance to people I don’t know fairly well, but you’ll never be someone I know fairly well unless you reach out, so if you want, say “Hello.”
I hope everyone is having a lovely lovely holiday, and have an exciting and beautiful new year.
xoj
PS: Mos Def=one of the most beautiful men alive? Y/N? Pls adv.
I knew something had changed inside when I found I had fallen in love with this song. It’s so patently not-me.
Anyway, it reminds of elderly Tolkien cartoons and grainy footage of snow drifts from long ago, not to mention that “patient virtues” have never been mine, either.
Today was the day the blackbirds come, a wide, thin sheet of them descending on the yard, blanketing the grass for a half hour or so. My wife had never seen this; I often forget that there are so many hidden benefits of working at home. Hundreds of them, all on the ground, in the tree out back, shuffling through the leaves I never raked, hundreds in the air, careening on and on, around and around. They love the gutters of homes, they love the trees where no squirrels live. They help each other, I noticed this morning, as a few pecked seeds from the branches into the waiting beaks of their brothers below. In the sun, they are hardly fuliginous, but, rather, that black that carries more colors, the shiny greens and purples of the sun in them. They come and come and come, and they are gone very quickly, that momentary black mood that you cannot remember until it returns again.
these are the faces that kept me company, and grew to become legends of what home could be.
I was reminded of this song when I saw Tom Waits on The Daily Show a week or two ago. Did you see him?
I remember the first time I ever heard Tom Waits, back when the first Red Hot compilation came out. It was the end of the eighties or the beginning of the nineties, I think. I had never heard a voice like that before, and I didn’t understand it.
It took me a very long time to get Tom Waits. It wasn’t until I was stuck alone in the Midwest in the autumn and winter of 2002. It took having the closest person who gave even the remotest shit about me being 2000 miles away, discovering the medicinal faculties of bourbon, and getting wet eyes at even the slightest provocation because I had never experienced solitude like that before to really let his genius and poetry under my skin.
He healed me in that lonely apartment, his voice cradled me the way my father never did but always wanted to, he made me feel ok. Tom Waits’ voice helped me believe in second chances and Grace. That beautiful, broken gravelly whisper helped me trust that I would be able to pick myself up and even start to hope again.
When I was in Iowa I would take long drives into nowhere, especially in the weeks leading up to when my brother came to save me, I would take pictures (that I still haven’t developed) so that I wouldn’t forget what the bare branches reaching up into the biggest grey sky I have ever seen looked like, what their brittle fingers felt like as they stretched, bent, heavenward. And as I navigated my little civic down lonely little roads that outlined farms with their rusting machinery and frail old horses, I would listen to the mix I made with all my favorite, saddest Tom Waits songs. I would drive and drive until I couldn’t see another car anywhere in sight, and I would park and sit on the hood of my car, Mr. Waits’ voice coming through the open windows, and just put my face in my hands and cry, sure that pretty soon I would be so far gone that my heart would simply stop.
The isolation grew to overwhelm me, as I am sure you can gather, the descent was something that was inevitable. The time I spent by myself was so painful then, and now it feels like nothing. I have learned to be my best company and spending 4 days without speaking to anyone doesn’t feel like my heart breaking apart into a thousand thousand pieces. I am able to take these times with a sense of Grace and do not worry so much anymore that I will soon go so far inside that I will never return. In fact, even though I spend far more time by myself than anything else, I am coming up out of my well, everyday it seems that I am present more in the world. I may be alone but I no longer feel despair over the fact that I literally can’t remember the last time I touched another person.
But it hurts when I realize that the pain of being abandoned in Iowa damaged me in a deep, subtle, too-real way.
Especially in the Seattle winter, the shadows have the same quality as the shadows that lined the walls of my cell in that tower. It’s often during these long nights that I find myself listening to Mr. Waits most, sometimes staring into space in disbelief when I can’t help but remember.
But if I let myself listen in the right way, if I (without bourbon now, and for a long time) let myself lay down, if I can just make my mind still, if I can just let his voice hold me close,
I am able to remind myself that I continue to believe in second chances, and if I can just be still and listen to this beautiful angel of a man, then maybe my Grace will come too.
Do you hear the windshield wipers and the ocean at once? Is that just happening inside of me alone? Yes, yes, I believe that it is, inside this car, this man-made thing, deep and warm. I have no proof of otherwise.
I continue to lay myself out on the examiner’s table
eyes closed,
holding my breath.
Somewhere, deep in me, I believe that it is this willingness to pull myself open,
this desire to expose what’s waiting underneath this calm, quiet, opaque shell,
which will allow me to finally become
translucent and
(my most secret wish)
allow me to create more connexions so that I might finally
walk away from the well.
Tracklisting:
00:00 hello
00:29 “Wandel” Popnoname
04:01 my brain is starting to shut down
05:38 “Daily Life” Arto Lindsay
06:57 “Loco Tracks” Aki Onda & Mono
07:33 i won’t look back and laugh
13:03 “Body & Soul” Billie Holiday
16:11 i have faulty ears and a tender constitution
16:19 “Brian’s Nightmare/The Unknown Part One” Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd
20:05 you are who i want to be when i’ve learned to lay down my fears
20:13 “The Last Leaf (excerpt)” Aloof Proof
23:37 i’m really glad that these letters are a conversation also
28:09 “Epiphany” David Sylvian
29:41 “Blue Moon” Zeena Parkins & Ikue Mori
30:18 “Tangle Eye Blues” Alan Lomax Prison Songs
33:33 “The Stars & The Scars” Navicon Torture Technologies
40:00 “Track 04″ Andrew Chalk
40:44 you wondered aloud what my well was like
44:44 the whole universe has closed up, and there is nothing but the well
45:03 “The Great Salt Lake” Juno
50:30 “Requiem for Dying Mothers Part One” Stars of the Lid
51:01 sometimes it feels as if my heart might stop beating
56:44 “Kiss, Scar aka Bell” Prurient
57:47 everything just feels far away
00:57 a better way to feel safe
01:16 “Nautical 2″ Loscil
04:35 happy and secure, and protected, and feel whole
05:23 “Evocation of the Invisible” Alio Die
06:11 how is it that the wells could be so different?
08:54 an awfully hard place to be
09:56 “Remind Me of You” Beequeen
13:08 a world that can contain both these kinds of wells is a lot more hopeful
15:12 goodnight
EDIT: Hahaha, I am rad and there are all kinds of typos n’ shit in the first version of the cover. If you care, re-download, it should be titled “thewell2.jpg”. jeez.
Because the sun cannot last….
I knew something had changed inside when I found I had fallen in love with this song. It’s so patently not-me.
Today was the day the blackbirds come, a wide, thin sheet of them descending on the yard, blanketing the grass for a half hour or so. My wife had never seen this; I often forget that there are so many hidden benefits of working at home. Hundreds of them, all on the ground, in the tree out back, shuffling through the leaves I never raked, hundreds in the air, careening on and on, around and around. They love the gutters of homes, they love the trees where no squirrels live. They help each other, I noticed this morning, as a few pecked seeds from the branches into the waiting beaks of their brothers below. In the sun, they are hardly fuliginous, but, rather, that black that carries more colors, the shiny greens and purples of the sun in them. They come and come and come, and they are gone very quickly, that momentary black mood that you cannot remember until it returns again.
When you listen like I do, like I assume you do.
It’s amazing: all the things I know that just aren’t so.
