Howl, Parts I & II

I'll preface this by saying this is adult content and has foul language and I haven't read the while thing in a long time. Howevah, the Beat Generation of writers were important to American literature, and were ahead of their time in exposing the reality of youth. For whatever reason, I wanted to share this here.


by Allen Ginsberg


For Carl Solomon

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt
of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or
purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and
endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat
through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the
crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with
brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of
China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural
ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse
of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or
soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but
the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in
fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts
with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
hensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze
of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and
undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before
the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for
committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and
screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
ever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to
pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew
of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the
womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass
and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued
along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of con-
sciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and
were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of
the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to
the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
& especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a
sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
& stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks
waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-
heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy
bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions
and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to
build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the
tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in
the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming
of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside
of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next
decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were
growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue
amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi-
ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down
by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked
away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown
soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,
jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the
street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph
records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whis-
key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's
hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you
had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver
& waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver
is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salva-
tion and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a
second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals
with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang
sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha
or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with
their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-
neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
nesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and
fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns
of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the
echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to
stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the
tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last
telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper
rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the
total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash
of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens
Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet
confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow
of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love
into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered
the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies
good to eat a thousand years.


II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up
their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Chil-
dren screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old
men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Mo-
loch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-
house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judg-
ment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned govern-
ments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running
money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast
is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrap-
ers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose
factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and
antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity
and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the
Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in
Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness
without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ec-
stasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light stream-
ing out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries!
blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses
granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios,
tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American
river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive
bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood!
Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells!
They bade farewell! They jumped off the roofl to solitude! waving! carrying
flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

Just Be You

Be the best You you can be. Nobody else can.

Feel different, like a freak somehow?

Embrace the freak! Be different!

Toxic people just see something in you that makes them feel bad about themselves. Don't take it personally.

Don't stop being You, because that's what people want to see anyway.

To Remind Myself

Familiarity yields experience;
Experience yields confidence;
Confidence yields continuity;
Continuity yields expected results;
Expected results are the sum of familiarity.

S.A.D.

Maaaaaaan, so somehow I thought that with the new time change that the sun would be rising earlier, and it would be easier for me to get up in the morning and get started. Well looks like I was wrong. The sun is going to be rising around 730 now and I'm supposed to be work at 8:30 and it's already really hard for me to get started in the morning. I'm gonna be forced to go to bed mad early in order to get up to work out. Can't gamble on a day screwing up your workout routine come evening time. Life happens, ya know.

Okay I'm done generally complaining about something entirely out of my control.

Life Imitating Art

Want to hear the cruelest irony of my emotional life? I wrote "I'll Just Smile" about Matthew Richard Shumway, a song about liking him but being too shy to tell him and having no intention of ever doing so and being content the way things were between us. He died without knowing that song was about him.

He passed away on a Wednesday, July 20th, two days after I drove to Shands in Gainesville to see him in the ICU. A couple weeks prior to that he came into my mind for some reason, I don't know why. I had a boyfriend at the time, so I dismissed it. A long time ago I hid him from my facebook News Feed because I didn't want to be reminded of him, because I was trying to not like him and get over the whole somethingness/nothingness of the whole thing. Of course, with him comatose in a hospital bed and attached to a dozen machines, it was time to tell him everything, so I cried and recounted memories and said everything he'd deserved to hear.

You can't make this stuff up. Maybe I wouldn't feel as strongly for him as I do now if I hadn't made such an effort to keep him off my mind back when we lived in the same town. I made a conscious decision to not go after him; I could like him all I wanted, but I didn't want a drunk boyfriend, and he drank a lot. That choice was what was most healthy for me at the time.

I feel like a fool though, when I think back on the times I was sort of mean to him or ignored him. The very last time I saw him before he had his stroke was New Year's Eve 2010, and as we said our good-byes Gage had asked him, teasing me, "Shumway do you know Haylee?" Shum looked at me like the cat that ate the canary and said, "Yes, we know each other". Though we'd been acquaintances for over two years, at times with palpable emotional tension, I never felt like I knew him that well but always, always just wanted to spend some quiet time with him, play guitars or something. Like my song said, "I'd like to grow in what I know of your gentle soul by merely being near." He told me before I left, "I have unlimited texting now and we can shoot back rapid-fire messages" and I said, "Yeah, that'll be the day." He'd disappointed me so many times before; not texting me back when we first met, not replying to a facebook message I sent him once. For a second he seemed taken aback. Then his face softened as he said, "Yeah, that'll be the day." Gage, very protective of me, didn't think Shumway was good enough for me and he was proud of me for finally saying like, "No, I'm not going to get excited at the prospect of getting to know you better because I will not let you disappoint me again."

Is this honestly the last interaction I had with him? You can't make this stuff up.

I'm working on a song now about asking his permission to remember our history the way I wish it had happened. It was agony to accept my feelings for him and then see him suddenly. I would cling to my oath that I would not make a move on him, knowing full well he was entirely too shy to put the moves on me. The most forward he got was one day at the pub after a rugby match (picture me, track pants, jersey, no make-up). I said good-bye and had almost left the room when he said, "Hey Haylee?" I stopped and said, "Hey Matt?" and he looked down at the floor and mumbled, "You look really pretty today." Aaaaahhhhh!! I said thank you and went around the corner where I could giggle and jump like a teenager. When I'd confessed to Kerri and Gage that I had a crush on him, Kerri said, "How can you have a crush on Shumway!?" She didn't see what I saw, and neither did he.

You can't make this stuff up.

So how can I make art imitate life? I feel as if I haven't been very creative over the past year. There's so much more that happened between Shumway and me as nothing was happening, like the night we chatted on facebook at 3am the cloudy August night the Perseid meteor shower was on, trading youtube videos of songs we wanted the other to hear. I do want to remember everything accurately, except for the times I could've been more kind to him. One of the best was when we slow-danced on the porch at Mother's to some 1940's big band music. Pure magic. He was very good, and he confessed that his mother made him take ballroom-dancing lessons when he was younger. I still remember what it felt like to rest my face on his shoulder, to feel his cheek near my ear and the way he held my hand against his chest. And my mind wandering to the fact that I was wearing baggy khaki shorts and my crazy-lookin' "Love Is Real" Daniel Johnston t-shirt, haha.

This isn't at all where I thought this blog was going to go. I guess I needed to get this out. There are so many more memories I hope I'll always be able to recall easily. It would likely be more healthy to try to move on and find an interest in someone who hasn't been dead almost seven months, but the artist in me loves this agony. I always knew he was really special, and the fact that he was taken from us so young confirms this.

More cruel irony: the first time I went over to his house, he'd been trying to learn this song on guitar, with which I've been obsessed ever since: "Ghost" by Howie Day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmlr0Jc9hPQ

October Morning

The clouds are a ceiling this morning,

Just enough light coming through.

Am I letting it shine through me?

Under the overpass I see signs of life,

Probably not one you or I would want.

Am I just putting this thought away?

Each life that rides past me in its own vessel,

Some of them better or worse than others.

Am I judging a book by its cover?

People get so angry, sometimes so do I

At a person they will never meet.

I just cruise along in my seat,

Am I helping them get through their day?

Power lines connect us all

And give birds a place to sit before they

Launch a swirling formation.

Am I appreciating this beautiful performance?

So if we're all heading somewhere,

Different paths and destinations all,

Am I still going in the right direction?

The First On the Second

A most delightfully lazy day. Just sayin. Have a nice (real!) fire going in the fireplace, the Gators won the Gator Bowl, right now watching Ulster v Munster to study up on 15's. Hungry though, I see ramen noodles in my future.

2011 began with an emotional sprint and saw an 8.5-year streak go down. Then I got hit in the gut in July when Shumway died, and my collective heart-and-mind were wrenched out and run over on the highway. (This is him with my sister and me on New Year's Eve last year... sigh.)

Rugby was good to me all year, and I was good to it.

I am determined and newly inspired to learn to speak Spanish as I've discovered the music and voice of Alejandro Sanz, and I'm desperate to discover the lyrics.

Will I finish my own album in 2012? I'm having my doubts! Gotta be positive though. About everything, especially myself.

Worse Still

The friend I wrote about in my previous post is fine, recovering at home, taking better care of himself. Praise God.

I called that situation "The Unthinkable". Well, reality is quite frequently what we don't expect it to be. A young friend of mine, 27, died after eight days in a coma, induced to save his brain from a massive stroke he suffered out of nowhere. But the damage was done.

There are many reasons why I'm having trouble coming to grips with this. Pray for his parents, Larry and Theresa. His funeral is tomorrow, geography prevents me from attending.

Life is never fair, and God does things for His own reasons. A good friend of mine says that God can see the whole tapestry, while we can only see the little frayed tassels that hang down. I trust God and His plan, that'll never change. I just wish young people didn't have to be taken away to remind us all how much we take this life for granted.

The Unthinkable

One of my best friends is very, very sick. He's in a hospital right now, has been for eight days, and has almost died twice. I can't go visit because the doctors want him to rest. This is horrible.

Rick has been the very best I could ever want in a friend, and I consider myself very good at being loyal and true to my friends. He stuck by me and defended me when I went through some really hard times, and at the time we'd known each other less than a year. We worked together at a rancid cesspool office of disguised evil, so we share an understanding of what's been killing him for the last twenty-six years. He loves my music and believes in me as a songwriter and a performer and encourages me to stick with it. I can confide in him and he confides in me. He's fun and funny and loves the Gators and Bruce Springsteen and can't tell you about a song without singing it and playing air guitar. My dad and I went with Rick and his wife to see Bob Dylan. He doesn't even begin to realize what a good person he is, empathetic and generous, hard-working, just a gem of a human being.

I'm literally beside myself. If anyone out there reads this, please pray for my friend Rick. When he gets released he'll have to make major lifestyle changes, so he'll need prayers for that, too. We all have our cross to bear, and right now his is heavy.

Lord Willin

As a man was leaving the office, a girl I work with said "Merry Christmas".

He turned around and said, "The same to ya'll too, Happy New Year!"

To which she replied, "See you next year!" Laughter was exchanged and general good vibes spread through the office.

As he walked out the door, the gentleman (who was wearing a Gator hat, by the way) said, "Lord willin, I'll be here!"

And I knew he was right, and thought of all the vain things I make plans about and was reminded of this passage from James 4:

¹³ Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” ¹⁴ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”

Is That What It Is?

Artemis is the Greek goddess of hunting, wild animals, virginity and the moon, twin sister of Apollo. This guy asked for my phone number over the weekend and it made me think of this story (and wonder why it's been 2.5 years since the last time that happened, what is it about me? I've been told I'm intimidating, being a referee of men's rugby (and women's), tall and not ugly and all). Anyway this is the story:

Artemis was once bathing in a vale on Mount Cithaeron, when the Theban hunter Actaeon stumbled across her. Enraged, Artemis turned him into a stag and, not knowing their own owner, Actaeon's own dogs killed him.

I mean she was pissed he saw her naked. She couldn't have him going around saying, "Yo I saw that virgin goddess Artemis naked!" BUT, I think it's significant that she turned him into a stag (deer), allowing him to live in the form of an animal she held sacred. Hmmmm. Then again she probably knew his dogs would attack him if he were a deer.

Infinite Jest, an amazing book I just read and highly recommend, had a character named Joelle/Madame Psychosis who was beautiful (the former love of her life, Orin would continue to refer to her as the "P.G.O.A.T.", as in Prettiest Girl Of All Time). Her father warned her about men who were only attracted to her looks, ("The sweetest syrup attracts the nastiest flies.") so she was paranoid about that. But the author called it "Actaeon Complex", ("deep phylogenic fear of transhuman beauty"), which is what men get around women who are so intimidatingly beautiful they're actually repelled by them and can't bring themselves to even talk to her. I can't say this is my problem (I'm actually quite awkward and get this same Actaeon Complex around good-looking dudes as I go around looking like an unmade bed) but it makes me feel better to blame it on this. Maybe I should be asking "What's wrong with this kid who wants my phone number!?!?" (just teasing - I know that a girl's phone number is like a trophy for a guy)

*(Ultimately, at Thanksgiving dinner at Joelle's parents' house (with Orin at the table) her father revealed some gross crap about him being in love with her so the mother freaked out and went down to the basement where the father had his lab (he was a low pH chemist) and threw a beaker of acid at the father, who ducked, so it ended up breaking on Joelle's face, which made her deformed and un-look-at-able, so she joined the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed and took an oath to always wear a veil to cover her face. And obviously Orin dumped her soon thereafter. At least she didn't have to worry if men were just interested in her physical appearance anymore.)

From wikipedia, other reasons I identify with Artemis' story:
The childhood of Artemis is not fully related in any surviving myth. The Iliad reduced the figure of the dread goddess to that of a girl, who, having been thrashed by Hera, climbs weeping into the lap of Zeus.[17] A poem of Callimachus to the goddess "who amuses herself on mountains with archery" imagines some charming vignettes: according to Callimachus, at three years old, Artemis, while sitting on the knee of her father, Zeus, asked him to grant her six wishes: to remain always a virgin; to have many names to set her apart from her brother Apollo; to be the Phaesporia or Light Bringer; to have a bow and arrow and a knee-length tunic so that she could hunt; to have sixty "daughters of Okeanos", all nine years of age, to be her choir; and for twenty Amnisides Nymphs as handmaidens to watch her dogs and bow while she rested. She wished for no city dedicated to her, but to rule the mountains, and for the ability to help women in the pains of childbirth.[18]
Artemis believed that she had been chosen by the Fates to be a midwife, particularly since she had assisted her mother in the delivery of her twin brother, Apollo.[19] All of her companions remained virgins and Artemis guarded her own chastity closely. Her symbols included the golden bow and arrow, the hunting dog, the stag, and the moon.

"She wished for no city dedicated to her..."
"...Guarded her own chastity closely."

And she killed Adonis, the guy everyone thought was so hot. (Also from wikipedia):
In some versions of the story of Adonis, who was a late addition to Greek mythology during the Hellenistic period, Artemis sent a wild boar to kill Adonis as punishment for his hubristic boast that he was a better hunter than she.

So, Artemis is one of my favorite mythological figures. There was a point but I forgot it.

You Know Who You Are

Thank you for bein a friend

Travel down the road and back again

Your heart is true

You're a pal and a confidant

And if you threw a party

Invited everyone you knew

You would see

The biggest gift would be from me

And the card attached would say

Thank you for bein a friend.

I Want To Be Weird Again

"What kind of music do you play?" Uh, Haylee Slaughter Music. I don't know. Some of it can be pegged into a genre but some of it cannot. Since I've been recording an album in a real studio with a very talented producer, I've taken into consideration mass appeal to a certain extent and attempted to meet the listener halfway. There are songs I've deemed too personal that have been left off the final track list. The tendency to hold back and water it down now is stronger that I started refereeing seriously, for fear that rugby people will hear a song or read this blog and think "Ummm, yeah, what an unstable emotive weirdo." Referees are definitely not supposed to be unstable, emotive weirdoes.

You know who my song-writing hero is? Daniel Johnston, an unstable, emotive weirdo. So RAW, so REAL. Much of his early stuff was recorded on toy organs or badly-tuned guitars onto a cassette. Check him out, : http://www.hihowareyou.com. I want to make music just as weird. Some instrumental, all experimental, brutally honest lyrically, all music that exposes my heart and soul in a way that makes other people uncomfortable.

In the first two years of my refereeing career, I thought I had to fit a mold, not stick out too much more than I already do as a female. Be humble, not join in conversations, always get to meetings on time with my clothes ironed and my shirt tucked in. In other words, Play the Game. It's not quite me but I think that in a way these expectations have helped me grow up a little. In other ways, I've have to suppress who I really am for fear of weirding people out. I'm much more morbid than I allow myself to let on, and I've learned which anecdotes I need not share. Maybe these are good things. It is unrealistic to expect everyone to understand where I'm coming from, and it's really quite a hassle to try to change this on a day-to-day basis.

I've got high hopes for this record I'm working on right now; Internet radio play and shopping it for song placements on TV, movies, commercials or with major recording artists. I may do a CD launch party and actually perform for the first time in months. Who knows? But when it's done, I want to let myself be weird again. Really weird. Daniel Johnston weird.

Some Things I Learned This Weekend

1. I need to learn how to get in touch with my feelings.

2. I have to stop spitting.

3. Being teased by both my mom and my coach together is disturbing.

4. Many things are not within the scope of my control, but many things in fact are.

Quote of the Day

"You play right up to your limit and then pass your limit and look back at your former limit and wave a hankie at it, embarking. You enter a trance. You feel the seams and edges of everything."

....TALENT IS ITS OWN EXPECTATION.


-from the book Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It's so weird and I can't put it down.

Routines

I was going to say something nice about routines giving me confidence. It just occurred to me what was missing from my athletic development: I'm not superstitious enough. Rafael Nadal, a great tennis champion, was so reliant upon his routines that he declined an invitation to meet the Queen of England at Wimbledon, saying, "It was disappointing for me but the Wimbledon club knows I have my routines before the match." Most of the routines I do have now are about food (e.g. packing the cooler with pre, during, post match snacks, then enough calories for the ride home), but I could get weirder about my watches or the way I tie my bootlaces. Hmmmm...

Traditions

It's not just the name of a local shop that sells ceramic knick-knacks to old ladies who have nothing better to do than shop for ceramic knick-knacks.

Townes Van Zandt

A girl at church (Laura) was the first person to mention him to me after she'd been to one of my shows, asked me had I heard of him. Then, at a record store downtown the guy in the store pointed out a TVZ vinyl double album (Live at the Old Quarter) and spoke of it with such reverence I regretted giving my turntable to my dad. The latest sign was Brother Rufus (my harmonica player!) loaning me an issue of American Songwriter that featured Townes Van Zandt, and the article quoted several musicians. These resonated with me:

Guy Clark:

"And that poetic nature that's so richly inside Townes' work is like standing in front of a Van Gogh or a Renoir. You want to be able to access that part of any artist or writer or poet... They show you what a true artist is capable of doing."

14-year-old Elijah Berlow (Proctor School, NH)"

"He's such a poet, a really, really sad depressed poet. I tell my friends: 'Listen to the words...,' because at first, you know, they don't; they're about the sounds. But you put on 'Flyin' Shoes' and they don't have a chance. I tell 'em, 'Keep listening! Over and over 'til you get it' and they always come back blown away. My friends are inspired. They wanna write songs, but then they realize this is way hard."

Grace Potter:

"...you hear a song like "Waiting Around To Die" and there's such enormous despair, you're consumed by it. Taken whole from a very few, very pure lines... and as a writer, who doesn't want to do that? The way he does it so completely? Wow.

"And it sets a standard. Even his voice is poetry: The beauty is in the broken places! He always chose the perfect place, the perfect word to break... and he never overdid it. As a singer, that's part of it, too: He knew his voice inside out, how to deliver his lines so he could deliver that pain and never let the emotion take over, but be so real because it's true when he wrote it; you know that, but it doesn't make it true every time you sing it. That's the deeper poetry."

Good things come in threes, so I'm sure supposed to get into him now. The good Lord thinks I'm ready to learn from his songs.

And this is just brilliant:

Legs to walk and thoughts to fly

Eyes to laugh and lips to cry

A restless tongue to classify

All born to grown and all grown to die.

From "Rex's Blues" by TVZ

Naked Dream

I walked into a department store completely naked. I think it was the shoe section. This tall sales lady with long blonde hair is gossiping loudly/making fun of me to someone else. She said, "Who leaves the house without pants??" very sarcastically. So I walked right up to her counter and said, "Yeah, I'm naked." Apparently someone had taken my clothes, but to me there was no shame or embarassment, just a matter-of-factness about the situation. Then I started to say something, can't remember exactly, either "someone took my clothes" or "hey I need to buy some clothes." I think it was more about fear of confrontation, or my lack thereof, which is good! Despite my obvious handicap, I took care of business. Take that, tall blonde harpy.

Femininity

It's something I'm putting emphasis on lately. WHY?

When it was still cold, a friend (Gage) called me out about my track pants and huge men's training sneakers (that "even (he) wouldn't wear") and ar-teest Unplugged In New York sweater and challenged me to do at least one feminine thing a day. Don't become "one of those!", he warned. And I knew he was right - I could've taken it personally in a negative way, but knew he had a good point. If it wasn't worth the effort, he wouldn't have suggested it.

AND WHY NOT?

It's strange, as a woman, to be asked to justify my choice of attire, because dressing nicely with mascara and hair down really is a huge departure from my usually indifference. There must be some agenda! No, I just want to look nice. Hopefully I've never been some poster child for women who refuse to be attractive because wearing make-up is selling out.

WHY NOT?

And you dudes out there who say they love women who wear their hair back in sweatpants and wife beaters, God bless you. See you when the weather bans skirts again.