I had actually signed out to go and make dinner when I heard the ice cream truck...playing Christmas carols and songs rather than Home on the range as usual. maybe business has been bad? The same old song was passing unnoticed so they went for an attention getter? I mean carols in June..or perhaps they put the wrong tape in. Anything is possible up to and including a tone deaf driver who figures it is all the same racket so who cares what is playing. Surreal moment.
Leaving again for a while, there is a mother downstairs who needs to be fed (she hates to cook, I always cook so it only seems fair to feed her).
I washed the car, dismantled and repaired the seat belt on the driver's side - there's this weird little spinning top kind of thing in there which drives the ratchets that can make it freeze up, very cool- I actually have no idea what I did that fixed it, I took it apart a few times and kept doing it until it ran free again; did two loads of laundry; went to the supermarket and did my week's marketing (yeah, that will last till Tuesday when I'll decide I just have to have____ and it won't have been on today's list);watched two DVD's and wrote the reviews;tidied my closet (aaargh);cut my hair; cleaned the kitchen; messed it up again cooking; cleaned it again;came here read my email and responded and now I am putting the day in order in my mind.
Lot of cool poetry springing up around me which is nice because I have been thinking about putting my 9/11 stuff here. It is time to let it breathe and let it all go.I think. Maybe. Maybe not.I'll think about it.
On my way to the supermarket I took my favorite road fron highway 1 up to highway 2 passing the Sandy Lane Country Club. It is all beautifully manicured grass contrasting with an abundance of bougainvillias in myriad colours tumbling down the smooth green slopes. The sky was blue and cloudless and the sun splashed vivid light every where and there were long moments when I was the only one on the road with the flowers and the sun and the gleam of the sea off the edge of the land.
It's after 11:00 now so I'm for bed and my book. Perhaps some tea and cake first or there is always chocolate...
I woke up this morning to the sound of rain, hard and driving, and the blissfully chill breeze circling in through my window and winding around my body. Paradise is sere and brown and needs the rain to bring its greens back on line. I like to dance in the rain ; face upturned, grass slick beneath my feet moving to the melody in my blood. Heck I like to dance anywhere; in supermarkets, as I pass an open window and a phrase, a riff of music grabs my feet and leads them through the pattern to complete the thought, waiting on line in banks I shimmy and groove if there is music on and people give me room. How can they keep their toes from tapping to the endless beats of rhythm that cascade through and round us all the time?
Rain has its own rhythm, now fast, now slow; pounding, soft, a splat on glass, a thrum on wood, tap tap, tap tap against the tarmac of the road that leads right to my door. The earth expands, exhales the scents and stinks of life as water makes them bloom under the soft grey skies, full of promise and redemption. Rain beats staccato, cold, upon my skin, my eyelids and runs across my lips collecting in the corners of my smile, then suddenly it stops and I twirl untouched in crystal air washed clear of dust, perfect for breathing.
but I am still awake. This is all part of my new plan to sleep late into friday morning so I am time shifted enough that I don't start to flag at three thirty or so on Saturday morning. What 'they' say about everything being at its lowest ebb around three to four in the morning is so true. It is the time I start to wonder why in the world I ever thought doing an overnight DJ show would be really cool. I get convinced that I am the only soul awake and no one's listening so I might as well be sleeping! My response to those internal nay sayers is to put on back-to- back uptempo beats and literally dance around the studio to get my blood to singing and seething through my veins again.
Once past four I am always fine and the drive home with the rising sun at my back is quite amazing. Once I get home and have something to eat it is interesting to feel the system shutting down. Last week I sat reading for a while and never noticed when I slipped into sleep. I had been planning to go down to the beach for an a.m. swim but I think that is probably beyond me UNLESS I can be day shifted so my early morning feels akin to an evening back home after work...thus I am awake now, typing reasonably coherent fragments (well they seem that way to me, right now)to keep myself functional for another couple of hours. There was a time when I thought nothing of going without sleep for days on end, full days, full nights that spilled one into another and then I'd crash for 24 to 36 hours and sleep the clock around and wake renewed and do it all again. Now I find my eyes half-mast at half past nine to open 8 hours later without a clock. The grown ups never warn you what happens as you get older. They never mention that you still feel 17 (or twelve) and just can't do the things you could when that age was actual - grown ups really suck! Okay made it to midnight!
...it has been a productive day. Finally settled on the format for the hurricane pieces and I think I can get about fifteen to twenty with good content so there will be a good rotation on them. Doesn't pay to bore the audience with the same thing over and over again.
Also finally managed to set up an interview for my new piece Art Form - an experiment where I try to make a vibrant audio piece featuring a visual artist. A challenge but I have a definite plan on how to make it work.
Finished reading Deerskin by Robin McKinley, very heavy subject matter despite its fantasy trappings.
Had a lot of fun swinging through the threads putting in my two cents every now and then. Amazing how easily people misinterpret each other - is it that they don't take the time to read thoroughly? And some people clearly just post to create conflict. I exercise my right to refuse to play in their sandboxes!
Each thought expressed
can burn and score the skin
or soothe the readers' spirit
why choose to roll in acid
with ice cream
right next door?
Just need to take a break from auditioning music; I am looking for a theme for short pieces on hurricane preparedness so it needs to catch the attention then be suitable to run as a bed under the voice over. Found two pieces that have potential, one like a ticking clock and one with a nice touch of syncopation that may blend well. If yes, well then I loop it and find a fanfare type sound for in & out and we are good to go. Here in the caribbean we say June come soon, july stand by, august come it must, september remember, october all over - not that Mother Nature has been following our rules lately - so I am trying to decide if it is too trite and hackneyed to tie the rhyme in or if it will help the audience to connect. I did a poll of twenty people last week and i am the only one who has enough water and non-perishable food together for seven days. And batteries, candles, matches and a first aid kit. Thus the radio pieces.
Barbados has been very fortunate that it has not had a direct hit since Hurricane Janet in '55 although we have had some heavy weather from a couple since; to my mind that just increases the odds of getting totally clobbered, others think we have some sort of divine dispensation. Me, I will keep my emergency kit together and current and set up one for my mother too!
Right, time to go back to work. I want to put in at least three more hours then I get to watch DVD's for the review segment. Probably swing by later to play in the threads.
I have been having nightmares the last few nights, inchoate scenes of loss and death and horror. I sit with them quietly because dreams always carry a message, but the language of the night is not straightforward, not word for word exact, but twists and coils with secret levels of enlightenment.
This morning as I was thinking of my poem for the forum I clicked on one written not long before my decision to leave NY and come back to Barbados was made. Suddenly the nightmares made sense. 9/11 was the beginning of the end of NY for me; of the thousands lost I personally knew five. Had lunch with five shining young women on the Sunday before the fall celebrating finding the perfect apartment for them after a six week hunt and they all worked together in one of the towers. And they all went to work that day. And none of them escaped. I would have been shattered anyway like everyone else who heard first one crash then the second; who stared in disbelief as man destroyed what man had wrought; who breathed the dead and burning plastics as the fire burned for days, but I knew their names, can see their faces still and so it happened in me as well as outside of me. And I left NY. The poem is one that echoes the nightmares - memories stirred by my visit a week ago rising to the surface looking for resolution and recognition. So although it is a sad and plaintive struggle to hold my ground I decided to use that poem to mark today. My vulnerabilities can only strengthen me when I embrace them and face them and grief can simmer for a long time before we are ready to acknowledge the devastation of loss.
How nice, wake up late and sit around with a cup of tea, browsing the forums and not really doing much of anything. The sun is shining brilliantly here in Bim (aka barbados) with a good brisk breeze. Course, that means I will start to feel the need to take care of laundry and go out and wash the car...and there's a new shower curtain to put up, the flush thingy in the second bathroom needs to be replaced and I really need a shelf to display all my pots. Gee its really easy to shift a mood isn't it? Any second now I am going decide I have to go to the gym!This is what I get for not meditating, a mind jumping all over the place instead of resting in the moment...or perhaps its the caffeine. Sometimes I don't know how we humans manage any semblance of sanity - although possibly other peoples' minds are more tranquil than mine. I can move from utter peace to utter chaos in nano seconds, the good thing is that I have experienced serenity and peace so at least I know what I am looking for when I am running back and forth on the seesaw in my brain. Middle ground and balance. I pass through it on my way from one extreme to the other. It would be endlessly boring to be enlightened and continuously at peace. No drama and no NEED for drama; how would I write with all conflict smoothed from my soul? Is there heat without some deep core ambivalence to pose a question? If I ever find there is an answer once and for all do I cease to exist? Hell, I am not even sure there has ever been an I to question with, I can understand oubourous swallowing its tail! Time to have more tea!
has an odd charm. Once I put the station back onto automation, tidy away my scripts and CD's and wash the occasional coffee cup I am free to drive home through the dawn. The sun is at my back, reflecting shards of light off my side mirrors straight into my eyes and I drive along the highway and wonder where the people out running came from. Did they drive here and leave their cars in some convenient lay by or have they been running, jogging. power walking for hours taking them far far from home? I'll never know unless someone emails in the answer to my question. Of course I asked, how else will I find out? Although it is more romantic to picture them striving and lost in the sheer experience of running, so involved in that moment that they never noticed they strayed far from home.
That's how it is for me on good nights. Five plus hours pass between one breath and the next and the echoes of my midnight time check have not yet faded when I introduce the dawn. Last night was a good night, the music flowed and my words wove a magic story knitting all the elements
together. My hands wove back and forth across the pots and faders, clicked the decks and triggered the computer without a fumble. I am totally alone there from midnight till morning, the only other living beings, the cows out in the pasture behind the station chewing on their grassy cud. I sing along to songs and smile and tell my stories, create my scheharazade moments never even knowing if I am heard.
Well, I was fairly on the mark with my 'diagnosis'. Good cholesterol is high so my lipids rock; and they gave me a call back in a year so I guess they expect the patient to live. Oh and the tricuspids are leaking not the mitral valve. Nothing to worry about. I could have bought so many more books in NY if I hadn't had to pay for those tests! And i am going to skip the doppler thing on the leg to prove the swelling is caused by valvular insufficiency - I rather get me some deep lymph moving massage for a couple of weeks and some acupuncture. Cheaper and it will change things not prove things. Four massages and five acupuncture sessions for less than the cost of the test - a definite no brainer.
It is 8:20 now and I go on air at midnight (90.7 FM but i doubt anyone can get it outside of the caribbean) reviewing a couple of movies, my usual diatribe against bad drivers and foolish pedestrians, green living and the joys of internet connections perhaps! Certainly my usual piece on how not to conduct a relationship - all the mistakes I made in life are just another radio show! Woo hoo! Got to eat and get centered. Closing down the mental floodgates.
I still love New York! I think if I had not just signed up for my total dream job two months ago I might have have made the effort to stay. First of all I just had one of those perfect vacation weeks where time just flows without rushing and despite the fact that I was out every day, walked miles, and never stopped I feel refreshed and rested(!) and completely energized to be back. I managed to get all the new books published by my favorite authors -books weigh a lot en masse- and stocked up on classic rock and others hits for the '70's and '80's segments of my radio show. It was also pretty cool to run into people who haven't seen me in over two years and have them say OMG and rush to hug me. Oh, and I watched televison for the first time in about ten months and there still isn't much on. Although it was fun watching the finale of American Idol. In HD the 'overcome with emotion' at the end looked totally plastic - not a tear in sight (the eyes didn't even fill with tears that didn't overflow) despite all the posturing.
So now I am back in Barbados and need to catch up on the blogs and the forums (not this morning!) and slide back into my life here (which of course has continued quite successfully without me). Maybe I'll even unpack!
Okay, I have packed and unpacked twice - I'm going to shop I don't need to take a full suitcase. Posted my morning poem in the forums and checked out a couple of new threads, leaving my two cents behind on a couple. Sent out a couple of flowers because I figure if I like getting them so do other people even if it is just a hi how ya doin' flower. Just finished a 'proper breakfast' as they don't actualy feed you on planes any more. Sure you can buy a light meal but it is unhealthy and horrible tasting. Last flight I was on in April had run out of bottled water...
Jumping out of my skin with anticipation and I still need to do things like clear the fridge of perishables and take out the garbage.Did blogging help? Not this morning, just too much adrenaline!
bajanblue Blog (295)