I took this image at Ocean Beach a few summers ago. I was playing with the macro settings on my S70 so it’s fitting that it would inspire a macro memory of summer.

Their song “The Carnival is Over” is particularly mesmerizing for my spirit.

Here are the lyrics:

Outside
The storm clouds gathering
Move silently along the dusty boulevard

Where flowers turn and crane their fragile necks
So they can in turn
Reach up and kiss the sky

They’re driven by a strange desire
Unseen by the human eye

Someone’s calling

I remember when you held my hand
In the park we would play when the circus came to town
Over here

Outside
The circus gathering
Moved silently along the rainswept boulevard
The procession moves on, the shouting is over,
The fabulous freaks are leaving town

They are driven by a strange desire
Unseen by the human eye

Someone’s calling

The carnival is over

We sat and watched
As the moon rose
For the very first time

Anywho, because of the glass door, with sheer curtain, it was easy for me to hear what was going on in the living room after I went to bed. One night, after falling asleep, I awoke to hear the most beautiful music playing. It was delicate, intricate piano sounds and I had to investigate. I got up and looked out my door into the living room where the sound system lived.

There was my mom, sitting on her knees in front of the tape deck. I had a moment of trepidation that she’d scold me for being out of bed but the music was just so gorgeous that I had to go sit with her. And I did just that. I kneeled next to her and just listened. She didn’t send me back to bed, but I think the music lulled me back to sleep because I don’t remember anything after sitting & closing my eyes.

The music was George Winston‘s album December that my aunt had copied onto cassette, TYPED UP THE CASSETTE COVER (with a typewriter!) (I know – so awesome) & sent to my mom for the holidays.

Here’s a quote about the album that I found out there on the interwebs:

The mother of all solo instrumental albums, and with good reason. Mixing traditional carols with Pachelbel’s Canon and a few originals, Winston produces a solo piano album of unparalleled — and undeniable — beauty. How can music be simultaneously stirring and soothing, relaxed yet exalted?

That album and Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Original Sound Track Recording Of The CBS Television Special are all I need to stir up holiday season nostalgia – even if it is against my atheistic heart’s wishes!

I can’t remember why it came up tonight but we realized it’s a medley of two songs from the 80s that use “rock” in the chorus so off to YouTube I went to find them.

First, I found Solid – a fun song and a cute vid. Dude’s got some serious style but his stylist on the video shoot should have untucked his jacket…

Then I found the gold: The Whispers: Rock Steady.

If you don’t have five minutes to spend with your speakers on, come back when you do. I’ll wait.

Okay.

Ready?

I need to make a time stamp list of awesomeness (if you click on the video to go to the youtube page, there should be a comment by addycat777 [aka me] with the time stamps as links if you want to save yourself a little effort – however, not all of these are there and I got the numbers wrong and youtube wouldn’t let me edit or repost – argh!):

1. 0:37 – favorite dance move with the appendicular body

2. 0:59 – love the bearded back up singer/dancer (his beard looks glued on)
Watch for more of him cuz his moves are hot. (I’ll spare you additional time stamps about him)

3. 1:26 – hey! where did those dancers come from?

4. 1:36 – “doin’ the snake. mmm…maybe not…”

5. 1:44 – his “jazz square” pirouette reminds me of my jazz dance class when I was 9. We listened to this song during our warm up, which included jazz squares with our feet and hips.

6. 1:57 – enter freight elevator. that must be on what the crowd comes to populate this underground funk party.

7. 2:31-2:34 – I WILL learn this dance move and show you at the next party.

8. 2:48 – is that a tour jete I see in the background?? Justin did a couple of those for me on my birthday. He’s really good at it, very graceful and always has pointed toes (even in cycling shoes!).

9. 3:22 – after more freight elevator and a moment without the crowd, they’re in their party suits.

10. 3:32 – dude with the sunglasses and half-fro is really feelin’ it

11. 3:55 – can’t quite figure out why they went back to the other, “not party” suits…

12. 4:06 – looks like they can’t either!

13. 4:33 – I know they used the “not party” suit footage here because of this sick move. it’s spontaneous – not to be replicated – magic, caught on film.

This song makes me happy. Although, after trying to get all of those time stamps just right, I need to avoid it for a little while… but this video I could watch without sound, over and over while practicing all of those moves. Soon, I too will be able to dance like Barack Obama.

it was the first, and, I pray, not the last, time i’ve ever ingested anything almost a century old and i could taste the history.

it was smooth and wonderful and perfect, in every way.

now i want to know where that bottle started and how it travelled to end up filling my glass, twice, in 97 years. ahh, reverie.

update: according to wiki madeira’s are the longest lasting wines. next on the list is one made in 1834!

.:my mom keeps telling her friends that they can’t trust me anymore and then she giggles. fun little jokester former hippy mom. i don’t think she trusted me much when I was 15.
.:i still like birthday cake AND cookies on my birthday.
.:shiny red flats and a black and white dress were my birthday dinner garb – not much has changed since I made a vow at 15 to put in my will that my funeral would be “a party on Big Sandy Beach (or Singing Sands – depending on who you talk to) where everyone had to wear only black, white and/or red and they could only bring balloons and that they all had to dance rather than cry” – I still agree with that sentiment and still have no will, nor valuables to put into a will. my cds always go to someone at least 10 years younger than me. yes, I still buy cds.
.:This Night Has Opened My Eyes is still my most favorite Smiths song ever. I still listen to it over and over in one sitting – just not as often as when I was 15.
.:When i was 15 and told someone something that was personal, it never was very personal and I was always a bit hyper about his/her reaction. Now, I still get sad when I share something I feel to be emotionally exposing and I either get no response at all or get a response that seems to come from a place of not understanding what I was saying. The latter is easier for me to deal with than the former because at least I feel that it’s okay to keep talking about it. The former happened recently, twice, with the same person, and it’s really made me sad but I’m must more okay with it than I would have been at 15. The latter happened over and over with the same person and it left me feeling a need for space, and I asked for it. I wouldn’t have been able to do it like that when I was 15.
.:i don’t drink as much now as I did when I was 15. And when I drink wine now, it’s almost always out of a glass, and not the bottle, unlike 15 years ago when I spilled pink paul masson wine down both sides of my face, while laughing, and not choking, and trying to chug it so I could get drunk.
.:i’m much more balanced when i’m stoned. I still get a little too chatty and sometimes talk out my ass, but I have more of a rein on the runaway thought/babble patterns.
.:I’m softer now.
.:My smile is twice as big and twenty gazillion times more sincere.
.:My eyebrows look ridiculously better now that I’ve learned the art of eyebrow shaping.
.:Feelings are allowed to exist inside me now.
.:Swearing is not nearly as common these days as it was back then – I was so angry at 15.
.:My hair’s basically the same. I like my curls and they’re good at telling me how to make them look.
.:I feel much less of a need to talk about my beliefs now than I did then. PHEW!

I did
and already had been

I cried the first time I saw her in concert
I mean
I was in the same freaking room with her
it was overwhelming

and kinda silly

now even when I hear her song jump or how high
(new ones that don’t have much emotion attached to them
yet)
I get choked up

even looking at her pics
gives me a bit of emotional stir

I don’t want to meet her anymore
it seems that the magic could be ruined if that happened

well, maybe I do

but I want to not want to meet her anymore

I want to keep the idolatry in it’s place
keep the pedestal in the gallery
and keep the dreaming free

a simple appreciation for life
just the way it is

*

losing friends
making new ones
simultaneously opposing feelings
tho one hurts more than one feels good

essentially, the game is to simply let the felt experience happen

*

entering a new sphere of influence
shedding that which is no longer needed
discovering new realms within which
to coexist
and function

*

jasmine and rose
remember my heart for me

blister on my toe
remind me to heel

tension in my shoulders
your job here is done

bliss in my heart
have a cup of flowers and stay a while

I walked out with a flatter wallet and three new CDs

Madonna (of course) – Like a Virgin (now I finally own the CD…my mom has my vinyl somewhere, I think/hope)
Heart – Heart (same as above re: vinyl)
Tears for Fears – Songs from the Big Chair

Yay, now I can sing along to three more cds.

[heavy bit]
1b. I used to sing the TFF song “Shout” (I think you might know it) when I was like, uh, 8 or something, when that song was popular originally, to my dad and I’d yell the part “I’d really love to break your heart.”
Sigh.
Perhaps I knew he’d break mine later…
[/heavy bit]

2. was a grumplesaurus on Monday (I had to go to work – no, not to work, but to keep from having to use a vacation day to not work) and when the “going to a movie double feature where the second movie is free” plan didn’t pan out, I continued decoupaging tea tags to my tea tin while singing along as loud as I could to Fiona Apple’s Tidal and I slowly became perky – especially when I realized that I was finished my tea tin (the decoupaging part – now I have to find toy truck wheels to attach to the bottom).

3. when I was in college, it was non-traditional. I got graded on how long I could sit up and then hop with my legs in (half) lotus during an 1.5 hour meditation session, twice a day, in a large, gold, domed building with a cement floor covered in foam mattresses coverd in white sheets. I also got graded on how well/often I put a particular man’s philosophy into my school work (the more, the higher the grade, the more likely you were to get an award upon graduation – unlike me). When I got overwhelmed by all of it, I would either listen to Soundgarden Superunknown or Peter Gabriel’s Passion depending on the vibe of the overwhelm.
One of the wonderful benefits of my strange university experience was the regular doses of live Ghandarva Ved music concerts that would happen in one of those foamy, sheety domy buildings [read: lying down to float away to never never land because of the dreamyness of the music.] I think they happened once a month and were free.

4. SIGH.

1. my dad’s house (see previous post for more details) which he says he only built for me.

2. where my best friends, Heather and Sadhana, lived. I’ve been friends with them since day one of this incarnation. They’re 11 months older than me and their parents were best friends with mine so my idea is my mom met them and said to my dad “lets have a baby too” and two months of trying later, viola, here comes me!

3. our friend Melissa’s house. She came along later. I was jealous of her for a while because I didn’t go to the island for a few summers (parental politics) and that’s when H & S became friends with her. I got over it eventually and we all had wonderful times walking around the island, in the middle of the street, of course, all night, drunk, and peeing outside, in the middle of the street, of course.

4. the cove where my dad anchored his boat and where he kept the canoe he used to get out to his boat. It wasn’t a great place to hang out unless we were getting into the boat but at high tide it was a wonderful place to look for rocks and shells.

5. This is NEW HILL – the best downhill biking EVER, EVER, EVER!!! The hill terminated, as you can see, just in front of a cove, so there was an abrupt turn – probably 85 degrees, so the adrenalyn would get pumping to make the turn without crashing at full speed. The goal was always to try to make it down the hill without using any breaks. i think I achieved that once or twice (I’m a chicken but I have scars on my knees from falling off my bike a few turns later because I went to fast while turning on sand! dammit!)

6. Big Sandy Beach – my favorite beach ever – the sand squeeks when you walk across it – my dad says it’s because aliens landed in the water next to it and charged it up. They also call it Singing Sands Beach. My dad would take us there in his truck – we’d stand in the back and jump out without him even having to stop.This is where the teenagers would have bonfires and drink at night. During the day there would be a volleyball net set up by our friend Seth who is sadly no longer in his body. He was always so happy and fun to be around… but that’s another story.

7. Down Front – where the ferry boat would drop off and pick up. Also where the one grocery shop was and the bar, The Spa (pronounced “Spar”) which was also the only restaurant, which was connected to the post office. Edgar was the man who ran the little grocery store with the cement floor that always had sand on it in the summer that would feel so fun on our bare feet. We’d get half a popsicle – leave the other half for someone else – and put the charge on the family charge account. Once when we were at Big Sandy a lightening storm started in the blink of an eye – everyone left the beach to avoid electrocution and headed to Edgar’s (a whole mile away) and the road was steaming and we were rain soaked. H, S and I “took showers” under the rainspout that poure down hot rain from the roof of his store. The rain stopped and we all went back to the beach to pick up where we left off.