my latest conversation with the DLLR began with

"I think this is a clerical error..."

And it was. it's a long story that isn't really worth telling. bureaucracy continues to be absurd. at least the arbiter of my case knew someone in his agency had neglected to do something, thus resulting in his need to telephone me at 10:30 on a Wednesday morning. i'm sure my hero kafka never dreamed the likes of that. or did he?

i am drinking a glass of Educated Guess, a 2006 Napa Valley Cabernet with a vanilla heart and a berry soul.

have not dreamed about michael in many days now, but the idea of him returned to me last night in R.E.M. sleep. It was something sensual and suggestive, I think. right before i went to bed, i followed a link to an audio youtube of recorded telephone conversations of his from 1992. they seemed authentic given the context and the pattern of dialogue. he was talking to a friend and so was completely candid about his desire to love and be loved--to have a real relationship with a woman. in the context of discussing his father, he dropped the *f bomb. that's pretty much where i fall in love if i'm going to.

God help me, but I love it when men say that word in just the right way...

understandably vague

i don't mean to create the illusion of drama when there is none. i'm accustomed to writing in couched terms because this blog was on the radar of a few people, at least at one time, that i worked with and discretion just made good sense.

so when i talk about being open to a change, wanting something different, and having a full heart, it's really just about vague yearnings and being tired from putting in a few long days last week. this is my blog, and i shouldn't self edit, but i'm hyper conscious of how i come across when i fixate on or revisit the same topics too many times.

i didn't want to write that mr. close encounters' book is being reviewed by a publisher and that he wrote to tell me how invaluable my contribution was to the process. he said more than that, but it all amounted to his gratitude for the work i put in. he has no guarantees at this point, but he's being given some real consideration. i've been impressed this whole time with his single-minded devotion to his work. he's more of a writer than i am.

i was too chicken to quit a job that wasn't working for me anymore, and now here i am again. working hard, making a contribution, but not one toward my own agenda. i am not jealous of mr. close encounters. i would want nothing less for him than for his book to be published. in truth, though, i felt something other than gladness for him, but i don't know how to say what that is. and i don't know if it's worth it. i don't know if it means anything--what i want or what i feel.

i am afraid because i need--really need--the job i have now. it is a lot of work and i don't know if the dividends will justify what it will take to do it well. i just hope that i have the courage to keep my ultimate goals at the forefront of my mind and keep fighting for them.

when i was editing Mr. Close Encounters' novel, I worked for hours, after clocking out for the day from my day job, to get it right. I wanted him to have something solid--a strong place to push toward. i'm not so pure of heart that i could completely divorce any hope i'd once had for being with him from that process, but i can say that the truth of what he wanted to convey would not allow that subplot to take over the main narrative.

i have had men tell me before how my invaluable my genius is to the foundation of what they want to do, and that has kept me hanging around longer than i should.

jobs. the hope of love in a hopeless situation. they're both crippling.

i saw myself already signing up to sell my soul to the company store (3 10-hour days last week) and felt my pulse threaten to quicken at the sight of a name in my inbox that i never see there telling me how crucial my efforts were.

and it just made me sad. because it doesn't change anything.

"have you ever wanted to dream about those things you've never known?"

my heart is very full tonight. it's been brimming with a lovely sadness and hope--with grief and with love. i had a spirited meal with friends, two of the funniest, most charming women i know, and i felt a lot like myself. each of us is very different from the others, but something magical happens when we all sit down to talk. we end up laughing hysterically, and something better about me emerges. someone funnier and more eager than i usually allow myself to be shows up.

i feel pretty overwhelmed at my job, and i'm compensating by showing up about 2 hours earlier than normal--just so i can address everything i need to with the benefit of no interruptions. i have every intention of doing well, but i feel crippled by the very real possibility of failure. it's a humbling situation. hard not to feel like i've gone backward. it's hard not to feel like some of my options have disappeared.

is this where i was supposed to be now? another birthday looms. i can see it from here, but what i don't see is how i'm supposed to get there.

why do i get myself all riled up with coffee and complex music before bedtime?

and why am i always just a little too far away from everything? it occurs to me that my days are the recurring dream of near misses and that my dreams must necessarily be my life. either way, a hot mess.

God, i'm going to need something different

i'm in a situation i don't like. and i'm open to a change.

New Old Music

It's payday in my world, so that meant a trip to iTunes. Music is the consistent, unfailing pleasure of my life, so it makes sense that the bulk of my "entertainment" consists of clicking "buy." In addition to Billie Holiday's 'Solitude,' I bought the Jackson 5 Stripped Mixes, which also includes stripped, bare bones versions of Michael's solo stuff from that era. I got a few other things, too. Pandora.com introduced me to K'Jon's lovely song "On the Ocean," which makes me happy and sad at once. For me, if a song is really good, that's typically the experience. When a song gets at the root of something true, for me, it is like returning to something and someone I was supposed to know.

 

The Little Prince

I just finished reading it again. it's been years since I last took it up, but I remember all the feverish urgency with which i first experienced it. i underlined, many moons ago, that whole passage about the Little Prince taming the fox. if this had been the first time i'd read it, i probably would have marked the parts about matters of great consequence, and the misassignment thereof.

i was so caught up in it yesterday morning that i nearly didn't get off at my lightrail stop. i am not the kind of girl who gets caught up and misses her stop.

i did not have my hair appointment last week. my stylist wrote me down for the wrong day, and so still wasn't there when i gave up and left an hour after i arrived. i rescheduled for this coming saturday morning.

for now, though, butter pecan ice cream before dinner...

Regularly Scheduled Programming

it's 9:48 on a Thursday night and I find that I am exhausted. the normal wear and tear of the work week, getting up early, and barely stopping as the day trots on brings a sort of beautiful coping. putting out fires and quelling people's over reactions, ordering chinese food b/c there just hasn't been any time to grocery shop. hoping for the best, pondering my first real hair appointment in months. finally listening to something else on my ipod besides the only music i've wanted to hear for 2.5 weeks, and it felt almost normal.

i've reengaged the mundane facts of my own life. it's still true that i have no romantic prospects. it's frightening because i care less and less and less about that, it seems. i tried to have a little crush on this guy at work, then realized that was stupid, and so gave it up before it was anything. i'm okay. things are good. i'm a little cash strapped and feeling uneasy about that, but things are ebbing and flowing as they should.

it's 9:54. i think i'll shut my eyes and see what i can't scheme up in my sleep.

Farewell, Lost Boy

Soon The Baltimore Chronicles will return to its regularly scheduled programming--me, writing about my life in dribs and drabs of mundane revelation. I am not deluded. This blog is a vanity project more than anything else and only went through a brief period of being interesting when i was unemployed, but hasn't had the benefit of a mission since i started working again.

until now. and if my readership stats are anything to go by, i see that this point of interest is mine alone. very well then, one more (at least) indulgent post about Michael Jackson it is.

when i was about 14 years old, after the intense pre-pubescent crush i'd had on Michael Jackson had waned, i fell in love with someone else. I read J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and felt true wonderment. I underlined and reunderlined the effortlessly true prose. Something hidden had been revealed. i was still young enough to hope for magic wherever i could find it, and this book transported the ever grounded, bookish me to some place that didn't exist anywhere, and was all the more real for it. Peter reminded me of every spritely boy i'd ever daydreamed about. i was always one to pine for boys with winged feet, who were also deeply broken, insightful, and sad. Like Wendy, i wanted to dole out my medicine and make them all better. i loved that wildness in them, but wanted them to want to stand still, just for a second, just for me.

but when perpetual movement is your lifeforce, when it is the thing that transports you, being still is tantamount to death. when you are doing exactly what you should be doing, what you were born to do, you cannot help but be beautiful and beyond everything.

when i look at Michael's body in motion, it is clear that he was doing what he was supposed to do, and it was a privilege to watch him and to feel transported by it. i loved the yearning sadness i could always hear in his voice (even on fast songs), but when coupled with his dancing, well, let's just say i understand why it made some people cry.

Michael, i will miss you so much. I got to know you through your experience of the music. You were the music. It was you. Farewell, Lost Boy and Wild Thing. I hope you are finally where you know someone loves you best of all.

"One Day In Your Life"

last night, Sarah picked me up so we could go out for crab cakes, and we took a sing along tour through "Off The Wall" on our way to the restaurant. Then we drove around, north of the city proper, and listened to all of "Thriller." The music, still so good after all this time, left my heart soaring and my mind blown, much as it did when i was 10 years old, first hearing those strains, chords, and the dazzling yearning in his voice.

it's been years since Michael Jackson has taken up this much space in my head. i dream about him most nights now, and in those dreams we (he and i) are usually trying to solve a mystery--the mystery of where he's gone off to. or sometimes i am simply trying to protect him from something abstract, yet menacing.

my sadness is strange. it is persistent, but not crippling. i have hours upon hours of reprieve, where it's not the first thing on my mind. then a wave of disbelief hits and it's all i can think about. and i want to talk about him. i want to keep remembering him. i wish he knew just how much i'm thinking about him.

i feel guilty, in some ways, because i really had to compartmentalize my thoughts about this beautiful genius of a guy for the last 15 years, at least. i could not reconcile the person i so naively believed i would marry when i was little with the person he seemed to want to become. i wanted the best for him and sometimes felt angry with him, when i allowed myself to acknowledge any feeling about it at all, that he couldn't do what he needed to do to correct the worst perceptions of him. because perception, not truth, is reality.

Michael, for so many people, is like a dearly loved relative that we could never give up on no matter how much our belief that everything could still be fine was tested. i know i allowed myself to be swayed by the portrayal of him--on some level. i tried to protect myself from that influence, but it crept in. when Chris Rock said he was "done" with Michael, I knew what he meant. but you can only be that frustrated with someone you love so much.

so i've gone back to the music--all the way back to "I Want You Back," and have made the exciting, momentous trek to "Billie Jean," and then I went past the pinnacle to the lovely hits of later years, including those lilting, soulful ballads on "Invincible," his least commercially successful treatise. I revisited "Bad," an album I just didn't connect with, or so I thought. Everything after "Thriller" sort of ran together for me, but when I, with love and sadness, went back to it, realized that I loved so many of those songs. I had failed to remember.

for a little while.

A song he sang as a young man was prescient:

One day in your life
You'll remember the love you found here
You'll remember me somehow
Though you don't need me now
I will stay in your heart
And when things fall apart
You'll remember one day...