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...

I guess I shouldn't be surprised

that Michael Jackson is being retried in the media, though the only new thing that has occurred is his death. he was tried for crimes and acquitted while he was alive, and now he's dead. dead. and it's being dredged back up as though these matters are necessarily relevant again. everyone who used to know him, knew someone who knew him, or who had an impression of him based on their observations of him from film or hearsay has a statement to make.

it is not that i thought he was above suspicion when he was alive. i didn't think he was guilty, incidentally, but i thought poor judgment on his part and perilous naivete meant the claims had to be investigated in accordance with due diligence. but, as far as any legal or civil matters related to these things are concerned, the case is closed.

i'll say it plainly. what does it matter now if he was addicted to prescription drugs? barring that live-in doctor having killed him in his sleep, the only point now is that he's gone. and if you didn't care about him one way or the other, it's just a fact to you. and if you thought he did the things he was accused of, and so believe the hoopla is unmerited or grossly misplaced, it still comes down to the fact that he was tried and found not guilty on 14 counts of misconduct--including all the lesser charges. and if, like me, he and his music meant something to you, the fact that he is gone is hard enough without this regurgitated footage of the ambulance.

i don't need to hear from a sanctimonious, hard-nosed "financial journalist" about how dire his money situation was--a fact that is hotly disputed anyway.

i'm all good with the retrospectives that show a timeline of his career--in fact, i want more of those. please. i'm okay with clips and soundbites related to his plans to come back. i'm even okay with joe jackson proving to be the ass he's long been accused of being in the wake of the death of his superstar, i mean son.

Michael Jackson's sphere of influence was tremendous, and as a human being, he was writ large.
and this was first apparent to anyone who was paying attention when he was a child--that Motown 25 performance simply clenched the hell out of a truth many people had apprehended years earlier.

i get why it's important to know whether there was a valid will, and of hearing, once the verdicts have been rendered, who the children will live with. but the actual parentage of the kids? the speculations about what drugs he took to numb his pain? waxing punditiffic about his increasingly white face? this is not needed. but it sure is a ratings bonanza.

i confess to watching--else how could i be so frustrated? the thing is, i'm just hoping for glimpses of recognition, i want to hear from the people who really loved him and respected him, and who are mourning like i am. i want to take comfort in the kindness of their remembrances and in the conviction of their belief in his kindness without having to sift through this rubbish.

i loved what i saw and intuited about him through his music for so long. i think that loving and appreciating his music was probably the purest association a person could have with him, and the truest impression of who he actually was. also, the music was public, and what was put forth for critical consideration. just leave it at that, and while those who admired him are still mourning, if you don't have anything nice to say, just be quiet.

'dear michael...'

she wrote 'dear michael, you'll probably never get this letter, michael'
'i wrote you a hundred times before
knowing how i feel, i'll write a hundred more...'

'dear michael, every time your record's on, michael
i close my eyes and sing along dreaming you're singing
to me.'

and then she wrote,'michael, i love you
i've held the tears back long as i can
i'm sealing my feelings in this envelope
cause i wanna be more than just your number one fan.'

i'm gonna answer your letter
i'll start beginning with the ABCs of loving you
your letter really touched my heart
i've been dreaming of meeting the picture
that you sent along, signed with all your love

i'm gonna write you back.
ooh, i promise you that.
girl, i think i love you.

hurry, hurry mister postman
take my letter, tell her i love her
hurry, hurry mister postman
take my letter, tell her i love her

yeah, i'm gonna write you back
i promise you that

(by h. davis and e. willenski)

Father's Day

my father died not quite three years ago, but none of us--not my sisters, my mother (from whom he was divorced), nor I--had ever visited his grave site. He is buried more than an hour away from where my mom lives, but more than that, it was never part of my family's culture to visit the granite and earthen homes of departed loved ones. even though i firmly believe the spirit departs the body soon after death, i always experience such anguish when everyone walks away from the funeral, and only the coffin remains, waiting to be placed into the ground.

when we walked away from my father, on a soggy October Sunday, I kept looking back over my shoulder at his box. My mother, through her tears, said "we're just leaving him out in the rain. we can't leave him there like that..." the fine drops lightly tapped the outside of the mahogany wood.

I couldn't help but think of him on another rainy morning. my middle sister graduated on a cold day in May in Vermont about a year and a half earlier. for reasons that had nothing to do with my dad, i was supremely irritated and stressed out. i short-sightedly and petulantly refused to be in any of the photos. the rain that day had chilled me to the deepest part of my bones, and i holed up in the hotel room and slept instead of going out to lunch with my dad and his father and my sisters.

the next time i would see my father was at his mother's funeral, on his birthday, one month before he died.

so, we all wanted to go and visit with him yesterday, to hug that cold stone that will have to suffice, and to lay yellow roses tinged with orange around the petals' rims and mixed gerberas and other spriggy like things on the dirt. there was no flower stand for his marker, so it looks as though we pelted him for a pageant.

"Happy Father's Day, Dad," I said. "We're all here."

my response

i've stopped taking anything i value with me to work, my cell phone being the one exception. other than my monthly transit pass, the negligible amount of cash i keep (most of the time, none), whatever book i'm reading, and my lunch, there's no jackpot (unless a thief is really fiending for a can of Progresso Best Life soup).

in fact, i bought two pairs of Dansko clogs so that i don't have to deal with wearing one pair of shoes to walk in and carrying another to wear at the office. those clogs can be dressed up or down, so that's that. no more being a sitting target on the lightrail. if anyone steals my stuff, it's stuff i can live with having stolen.

the next measure? perhaps a portable, easily concealed taser. i have a feeling i would enjoy letting a miscreant feel the jolt. seriously, though. we need a little 'Citizens On Patrol' action on the streets. Vigilante justice has its place.

at it again

baltimore city is up to its old tricks again. scandal at city hall (perpetual) and on the school board/in the school system with the near hire of a financial train wreck/borderline sheister, and rampant, often motiveless crimes perpetrated by staggeringly cruel teens en masse.

on the light rail ride home on friday i heard an announcement. "Ladies and Gentlemen, if you have iPods or cell phones, please be careful. We have had people get their iPods and phones stolen on the light rail trains."

Be careful. "How careful can I be exactly, outside of not owning these things?" I wondered. Furthermore, Why are we receiving a useless announcement to be careful when someone or some group of people is emoldened enough to yank cell phones and mp3 players on public transportation instead of there being armed cops on every train car?

Oh, I forgot. Because police presence has only been beefed up at the Inner Harbor in the tourist trap. Meanwhile, I cannot walk around in my neighborhood where I once felt safe, because gangs of teens are rolling up on residents, throwing bricks, beating them within an inch of consciousness. These, so far, have not been robberies. Just mean-spiritedness. Low-grade terrorism just because they can. Kind of like the poor excuses for human beings who burned that defenseless dog.

come on, Baltimore. it's time to get medieval.

i know i should be making a carrot banana smoothie, but...

i wanted to check in here, first. things are brewing at The Baltimore Chronicles (and steeping, too!). i am in the collaboration and idea-sharing stage for my Web site, which will launch in about two months. No slapped together endeavor this. the current stage involves securing photo permissions, staging photos myself, if necessary, Excel spreadsheets that track my progress, which I'm suddenly in love with, and writing new pieces in some cases...

such as "Who is Kate Krupnik and What Has She Done With Salimah Perkins?"

other than this, what can i say? the dog was hellacious on her walk (typical) and i set an appointment to have my full digital cable package restored. Mad Men starts again this summer, and I don't want to miss it!

Live, From My Balcony

C and i took a trip to Home Depot this afternoon to procure a set of plastic patio chairs (in the Adirondack style). we also got two matching drink tables, a frondy yucca tree, and another tropical beauty, whose genus and spelling i forget.

yesterday, at Home Goods with Sarah I picked up a box of bamboo string lights to drape around the railing. i thought, fleetingly, that i should get more than one box, but scrapped the idea. as it turns out, we will need at least two more strands, but the one that is up warms up our little space magnificently. last summer this street-facing patio was largely ignored, but with just an hour at a hardware store and a few light touches, it's become THE place to be in our pad.

now, out here we sit, above the din of sirens, our charming city warm and thriving below us.

Mingering Mike

As a recent facebook quiz attests, I am in fact an aging scenester. woefully out of touch and behind the times, but in denial. In any case, I discovered something that delights my sensibilities in the bargain bin at Borders last Saturday. I wasn't quite sure what it was, at first. What was abundantly clear is that it was a dollar. For a dollar, I could afford to buy it now and figure out what I'd purchased later.

I assumed that it was equal parts graphic novel and experimental fiction. well, the truth is stranger than. what i love about this, is how very meta it is.

Life Sentences

I like Laura Lippman's work so much that I bought her latest and very recent book Life Sentences in hard cover. Though I have read, in a manner of speaking, many of her books, this is the only one I own. In fact, it's the only one I've ever held in my hands, whose spine I've cracked open.

I have been in the habit, over the last several years, of listening to novels. The 8- to 9-hour workday is prime recreational reading real estate. my work, being the work of words, allowed me to collapse my professional and personal lives. not always effectively, perhaps, but in any case, the practice allowed me the great treasure of Tess Monaghan and Laura Lippman's Baltimore, which is simultaneously Baltimore as I see and love it, and as I wish I really understood it, experientially. After first coming here 10 years ago and realizing that no place else had ever felt like home like this feels like home, I see that I still intuit this town more than anything else.

Lippman's narratives bear out my intuition--her love for this city, cloaked in fiction and literary personae, is apparent. And I find that as irresistable as her generous prose. Her craft is evident in the effortless way the text spirits me along. The lynchpins and hinges are so effective that you take them for granted without having to be preoccupied with any obvious, self-conscious hand-tipping about them mucking up a perfectly good story.

Life Sentences takes on the much-discussed issue of memoir--and the lines it crosses intentionally and unintentionally, the fallibility of memory. That resonates in her protagonist's name. Cassandra Fallows--a would-be prophetess mining her own life for truth.

The novel is remarkable, in my estimation, for taking on another issue that's seething beneath the surface again--the ongoing tension between white and black women's narratives--and how they often undermine each other, intentionally and unintentionally. It's one of her stand alone narratives, as the unparalleled What the Dead Know is. That book haunted me for weeks. I do not know of its contemporary equivalent when it comes to characterization or air-tight plot construction.

Now I'm waiting for the treatise on the often-misunderstood Gloria Bustamante. Life Sentences sets her up nicely for her own full-length feature. How about it, Laura?

Acai Berry Juice & Other Stuff

is now a mainstay in my house. My sister and i have been on a "get right," as she calls it. I'm feeling better, in general, am exercising a lot more, and am being cognizant of my forgotten friends--fruits and vegetables.

i skipped the gym this morning because my right hip is bothering me--something that tends to happen when i first start a fitness regimen. i'm going to go tonight, though, and focus on upper body lifting.

the beauty of my 24-hour fitness facility is that it's right near my house, so i'm much more inclined to go... whenever. a couple of years ago, when i belonged to a gym that was very close to my job, i found that my unerring, unflagging motivation made me willing to get up insanely early to work out before clocking in and on weekends, but that's not where i am now. and there's no gym near my new job, anyway.

the new job is going well. i'm trying to ask good questions, stay out of trouble, keep my expectations insanely low, and be engaged while staying detached. i wanted to keep the little workspace i have relatively free of anything personal, but i did cave and take in a scent infuser (vanilla, of course), a box of Kleenex, and some lotion (i apply it like crazy during the day because i cannot stand hands that feel dry after i wash them). the idea is still to be able to grab up everything on a moment's notice if they ever ask me to get the hell out--or, if i decide, on a moment's notice that i'm done.

i guess it's a kind of post-layoff ptsd.