respoooosiobiloioto

This blog was originally posted to The Dresden Dolls Diary.

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this is what i started the other night, it was thursday i think:

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as i sat down to write this new blog, i broke another wine glass.

this time it didn’t slice my finger off but rather collided face-on with my laptop.

how did this happen, you ask? well, i was sort of holding both, idiotically, in order to … now i can’t even remember what. i wasnt even drinking….the wine glass was left-over from the night before….i was tossing the dregs of it in the sink, and the computer? i think i was moving from one place to another. the screen sustained minor injuries and my floor probably has some hints of shrapnel embedded amongst its inhabitants (note to self: don’t walk around barefoot until you vacuum….or better: just dont walk around barefoot, at least until the glass has ground itself into the carpet and floorboards, THEN walk around barefoot is OK). but it’s a greater symbol. i have been a complete flake lately.

i’ve missed interviews, forgotten dates, locked my keys in my car, forgot to show up for my second day of jury duty (i ALMOST got the rape case on day one but was dismissed on account of being “bohemian”….no shit….i went up and was questioned by the judge and lawyers of the case and then had to stand aside while i heard mumblings of “mrmrmrmmmm bmbmmrmmbohemianmmrmrmmrmmmrmgrmgrhrgggbohemian?mrmrmrmrhhm hhmhmrh mbrbmbrboHEmian,mmrm rmrmrrrr……juror dismissed” WHO fucking uses that word anymore? i loved it) and have sliced my hand, fucked my finger, whatEVS, the list goes on.

what is happening? i think i’m giving myself too much freedom, i mean, i’m rushing around so joyously enjoying my freedom that i forget there’s also respoooosiobiloioto

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that was not a typo.

that was my keyboard dying a liquid death.

i should have known. why did i leave my delicate electronics ON when i should have shut the bitch down, turned it over, hit it with the hairdryer, chanted, done a rain dance?

why? because i’m a fucking post-modern addict and i felt the need to blog about my misfortune instead of handling it like a sane person. wait. not sane. there’s got to be a better word. responsible??

was god laughing at me by making my keyboard die exactly t the time i was typing out that fucking word? for fuck’s sake.

anyway, things went from worse to worser. i drove cloud one into a curb and blew the tire within 25 hours of destroying the mac. miss glenna and i waited in the car for two hours for triple A to show up and two me back to the cloud club…it was late late, we’d been dancing, drinking, screaming, yelling, laughing….i had thought i was ok to drive. was i? was i not? was it just the excitement of the night? was i sober…yet special?? i must have been out of my mind. i’ll never know. i’ve been pushing the limits over the past few months, always managing to stay within the scary grey area of not drunk but fuzzy enough that you question your own questioning and then turn round and question that. its not something you ever want to discuss, i fear even discussing it here….because admitting that i may have been too drunk (notice the qualifier) to drive feels like a black mark that land on my head like a 276 pound guilty weight, i can feel my mother’s email right now. better to face up to it, better to admit it. i have a breathalizer coming and i will be keeping it in the glovebox. i am not into taking risks, not these kind. no fucking way.

i offered glenna an apology in the morning. we had loved the tow-truck driver. an experience, we agreed, not to be rgeretted. sxip and the luminescent orchestrii (www.lumii.org) who had provided the soundtrack for the dancing all came out to breakfast with me and glenna, becca and max. we feasted. back at my house, i played them the song i’d finally finished after months of putting off. i’ll try to debut it on wednesday at joe’s pub. it hurts to play, its a pounder, i’m proud of it. i knew it was good when sxip winced and whispered “oh my god” during the last verse. maybe it was “oh jesus”. either way, it was all i needed.

it’s called Guitar Hero.

it was max’s birthday, so we went to the gardner museum and sat around, looking at the beauty and talking about life. that’s the perfect day. and then later a movie too.

but my head kept nagging, the tire was another nail in the coffin. why am i so distracted, amanda amanda amadna, why am i moving so fast? i went to yoga yesterday and upon leaving almost pulled straight into a truck. punch drunk on my own freedom, moving so fast to fit in my life that i’ve missed so dearly, my self that i’ve missed so much…..and i’ve just scheduled myself to the teeth for the next 4 months, so i’m not even that free. maybe that’s whats killing me. i don’t know.

i am taking the time, real time, to slow down soon. part of me doesn’t want to. im going on a 8-day intensive yoga retreat at the end of february. no phone, no computer, no shit. may is earmarked for a month, also without accouterments, in bordeaux france where i’ve landed a sweet-ass apartment for free through the city’s arts council. i imagine myself eating croissants and finishing a book every other day and occasionally practicing a chopin prelude while my friend jean-francoise lights a hangover cigarette from his spot in the bathtub.
“amONdah, what eeees thees thing we are calling LIFE”
and i answer
“jean-francoise, do not ash in the toilet, i get you an ashtray”

i am starting to worry that i am fucking up because i can pay for it.
has this happened to anybody? i’m not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but i’m not scarping my rent together anymore and i don’t sweat getting parking tickets like i used to. as soon as i was able to not sweat a parking ticket, i found myself lazier in racing back there to feed the meter. what the fuck, i think. it’s fifteen dollars and probably not going to happen. fuck it. these choices can make life dangerous. i can fix the tire. i have the money. i can fix the computer. but not everything is fixable by far. with money or not. do the rich, the truly rich, live carelessly? if so, have i not noticed? i think it’s a personality thing.

i know that a large part of me is just distracted by the pain of huge change. i’m used to seeing brian viglione the drummer every day, have been for years…..i’m used to being part of a whole no matter how unwholesome, and the void hurts. i dont talk much about our relationship here (against the moral code of blogging) but it’s no mystery that its a long and deep and complicated one. the play was a brutally painful way to end things, for me at least, with so much weirdness in the air. blah blah blah, we need our space, i know how it goes, time will heal most wounds. we went on too long, way longer than we should have, about a year or two longer than we should have. i voted for a break before the last record and got vetoed. brian tried to veto the play and i strong-armed him into it. we kept at it. maybe we shouldn’t have. maybe it would have changed things. maybe it wouldn’t have changed dick. we were running on tired and toxic fumes for the past year. who knows. nobody’s asking any questions and so nobody’s thinking much about answers. still, i must remind myself that nobody will ever care about our relationaship as much as us. weird as it seems. i watched the raw footage for the roundhouse DVD tonight and it seems like a relic from years ago….we were trying, trying, trying so hard.

i am putting all of my solo songs from the last many years together for pre-production on a new record. i laid them all around me in a pile on the kitchen floor until it was covered. i was happy with what i saw. norah jones it will not be. commercially viable,,,,well, no. probably not. no way. more like a travelogue in music of the past 5 or 6 years. all the intimate, long, commercially-unviable, this-one-is-way-too-long/slow/whatever-to-go-on-the-record. my own choices, how overwhelming and frightening and beautiful and scary. any blame and glee will be mine all mine to put on myself. i cant wait to begin, i can’t wait to hear the sound of the piano coming through my headphones and to know that it’s my voice in there, my notes, the sound i can make, as ugly and beautiful as it wants to be, with nobody to answer to but myself.

lee put a bell above the stairwell leading up to the top floor. a bell on a string at head-height. if you’re not paying attention, you walk straight into it and smack your head on the thing. and it rings, oh it rings. lee calls it ” the consciousness bell: a friendly reminder to stay awake and aware”. i call it “the masochist bell: an evil reminder that we deliberately put shit in our own way.” we joke. but it’s all too fitting. we do these things to ourselves, we build up more and more levels. when do you decide that something is there as a god-sent reminder to stay present and patient and when do you see it as something caustic that just brings you anguish? it’s like tying a red string to your finger to remind you to take the trash out….and you sit there admiring its pretty color and texture as the fucking truck pulls away.

like the old man on the porch with his dog sitting next to him, yelping in pain.
“why’s he cryin’?” asks a neighbor passing by.
“sat on a nail” answers the man.
“why don’t he get up?” asks the neighbor.
“don’t hurt enough yet” shrugs the man.

i was thinking about the party metaphor from the last blog. and about what bands in general go through. a party, a scene, a band, nobody wants to be a member of a club thats huge and non-exclusive. wait, i take that back, lots of people do. thats why we have sports. sports sort of represent the opposite. but the downtrodden, the self artists and misanthropes, the thinkers, the hopeless romantics, they all want to find a smaller elite. i remember being shocked when people started posting things to our board about liking the band more before we got big. we got big? when did that happen? why didn’t i get the memo? people may adore you until you hit the mainstream and then you’re just as useful as the red sox, a team taht anyone can love and so the bond formed over a beer and love of something in common becomes about as meaningful as a love of…i don’t know, beer. or food. or air.

however, song on radio is one thing and reading paragraphs of the written word is another. maybe why this blog works, why i continue to feel so connected to all of you reading it. it doesnt take as much effort to hear a song on the radio and like it. it does take some degree of effort to sit your ass down and read this far into a bunch of word typed out by a maniacal songwriter who is a self-admitted mess (but aren’t we all?) a perpetually recovering narcissist, a serial epiphinast. you can only relate to me because i can relate to you. every comment that i read back proves me righter and righter. i know i’m not talking into a vacuum. is that so odd? the fact that you have arthritis, messes, pains, NPR addictions, jobs as pool designers, dying fathers, it kind of doesn’t matter, all the shit that goes down, its a small little world, we’re sharing it in spades, all the time. there’s no way around it.

on that note, some thoughts on the last round of commets, while we’re at it:

re:
myspace “kudos”. right. i have no idea what they are, except that in the land of myspace, it is the potentially lame and misguided name that they have given to what i would prefer they label “acknowledgment”. what i find totally bizare is that you can either give one “acknowledgment” or two. i mean, how can that be? don’t you either “acknowledge” something or “not acknowledge” it? what i weird fucking word. acknowledge. stare at that one for a minute and see what i mean. ACK. but i mean really. if you give one kudo, does that mean youre only half-acknowledging what the person has written? and how fucked is that?

re:
the possibility of commenting back to someone’s comments on myspace….thank you all for pointing that out…i’d never noticed that you could indent the conversation thread that way. now i am happy to know that one comment can give rise to another.

avril is recording a new record? o good. so is panic at the disco. our lord works in mysterious ways.

re:
the onion cellar blog, i ‘m still working on it. distance is lending perspective to that dark time of my life already. i learned more lessons in that few months than i may in my lifetime, and i’m still processing it all.

some german fans decided to make a video about baking a chocolate zucchini cake.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWbr7Amh1KU
i watched this and peed my pants with glee and wondered in awe at the randomness of the world. anything can happen.
small things like this make me happier than you can possibly imagine.

re”
the finger. the finger is healing, slowly. acupuncture before bedtime is helping.

re:
“You’re left with flakes of paint and corners of posters left from old and reccurent efforts to create a bohemia.”
whoever said this….you summed up my life nicely. thank you.

re:
books.
i have to thank all those of you who have recommended books via this blog in teh past year or so, i’ve kept them piled up and i’ve been devouring them lately with (finally, joy) time to read again. towelhead, don’t lets go to the dogs tonight and oracle night all came from here. i ate them up. oracle night (paul auster) fucking blew me away. i want to recommend it back to everybody here. i didn’t want it to end so i ordered the book of illusions and that too was quickly gone. he has ten more books. i’m working on timbuktu.

re:
my total lack of caps.
for those of you upset or querulous about my lack of capitalization, i have only one thing to say to you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings. 
please note how they fucked up his name in the url.

re:
“It’s also comforting to me to see how much what goes on in your head resembles my own thought patterns. Are most people like this? And we didn’t realize it until now with the invention of the blog where everyone’s thoughts are made public? Somehow all the zines and novels failed to capture this accurately.”
i must say. i think most people ARE like this. we all deal with the same shit. most people just don’t talk about it.

re:
you.
me.
and everyone we know.

i’m going to new york in the morning. i’ll be there all week. i love the train to new york more than life itself.

i was listening to someone’s demo CD (sort of ambient techno, a la the great aphex twin) tonight and was really impressed by the way they managed to create a really cool song using the sampled sound of a skipping CD. it was done truly artfully, the skip never lasting too long and not sounding too perfect or precious or too random. id been wondering when someone would finally use the skipping-CD sound to create a whole track. i enjoyed it for about fifteen minutes then decided it was actually getting a little too wanky and irritating. plus i needed to concentrate on something else. i went into my bedroom to kill the sound.

i was wrong.

the CD had been skipping for fifteen minutes.

indeed, again,
it’s strange how sometimes the fuzz between stations is sometimes more compelling than a clear signal from either side.

love
a