Rickie Lee Jones @ MindSay 
Classes have been grueling. Work has been challenging but fun. Being creative has been the saving grace. Here is a photo I call "Last Chance"
It was taken during a camping trip I went on with Torridgirl for her birthday one year.
I named it based on a song by Rickie Lee Jones called "Last Chance Texaco"
Last Chance Goddess Bless
Howdy Howdy all!
*sigh* I feel kinda blah right now. No reason really, maybe I miss the full moon already or maybe the waning moon has taken some of my hutzpah, who knows. No worries though as I tend to bounce back with the quickness and am never really in the dumps for long.
I updated my resume, finally...I needed to put my meager writing credits on it and add my second degree, the first is a BA-Management the second is in my first love English. I adore literature and I WISH I had someone to discuss it with on a regular basis. I think maybe that is why I have opted for celibacy....I don't want just sex, I want intimacy and shared interests. I don't yak much but when I do I would like for the conversations to go beyond the weather, a movie or a trend. That being said this entry was inspired by a song by RICKIE LEE JONES called COMPANY. It really makes me think when I need to crawl into myself to bring out my inner muse until I find my outer one. Lemme know if you see him around....In the interim I guess I can just ramble about what the song inspired...hope ya don't get too bored with it.....then again if you do...tough, this is how I get down now and again.....
1.Tell me what you do for a living and why you dig it or not. If not, tell me what you'd wanna do if options were limit-less. Talk to me damn-it, talk to me for real!
2.Are you close to your parents? Why not? or -You are? Tell me a funny story about them......
3.Do I remind you of any one relative, no? You remind me of.....because he, like you, could spin a yarn and thrived on lovely tall tales. Your bedtime stories rival his because sometimes the Princess RESCUES you instead.
4. Could you love someone who is forgetful but sincere? For instance, she may forget the anniversary but once you playfully remind her she will smother you with apologies. 
5. Read something I have written and tell me what you think... Too long? Not long enough? Too much heavy language? Thanks a bunch for your support.
6.How can I support you? I ain't so great at filing but I can work the room at ANY function.
7. Will my spur of the moment lifestyle work your nerves? You sure? Come with me sometime....it'll be fun, I promise!
8. You just wanna sit and watch TV tonight? Histories Mysteries or the Food Network...okay okay, you can pick this time, and it doesnt have to be any of those.....
9.Do you love poetry? My favorite is Pablo Neruda, Nikki Giovanni is a close second though.
I don't really know what any of this means but I am glad that it is out and on the page so to speak....Thanks for listening ya'll, respond at will!
How about some poetry...Here goes.....Careful, more erotica....
The Music of Love
Bodies warm with passion's heat
pressed together in hungry embrace.
Intertwined we move as one,
synchronizing to the inner beat
of desire's baton.
The erotic rhythm of hips in motion
thrusting in time with the melody
that steals its way from the depths
of our most primitive selves.
A harmony of sounds unintelligible,
voiced only by passionate lovers.
Bodies warm with passion's heat,
hard dancing to the music of love. --Robert W. Birch
Goddess Bless
calicoes dragging alternative telephone
detached array sacred pearshaped minute
interjection releasing pinchfist drivel? legal
point? thats slyness destroyer otherwise
revived heroine unwrapped buttoned abundant
slicked-down rustlings ladles senior want
client undulating pursued beetle sweetish
travelled ballrooms categorically crippled tact
totally pyjamas relativizing aching cultivated
referred hard wiping unity consultant?
records myself swarthy chicken crackled
singing lung vials popped vodka
some random message i found amongst emails. good words.
tonight i am sitting alone. you know that coldness that glass emanates from a cold night outside? that is what i am feeling. freezing and alone.
it wasn't bad for the whole night. in fact i returned from a tremendous concert put on by rickie lee jones at the carrboro art center. my dad took me out to a very fine restaurant and we ate fine food together and talked of little or nothing. it was still good though. it was very good. my dad got very frustrated at the traffic and blamed me for taking him the wrong way on the street, but i have grown used to all of this by now, so it was a good evening, and the music really talked, even if he didn't. he never really has said much; it's just his way.
it was good until my roommate, who has an uncanny way of hitting just the right nerve, begin chattering incessantly about food. she must have told me twice already, "god, I had this really good wrap at lunch today." food is one of her favorite subjects. i usually know what she's eaten for breakfast, if not lunch and dinner. another favorite subject is her homework, or something her friend said. i had just gotten home at 11, and had been gone since 10:30 that morning except for about 5 minutes, so i wanted to sit, be quiet, and more importantly, write. but she loves to hear her own voice fill the air. literally there is not a silent moment unless she is doing her reading, in which case, i should not interrupt. if i won't listen, she will call someone who will. i had been home about 15 minutes and she had already called three people in a vain attempt to tell them about her banana cereal.
it was at this ineluctable moment, where i have been relegated to the cold bland lounge, with dentist's office furniture and safe abstract, cubic pictures that are the same in every lounge, that i realized i really miss talking. i can forgive superfluity if it is at least accompanied by bouts of concern. once, she came in and my mascara was all down my face from crying. "oh, your mascara ran," she said perkily.
i do not enjoy people who ignore the painfully obvious, albeit uncomfortable, things right beneath their level of conversation about shredded wheat.
i do not particularly like that my father probably doesn't know his daughter. i figure this is not my fault and if he wanted to know me he would. i am not so much mad at him because i do not think he knows how.
does he know anything about her? does he know the poetry she writes? he has not seen the words. does he know she fell in love with a boy? he has never even seen that boy's face. does he know she is afraid she isn't good enough for them? he has not seen her cry...except once, when she said she was fat. does he know her favorite song? he has not heard her singing voice.
i miss talking. not just talking. really talking. not even me telling, but someone telling for me, what i would say, even though i did not say it. that kind of talking. someone knowing my face even though i would hide. that kind of knowing.
i do not think it is the last i have seen of that ghostly face.
the last i looked at you, really looked, i peered from under a hood. i think you thought i looked beautiful, or at least cute, hiding there, in your clothes--i could see it in your eyes.
if you could not tell from mine, i thought you looked like my protector. perhaps even my champion.
i know that is stupid, but forgive me, i am a little child. i am a little child always telling you i am sorry, i am sorry, man, i still have not quite understood all this, i hope i have not done anything wrong. i remember once i woke up beside you and i had my head on a teddy bear. "you have a teddy bear?" you asked, but only laughed softly. there is a girl with collections of ponies and puppies and animals that always love you. there is a great weakness, a great and fragile innocence. i think you knew that when you saw my eyes smiling underneath your hood, or hiding my face from the halflight, when i said i loved you. i gave you a star from my wall.
but there is also the strength of a fresian horse, a woman with a swaying stride and a dark mane of hair swirling around her eyes, and perhaps a faroff way about her look. her eyes are far off like the wideness of the ocean, where blue slowly, slowly sinks to obsidian. there is the woman who would huff your name deep in her throat and knead your sweaty shoulders with her aching nails. there is the woman who realized these moments pass so fast (and tries to get them down with words, words, words: they are the keepers of everything.) there is the woman whose lips told you she loved you without speaking. there is a woman with a deep, residual certainty that everything is infinitely right. it is the little girl who forgets in her wanderings. but it is the little girl who allows for the hope that everything should be infinitely beautiful.
the little girl did not even know about the woman until she looked at your eyes that said you saw her. we all need mirrors to remind us of who we are.1
i have only come back to myself and saw something that i had never seen before. i had abandoned myself. i had disengaged myself. but i have been thrown into myself. see, they return.
see they return, one, and by one,
with fear, as half-awakened;
as if the snow should hesitate
and murmur in the wind.2
it is as slow and quiet an awakening as a snowy morning.
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
. . .history is a pattern
of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
on a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now.3
rickie lee jones says that we are really all experiencing everything at once, but for some reason or another we can only perceive one thing happening at a time. "i'm something of a poet...but i bet you didn't know it..." she sang out and she said, "i've been doing some thinking and had an idea. now let me tell you what it is and you can say it was yours but anyway here's the idea. you know when you're about to sleep and you forget you're there? when you sleep you finally watch all the things you've been experiencing but didn't know you were experiencing...oh yes." rickie lee jones knew what she experienced, and i knew what i experienced, and my dad knew what he experienced, and yes, even you knew what you experienced, but yet there is one refrain that keeps us having our syncopated dreams about tangerines and spotted horses, about escaping in a hay cart and saying to yourself "now this is the life," about walt whitman, bob dylan, oprah winfrey, about cooking pancakes, eating doritos, sucking cock, running, running, being held beneath the sheets. there is a knowing we do not talk about beneath the shredded wheat.
it is profound what one voice can awaken in the heads of hundreds of others. rickie lee jones is in her late forties now--i can tell she used to be a blond knockout, to me she is still beautiful--she sings with the voice of a girl. it is smooth and innocent but when it crackles with her remembrances (do you know that moment when you sing when even if you do not mean it tears might come to your eyes because of the sheer exertion from your diaphragm) she is a woman. when it lows with her bellow she is a heaving, sun-tarnished woman. her blond hair hangs bleached over the piano keys. she has told her story.
it is profound what memory the sound of memory can awaken.
it is something i knew. a single, frail voice coming out of the dark, i knew this. for some reason i wanted and i knew, she would sing about my memories. in fact, she would even sing my song.
halfway through the performance i just got this impetus for her to sing dylan. inexplicably--this woman doesn't cover. in my head i sang "someone's got it in for me, they're starting stories in the press4..." and i wanted her to sing him. it was an itch that didn't leave.
rickie lee paused after one of her songs, sipping her glass of water, and then returned the guitar to its place at her chest. "i had this song in my head earlier," she said. "i was singing it this morning, so i thought maybe i should play it for you all..." she paused in uncertainty. "i hope you guys sing where i can't find the words...i don't know all the words but...you're probably singers yourself..."
and then she started to sing: "come gather round people, wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown..." she started to sing "the times they are a-changin." not the angry song, idiot wind. the song of prophecy, the song of the shepherd, the song assuring that the meek will inherit.
we filled in the gaps. the whole room sang parts. rickie lee said, "sing on, even if it's bad...just sing on."
"As the present now will later be past...The order is rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now will later be last for the times they are a-changin'."
There was a great cheer at the last verse. And the first one now will later be last.
See, they return.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.5
That knowing will come back. Those places in time are now.
1. Memento
2. "See, They Return" - Ezra Pound
3. "Little Gidding" - TS Eliot
4. "Idiot Wind" - Bob Dylan
5. "Little Gidding" - TS Eliot