Eccentric Flower:199904/lost laundry
From Eccentric Flower
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april thirteenth (barely) lost laundry
I know it's large - sorry - but I was thinking about the cartoon above all day, having once again committed reductio ad absurdum with my clean laundry supply. The crisis: I own only two pairs of jeans. Both pairs really urgently needed to be washed - but since I need one pair to wear to the laundry, washing both was out of the question. I suppose I could have gone to the laundry in a skirt .... The cartoon is reprinted without permission, but I don't think the artist would care. She has probably forgotten she drew it by now. It's got to be ten years old. She was disavowing those cartoons as overhasty work even when she was drawing them for our college paper, so take the artwork with a grain of salt - she was capable of much, much better. Her name was Carla Speed, and she has the dubious distinction of being the first woman I ever wanted to become. I had been in love with several women by then, but this was different. I wasn't in love with Carla - I'd have found Carla very difficult to live with, I'm sure. I wanted to be Carla. She could write, she could draw, she was smart, attractive, acerbic, and female - and she'd dispute all of those claims except the last two. Carla frustrated me because she never seemed to have faith in her own abilities, never seemed to give herself a break. I wanted to pick her up and shake her. Actually I was saying "If I were you, if I could draw like that, I'd be doing things! ...." I am not unaware of the ironies here, but I think that - despite my bitching - I had more faith in my work than she did, even then. I don't think I can sell any of it, but I can write well. I have no idea where Carla is. We were never more than distant acquaintances. I heard, at some point, that she was in a fairly serious relationship with a man whose character I had reason to strongly distrust ... and that dashed any chance that I might renew contact with her. Still, I wonder sometimes. She had more talent than half the people drawing cartoons these days - I hope she's doing something with it. - - - We never stop to wonder from "Scared to be Alone" It's not so bad losing track of someone whom you really didn't try to stay in touch with. It's rougher when you misplace someone despite your best efforts at contact. My friend Auky van Beek is somewhere in the great Pacific Northwest, I'm sure, and doing fine - Auky is a survivor. I believe I've already mentioned that a lot of people thought Auky and I were twins. We had a lot of mental channels in common, and I miss her. She'd have understood the gender issues - which, alas, I didn't become comfortable talking about until after we were no longer in a position to have a long face-to-face chat. I am thinking about Auky tonight because I am listening to two Dory Previn albums. Kymm discovered Dory because some folks apparently sent her Dory songs as part of the Great Mix Tape Tradeathon. I didn't know there was such a thing as a new Dory Previn fan - you lucky thing, Kymm - she's so obscure that normally anyone who knows the name is already a cultist. Dory is cynical, harsh, sometimes painful to listen to. The only song that anyone associates with her - "Lady With the Braid" - is one I have never heard. I am not talking about it. I am talking about the songs on "On My Way to Where" and "Mary C. Brown and the Hollywood Sign," songs where she rips her psyche open as you listen. Even at her best, her singing voice is a little too close to a female Bob Dylan for comfort, but that was never the point - the point is the words, the raw emotion built into each song. Dory Previn was completely unavailable on CD until this British company rereleased them recently, and thanks to Kymm and CDNow, I have the two albums above, the only two I want - both on the same CD. These are albums I heard so many times I have every note memorized - heard from tapes I made of the original records - records that belonged to Auky. Recordings I made while sitting crosslegged on Auky's uncomfortable bed - wood slats and no mattress, only a thin pad, but she loved it. I never had sex with Auky. In most cases, I look back at all the people I didn't have sex with (I was so clueless, and I got my sex drive so late) and I say, "Well, that was probably for the best." Auky, as far as I can tell, is the only exception. (Of the people in my past, that is. The present and the future are too indefinite to be surveyed that way.) I'd like to tell Auky about those CDs. - - - When someone is around us from "Scared to be Alone" The happy ending to all this melancholy is that sometimes you hear unexpectedly from people you had given up for lost. I got email from a friend named Kay Parkhurst today. I knew Kay was alive and well - I had inside information - but I didn't think she was particularly interested in hearing from me. Kay was always very difficult for me to read. For several years I had what I now describe as a crush on her, but that's not exactly right. I never lusted for Kay in a sexual sense - but I adored her, albeit from some distance, and wanted very badly to find out what was going on in her mind. A lot of others did too, I think. Kay was an enigma. The last time I saw Kay was a very melancholy experience. I was driving her home from her mother's funeral, from Texas to Louisiana. That drive was completely uneventful, and yet I remember it vividly. It was one of two times that I have been on a long car ride with another person and became aware that the other person was not, for the moment, entirely in this plane - that it was almost like they were flickering, halfway between here and now and some state of otherworldly existence. That for the duration of the trip, all normal laws of reality were suspended. That trip took several hours and we probably said less than a hundred words to each other throughout. And yet that seemed to be the way it was supposed to be. © columbine |
