midsummer night

this will be the first summer in twenty years that my sister will be celebrating her birthday without her most beloved at her side.

this is the first summer ever, that my daughter is envisioning her life as a young adult, stepping into the world, dipping her toe, checking to see.

this is the first year i have ever considered taking my time, really, and moving into next things with some grace.

ain't that hilarious.

"meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are headed home again."

ain't it funny that

"the world will call to you like the wild geese,
harsh and exciting,
over and over again announcing your place
in the family of things."

you can see why?
i'm not on tour? yet? still?

car 54 where are you?

was in the subject line of an email this am from a friend of mine back in atown-- though it may look as though i've fallen off the planet according to my mailbox back home and my tour schedule at pollstar.

no worries. rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. unquote.

multo jactatus

latin. meaning, much buffeted. even if you're not latin.

in some companies, they employ folks to wear a moose head and impersonate micky the safety moose, who then sit across from you as you sit at your desk just trying to get your day done. either he's putting it on, or taking it off, deadpan, no smile, all somber. micky the moose.

i'm thinking of a full on werewolf suit, myself, just to wear when answering the front door. why hold back?

whitman said: all things of the universe are miracles, each as profound as any. he said it on a card with a huge oak tree on it from juliet today, and i thought he said it well.

i am absolutely

not past losing stephen. i realize days and weeks have passed, and every day my sister seems to move her expressions into kindness and consideration, but i just think that's too high a cost, and completely unfair.

nothing is the same. it never will be.

every day she goes and sits in session while her good friend daniel puts one of the many cassettes she's brought in for him into the deck for playback, to transfer to disc, and they sit for eventually hours, listening for some snippet of conversation in among the electrifying, totally devastating beauty of his music, and hope for some piece of thread or wooly fuzz that might turn out to be something that will place him here on the earth where we can see him, in a red button up shirt and jeans and a pair of cowboy boots- something that makes his death less consequential. so we can eat dinner. and she can take a shower.

fuck death, man. i've had it.


meantime, we are dreaming up a dream garden for the new place, and already planting (altho anyone familiar with the western gardener's manual would know, you DON'T start planting these till later in the fall): squash, rutabagas, hellebores, rhubarb. roses.

pina bausch

posting on pina's life