many mouths to feed

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They have a lot of heirs between them and time the corporate leeches ate one.
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the internet wants to be free

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Capitalism just isn't doing well in this Socialist medium. The answers to all their problems are always fascistic, always depend on trampling the rights of everyone in the effort to maximize profit. It makes it plainer that even the most successful artists and celebrities are there only insofar as they have been able to FORCE plutocrats into coöperation.
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where were you?

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I'm in a couple thousand leagues of agony over this gig with my poppa being locked up by his wife of sixty years. He comes back to life when the people he loves are there with him... but... fuck... that's my mother for a couple hours three times a week, and my sister goes with her once every month or two... and this blitz of having me for two weeks... before I have to rip myself away and try to comb the cosmos for some way to ease some of his distress. This is a killer. He's not the kind of demented where you don't know who's who and what's what anymore. This isn't Alzheimer's. It's multi-infarct dementia. He just has a bunch of little dead zones from itty bitty strokes, has to try to talk around them, work around them, and doesn't always do a good enough job for some. He's in there. His words are scrambled and he has great trouble with his spatial orientation, but he knows his wife has locked him up and thrown away the key. He calls her his ex-wife now... when he's speaking straight. I don't blame him.

Anyway, BB2 sent me a link about Jeff Beck and his new album... and there's a video of his rendition of "Where Were You"... and it was really good, and not the Pink Floyd song, which is "Coming Back to Life", but I couldn't listen to it without thinking of Dave, thinking of poppa's distress, without wanting to leap up, get in my car, drive to the other side of the lake and go wrap my arms around my dad again.

It's just stupid how things play out, how close some things come without you even knowing it, knowing who, for decades, for millennia, and then, bam, a past you can't fly back to lights up like a roman candle, burning out your blood vessels, turning everything into flames. You just don't even want to know how many decades the soundtrack of my youth was performed by a band I didn't even know was playing that music. I didn't pay attention to such things. If I didn't have the album to hold in my hands and personally put it on to listen, I didn't know who I was hearing. I never owned a Pink Floyd album. All my friends owned them. They played on my car radio all the time. I never paid attention to who was playing. I never knew the guy at the party where I met Mick Jagger was David Gilmour. Much of the time I knew who was playing what, went to many, many concerts, knew a ridiculous lot of very famous musicians, but... I wasn't ever connecting with what I was supposed to think, or supposed to know about anyone, even rock stars. I was never curious about this stuff. I wanted the HEART.

I wanted the pulse... no... that's wrong.... I'm talking as though it was something I sought. I don't "seek" it. I don't "want" it or not want it. It IS. It is the level at which I immediately perceive everyone. I'm not out here on your surface. I have no time for it. It's unutterably boring, no matter how interesting you might be. It's the one who comes before that who has all my attention. Without even knowing it until decades later, that was Dave. That was Dave and he was right there to fall in love with, to tell about the music that was mine, and he could laugh about playing my music and me not even knowing... just as I have gone on about pieces of writing to the authors of those pieces, without even knowing I'm talking to the one who wrote them, making them laugh... that's all mixed up with my broken heart hearing guitar... it just starts squeezing and echoes of Pink Floyd start coming out around the edges of Jeff Beck and I gotta go find Dave or dive under a mattress and smother to death or jump out of my skin and GET it handled... BE the love filling the ten directions....

I yanked myself away from that party so very long ago so as not to hurt the feelings of the idiot who brought me. I want to be back at that party, knowing what I know, and able to save my poppa, save you, make what I always knew and could not speak BE now... instead of this... instead of this now.
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i made it

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...but there's a tv blaring and making my brains bat against the inside of my skull and nothing in the news seems worth linking to or talking about right now. Maybe a cup of coffee. Maybe a good night's sleep...?

xoxoxoxox

Still, it's not home....

in but not of

I was making a bed on the floor of my aunt's house, and it kept increasing from very humble to getting on toward a darn opulent sort of sleeping arrangement. My mom and aunt were coming and going, getting ready for some big deal, sort of in their Christmas dinner mode, but it wasn't that. Then I was out in the yard, and Sarah Palin showed up for this shindig. She had jet black hair and the face and body of a hag, but she was acting as though she were the attraction for the event. I went in and told my mom and aunt that she had arrived and whether or not that was some sort of a mistake, I was splitting. Suburbia turned into the city as I stormed down its homeless-lined streets. Someone was becoming violent toward me. So I ducked down an ally toward a finger of suburbia. At the edge of it, a path ahead across an embankment would take me back to my aunt's neighborhood, stood, or barely stood, a funky old trailer with trash in the yard and an angry bigot acting as though he'd wanted to murder me his whole life ran for his rifle. I started a run for the path, got caught in that age-old bit where I wanted to run but was paralyzed, and willed myself out of it and down the path. The bullets were zinging past me, and I was having great difficulty getting away, but get away I did.

I found myself back on the city streets, though, with Nick Mason, Rick Wright and Dave Gilmour. I was telling them of my ordeal. They were appalled and expressing their relief that I'd come through. We pretty much agreed that the Sarah ogre had been as dangerous as the people trying to shoot me. Hours collapsed into seconds and Nick and Rick were gone, but David and I and his mother were on a cable car together. His mom sat next to him across from me, and she was griping about how he'd had all this success and done all these great things and never married. He was saying that he'd never felt the need, he'd made a lot of money, was quite comfortable and... and couldn't finish the sentence because three gorgeous young things were instantly on him, fawning over him. He rid himself of them by pulling me across into his lap, the face-to-face kind of into his lap, and our arms and legs were going around each other, ever closer, and his mother was getting happier by the nanosecond... when a lady with a high-pitched voice in my back bathroom called to me and woke me up.

There of course was no lady in my back bathroom, but she'd woken me up anyway, just in time to break my heart, and just in time to hear the heater kick on.... I forgot to turn it off before bed last night. Maybe the lady was the heater making some noise in complaint in the cold, like when the phone is ringing and I'm dreaming someone's yelling "peanut butter" insistently at me... or maybe she was my ego resisting death for the quadrillionth time. I hate her.

you know, i saw this last night

[click image]

... and I asked myself, Would we have gotten here yet if not for those heartless pigs?

And I'm also thinking about making up the news... shifting all the way into my alternate universe and blogging from there. It's gotta be better than the idiot campaigns and the long run of reports proving stuff we've all known for years and still bubkes is being done about it.

I'm also thinking about a lot of creative things. I'm not feeling so physically good this morning, but my lights are getting brighter from all these deuced pills. I've decided to set a date to be back in perfect health... but can't yet decide on a reasonable one.

I'm bummed about American Exceptionalism again. It's everywhere. I hate it.

On the Turning Away

On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden
And the words they say
Which we won't understand
Don't accept that what's happening
Is just a case of others' suffering
Or you'll find that you're joining in
The turning away

It's a sin that somehow
Light is changing to shadow
And casting its shroud
Over all we have known
Unaware how the ranks have grown
Driven on by a heart of stone
We could find that we're all alone
In the dream of the proud

On the wings of the night
As the daytime is stirring
Where the speechless unite
In a silent accord
Using words you will find are strange
Mesmerized as they light the flame
Feel the new wind of change
On the wings of the night

No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It's not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there'll be
No more turning away?

i'm gonna be busy with medical stuff today

[click image]

So you should really spend the time contemplating. Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts, and did you exchange a walk on part in a war for a lead role in a cage? [ Answer: yes ! ]

Hey you, don't help them to bury the light....

run like hell

marooned

an hour with pink floyd

...live, in San Francisco, circa 1970. Just go here and click "play all videos" on the right side of the playlist page. Kick back for a trip down memory lane.

[This is so toadally the soundtrack of my youth. My brain can barely withstand the cognitive dissonance of who I am through my ears and who I am through my eyes.]

daughter?

High Hopes - Pink Floyd

the downside of babetude

Pink Floyd - Take It Back

Her love rains down on me, easy as the breeze
I listen to her breathing; it sounds like the waves on the sea
I was thinking all about her, burning with rage and desire
We were spinning into darkness, and the earth was on fire

She could take it back; she might take it back some day

So I spy on her, I lie to her, I make promises I cannot keep
Then I hear her laughter rising, rising from the deep
And I make her prove her love for me; I take all that I can take
I push her to the limit to see if she will break

She might take it back; she could take it back some day

Now I have seen the warnings, screaming from all sides
And it's easy to ignore them; God knows I've tried
All of this temptation, you know it turned my faith to lies
Till I couldn't see the danger or hear the rising tide

She could take it back, she will take it back some day
She can take it back, she will take it back some day
She will take it back, she will take it back some day

Their fears keep it unreal, from start to finish, and nothing you do bumps them out of that head trip. Your love, your proof, the real, all unmet forever.

hey look! brown people who love just like i do

Fancy that.

stanley rosenthal

... of Late Night Music Club fame, brings us David Gilmour via Supertramp. You gotta wait for it, but it's pretty nice.

making of the dark side of the moon

One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six

Or all at once.

a rich vein

...if not the motherlode.

mister popularity

The really worst thing about him is his fame.

Ruins everything.

You want him to be a secret that everyone knows but never tells.

You want the chic parties and the society pages to be things that never took place anywhere. And to lose anything too nearing a crush you look at him smirking next to a too young wife. But you never stop feeling the flood of love when this secret that was never kept plays across your mind.

seeing better

money

Goddammit! The creeps are messing with the minimum wage bill so badly I'm now certain they're all the Republicans from hell!

Teddy is the only senator who is reaching out to his real constituency, all of us, and one of the few who allows input from outside his state, and one of the fewer still who responds to it. It drives me nuts that representatives and senators barely listen to their own home constituencies, let alone the rest of the country. All of us feel the effects of what each of them does, and, ahem, it's not just * who's acting as if he's royalty. No indeed. For all the mistakes Teddy Kennedy has made in his life, he's been working damn hard, against total fiends, on stuff that is life and death for the little guy.

maybe bring out the big guns