Black Doggerel

I knew three people whose birthday was today; my mother's two sisters, Marian Junior (Auntie Juni) and Susan Jennifer (Auntie Sue). They were twins, and (I think) two years younger than my mother, so they would have been sixty-two today. Auntie Juni was fortyish when she died, Auntie Sue was (I think) fifty.

the third was my best friend Mike Swann. he would have been thirty-four now.

some days, all the dead people that I love give me strength. love doesn't die, after all. it stays with you forever and sustains you.

but everyone who's died that you love takes a piece of you with them. and on some days there's so much of me on the other side that I feel like a ghost myself; weak, thin, insubstantial and clinging stubbornly to a world I no longer have the right to walk in.

this is what made my mother lose the will to live. her troubles started after her best friend Carol died, at the end of a year in which she'd also lost her own mother and her last living sister, Auntie Jean.

but my mother's alive now. she's walking strong and living in love again, and I got my stubbornness from her. so will I. Keep saying that.

ICONSQUEEEE!!!!! Thank you very very much cottonmanifesto, you utterly rock!


It's been an amazingly good weekend. We were going to go naked sauna-ing after doing the last bit of the moving, but we were so tired we just lounged around Black Dog HQ and watched Farscape instead. topbit never got into it the first time round like I did. I hope my endless enthusiasm will be contagious rather than irritating.

I wonder if the muppet quotient was higher or lower than it would have been at the sauna? *grin*

Also got to meet the best friend, and was reassured to find myself getting on with him like a house on fire. A kindred spirit. Very happy.

I'm punchy with lack of sleep and hormone backwash - stimulated and bouncy, yet too tired underneath the bounce to make any damn sense. It's kinda fun. *grins harder*

stress, running late, need a bath, couldn't sleep last night, flat looks like a shithole, arm is particularly painful and Spike is being a psycho hosebeast from hell (I know he's only like that because I'm wound up. Doesn't always help to know that).


BREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAATHE!!!!

...out of all the music I've ever listened to, every sound I've ever loved in my life, I don't think anything carries a bigger emotional load than the Grateful Dead's American Beauty.

John introduced me to it, and I inherited its emotional resonances from him. Together we added more layers to those resonances. We used to quote lines from it to each other in our love letters during times apart. There were many favourites, but one that just slid past me and sparked is this, from Operator:

"I don't know where she's going, I don't care where she's been, as long as she's been doin' it right"

...which tells you all you need to know about John's views on truth, love and artistic integrity; just one more item of value in my rich inheritance. I try to do it right.

When I resurrected myself from heroin's undead and started reacquiring the albums I'd sworn I'd never sell for drugs (ha!) it was the very first CD I bought (together with Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks), the same day I bought the cheap little portable CD player with the first social security cheque I no longer had to spend on drugs.

And now, in a different place, a new life and new love, it still sustains me. All the love and beauty still there, much used and untarnished. Love never dies. Thank you.

What a long, strange trip it's been.