Who the hell is Marconi?

In choir class back in the late 80's I was an alto.
I kinda assumed that all altos were bad ass.
Sopranos were all prissy with perfectly pressed stonewashed Guess jeans.
Tangent: (My God. Anna Nicole Smith was at her height of sexiness during this time.)
Altos were like Benetton sweatshirts and leggings. Sopranos were prissy.

The teacher made us sing "We Built this City" by Starship because she thought it was bad ass.
We sang it so many times that it became imprinted on my brain.
My frontal lobes were pressed.
It was taught to us in almost operatic choral arrangement
and I have been randomly singing it for like 20 years.
I will be just rocking out my normal (non normal) life and all of the sudden I will bust out:

Marconi plays the mamba

Listen to the radio
DONCHA reMEMba...

and it's annoying- there are other songs too.
Songs that for no good reason I sing out in operatic ways.
Finn has started to tell me I am weird.
He says, "MOM! Stop it!"
I know.
It is like the worst song ever made or so said Blender magazine in 2004.

It's just so unfortunate-
to have the tics that I have.

I also close my eyes a lot when I talk.

How are you weird?



source

My kid has ten more days of Kindergarten left

my day is like a decent Ingmar Bergman student
the kid with a black turtleneck
driving a carmengia
lean and ready for anything a night can bring
after days in dark
flickering classrooms
the kind of kid that
may not understand the movie
really
no matter what the kid hears
and the mouth moves
and the kid sees the word existentialism be formed
three different ways by an older person's lips
pink and old
not really understanding it all
but feeling it just like
good old Ingmar really wanted
some days spread out like sexy Swedish blondes
they just make you feel
and you sit scrunched up forming wrinkles
towards the future

Ya - I'd always wanna be there

Deep in the year of 1984 I started my climb towards love.
It was initiated with the small plastic cassette tape I purchased with my own money at Gold Circle department store in Columbus, Ohio.
Reckless.
Byran Adams.
Holy shit I was no longer a mere child.
During that same Autumn I also bought the "Like a Virgin" album.
I have the distinct recollection of my mother bending down and whispering in my ear
Do you know what that word means she probed?
Yes I hissed
(of course I was not sure. I thought it may have meant a hooker or a prostitute but I would have to refer to my faster more learned friend in the 6th grade for this information.)
We pushed the shopping cart deeper into the music section of the store and I held the money tighter in my hand. My mother told me not to show the cassette to my grandmother who was with us and I am sure she made me sign a doctrine of good faith that stated I would never allow her own father (the southern baptist minister) to know we had a Madonna tape in our home.
I stared at Madonna's boobies all the way home through the cheap thin plastic bag.
I instantaneously wanted a bustier. The car could not drive fast enough to get me to my room where I could be alone with my yellow plastic Sports Walkman.
Now I guess I was like all the others girls and sang La Isla Bonita while I did the dishes
or used my hairbrush as a microphone for Material Girl.
But my heart belonged to the Canadian:
The hot
small
blond
man
in
leather
jackets
and tight
jeans.
Bryan Adams.

I'm gonna run to you

Suddenly all of the girls and boys in Mrs. Poling's class turned and morphed into tiny adults with mad beating hearts that winter and the Star Wars play on the black asphalt that spring changed like a shift into more footloosesque expression.

I know her love is true But it's so damn easy making love to you

Like a Teutonic plate rubbing against another under the playground, the intense forces shook off some of the innocence we had stuck to us so honestly out there in the county.

we held onto our boom boxes
and walked around imitating some idea of what adulthood must be like
gliding our bodies around like tough love kids
who knew what they wanted
like grown ups
we walked circled rings
imprinted history onto the merry go round
and sang songs that made not a true lick of sense to us yet
but that somehow resonated right through our beating hearts

Oh - once in your life you find someone
Who will turn your world around
Bring you up when you're feelin' down

It was the music that I really cut my true blue romantic heart on and it never went away really.
Years later when I would discover that I was alternative and much deeper than most of the student body at my school and that my musical tastes were governed by skater boys and what I saw on my neighbors MTV 120 minutes program weekly- I realized that my love for Bryan had to be hidden away because ballads and cheesy love songs were not what cool was made of.
I had to be firm with my heart. Only I couldn't. I would listen to the Violent Femmes and The Cure and all the music that I learned to love like a sickness, but I would secretly make myself Memorex tapes of Bryan Adams and think of nothing but tight pants and blond hair and the country of Canada. I would think of the day when I would be loved like that.

Also back in the 80's my dad would take us to The Spaghetti Warehouse in Columbus, Ohio. It was fine dining for me to sit in a bathtub and eat linguine. I loved it. I think what I loved best was the kiddo game room where they had the coolest Estrella Fortune Telling/ Wishing machine just like the one in the movie Big with Tom Hanks. You inserted a quarter and she was all freaky and spooky and the machine would all but shake violently and a small card stock rectangle would be produced as she waved her porcelain hands around. The tiny card often gave you information about the future and lucky numbers and tiny prophesies.
I collected the cards in a small tin box for the remainder of my childhood.
Nothing ever really came true.

I know that the Spaghetti Warehouse has gone downhill since the days of yore- but it still stands. It still cranks out sub par pasta and Peroni's over on the West side of town. You can still sit in a trolley car and eat cheap food and stuff yrself full of garlic bread. I think me and Blaise are gonna drop off Finnian to school one day soon and go visit the game room. It would only be right that the machine still stands there. That I could go inside and stand in front of it. I could ask her things.
I could ask her about my path. I am supposed to be writing this book about this character who is obsessed with the past and memories and people that imprinted upon her and in front of the machine I could ask Estrella if perhaps she may be the person to tell me the truth. To tell me to open up my eyes and see that if I just accept that it may be a lot of me that I am writing about that it will be OK. That the stuck will come unstuck and all around my feet will grow again a narrow trodden way that I will walk.
That I will run.

cause when the feelin's right I'm gonna run all night






My name is Amy Turn Sharp and I love Bryan Adams.

I'm a bad boy, cause I don't even miss her

I heard Tom Petty's first solo album today -Full Moon Fever and all I could see were the hills so very green of my past and the silver Chevy Cavalier I drove around and around.
The video is burnt in brain too like the urban escalator troubadour and Jerry McGuire can never bastardize this song because years before Tom Cruise rolled along on a movie lot and pretended to feel it I really did.

I always wanted Silver Eyes

Last week at pub night with the girls I kinda let it slip that I sometimes sit around and try to move things with my mind. I mean-I just think it's possible and everyone laughed because it is funny. I immediately accessed my netflix account and added "The Men Who Stare at Goats" to my queue because the pub girls told me about it after the laughter subsided.

I blame it on reading The Girl with the Silver Eyes and hearing that "We use only 10% of our brains" when I was a child.

I know we use all of our brains as I am sure that this is a myth, but I do think there are so many untapped areas in our mind/body/spirit. I think about it more now as an adult because I hear stories of my perfect Baptist minister grandmother telling the future and of all of the things that happened to my father in law concerning Spiritualism in England.

It's just one of those weird little things about me.
And really it's just something I think about and try from time to time.
Infrequent but focused upon like when you bite the inside of yr mouth
and tongue the sore for a week and you can only think if that.
And then poof.
You don't think about it anymore.

I think telekinesis is possible even if it means that I will only move a feather
along the wooden floor silently on a Tuesday some far off day when I am very old.

When gray braids hang limp across old cotton dress shoulders

and I raise my fist in the air and pump it.


photo source

Do you ever get that feeling?

I feel a little sad today.
Just blue bits floating around.
Just mean reds in the air.
Unsettled.
And it's like I am in several different places at the same time
but not really anywhere.

But have a poem instead of a bummer today.
It is Friday, after all.


LOVE POEM
I want to write you
a love poem as headlong
as our creek
after thaw
when we stand
on its dangerous
banks and watch it carry
with it every twig
every dry leaf and branch
in its path
every scruple
when we see it
so swollen
with runoff
that even as we watch
we must grab
each other
and step back
we must grab each
other or
get our shoes
soaked we must
grab each other

-Linda Pastan


photo via ffffound

There are at least 1000 things about you that I don't know yet

like ice buckets from hotel rooms
in the early morning
from the night before
when the ice is nearly all relented
the water is the coldest you ever knew
normal people would not hold it up and drink it
but I always have
I always do


photo here

I wonder how much space there really is inside of there

This one apartment I had in college was tiny and cold.
It was the basement of a house.
Above me lived a slutty Icelandic woman and above her lived a lesbian filmmaker.
The sounds that came from the house were like songs.
I was choosing my days at random then.
Like a spinner.
I had a lot of melancholy in that apartment that year.
I lived on Virgina Woolf and seedy bars.
It's funny because I just didn't know that right around the corner was bliss for me.
I stepped out of that apartment and into adventures like storybooks.

But sometimes when it's cold outside
when I live in houses that have old windows
windows that seem to puff cold air at me
I think about that apartment
or perhaps about that time


And I think of those other women
who breathed in and out in that same space.
And I wonder who they are now.
I have so much space in my mind.

I can't remember anything real.
but I can't forget all the people.

photo via

Please take off your dress

I thought about buying a digital recorder for speaking into but they are a bit too pricey for me right now. I think I gave all my money to the beer companies of the world last month. I have started carrying my moleskin notebook around again. I was inspired by my friend in NYC who is a really smart cat and although he tells me I exaggerate things I do know that he is one of the smartest people I know. Anyways, he has these little notebooks of the simple spiral design that he carries around and works formulas and other interesting tidbits of his work. (Don't ask me what he does but it is all mathy and important.) I peeked at one of his notebooks and it terrified and titillated me in the same moment. It was obviously loved and worn and bentish. There was commitment to that notebook.

Anyways, I want to have access to my thoughts on the go and it feels like I am always on the go and I figured it would be good for me to have it for writing my book and things that make me wild and inspirational bits that fall from the sky and all of the good conversations I hear and man this is what I used to do when my brain was so focused on turning the world inside out and sucking the marrow from it.

I have boxes of the world in little notebooks in my basement right now.

You would freak out if you read them.
You may be in them.

Did you sit next to me in the 90's on a bus in Europe?
Did we kiss in discotheques?
Did you walk by me in Los Angeles?

I am about sick of having grocery lists and paper and the occasional Thomas the Tank Engine in my pocket.

It's winter- the pockets are deep.

So far here are the things that I have written down:


my love for Jenny Owen Youngs
recipes for assorted comfort foods
the lyrics to Glycerine by Bush
all of the people that smell good
open and brave seven times
reminder to reread A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
ten small love letters
a new secret
the origins of the word panache
Prosopagnosia is a real disorder and I think I read once that Jane Goodall suffered from it
Phonetic version of please take off your dress in Russian



I think it's going to be good for me.
It's going to be a wild year.
I can feel it.





photo via ffffound

Richie had a falcon named Mordecai.

I was reading a Sir Lancelot chapter book to Finn and Blaise today and one of the stories was about this damsel in distress who had lost her Falcon. It went on to talk about how the bird was on a leash and shit. I try continually to explain to those around me how dumb I really am. I had no idea birds were ever on leashes. I am still trying to get over the fact you can train birds to send love letters or secrets through the air. My mind doesn't want to believe it true.

Birds of prey are scarier than most birds really. I mean they are huge. You can get a license to be an apprentice and matriculate to a Master Falconer. Never met one of those. If I did meet one in a tavern I might buy them a drink and ask questions. It is just something that sounds fascinating. Training a raptor to fly away from you and go get you stuff. They kill for you. I am not so sure that I believe in it but I would love to go to a falconer convention. I bet there is one someplace. I am fairly certain there are interesting people there. I am so sure. How do we ever know what we will become? I never thought in one million years I would be a toymaker. I will never be a falconer though.

I think the people at the falconer conventions might look like Hemingway and have a Hitchcock edge to them. I would float around and learn and flirt and find the secrets to devotion.
They have to put love in those birds.
Love makes them fly.
Love makes them come back.
I know they would tell me that.

"I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful."

I am dreadfully tired of being outside.
It is hot and sticky and buggy and stop shuddering you outdoor folk- I like the outdoors.
I even paused to recognize Thoreau's birthday this week- I just grow weary of the boys demanding I spend all my time in the thick of summer.
I have tried to show them that turning the air on full blast and lounging in the house is fun.
They will have nothing to do with it.
They want to be mostly nude and outside.
I want to be in a cardi and drinking an iced coffee with my feet on wooden floors.

The truth is they play so freely and with such reckless abandon outside.
There is nothing more magical than to watch freedom like that.
In the house there are obstacles and rules and such, yet outside they seem to really hit a stride.
Outside they float and flicker.
Outside the happiness is really easier to see.
I am trying to love it more.
I did as a kid.
A country kid with whole summers spent in a creek.

I was thinking about the summer before middle school and we had a slumber party at my friend M's house. It was a normal garden variety nightmare for her parents involving rotary phones, pop music, and frozen training bras-
but in the early morning we decided to go for a hike.
M showed us a wooded area by her house where we had never ventured before
and it was like we went ape shit the moment we stepped into the tiny forest.

It was all magical and I had just read Bridge to Terabithia
and the world just stopped and these 6 girls played hard all day and made up a whole back story to the place and decided it was their place.

We were in love with the secret spot and play came naturally and imagination soared and nothing was the matter with any of us.
Nothing was wrong.
Nothing felt ridiculous to believe in there.
It was like we checked our insecurities and problems and suspicions of each other at the crisp leafy entrance to a forest that whispered.
To a forest that was dark like in the day.
To a forest that promised we could just be.

You know how things happen when yr young.
A few hours can be ten years and all of the sudden you believe something is real
and it is just so heartbreakingly beautiful that the world stops.

It was like that and we all believed that the summer
would save us from the impending hell of middle school.
But it didn't.
Time marched right on and tore us promptly apart from one another
like some sort of jacked up Stand By Me bullshit.

Some taking their rightful place at the head of the class, some discovering that you define the word slut for yrself in a small town, some smoking cigs in acid washed jean jackets down by the old catholic church, and some just really sad that childhood was pretty much gone.

I think if we had gone there everyday after school that things would have been different somehow for us. If we would have thrown our books across wooden tables and ran to a place where we could just be free then life would not have been so hard. I am not sure. I think it is just the way the world unfolds that middle school girls get surly and stomp and scream and invest more time in the mirror than in play. To turn against each other and let go. I guess there was nothing really that could of kept us in that forest. Perhaps we had not found it in time. But for some weeks in the mid 80's it was as right as rain. It was a place that I can only find in the play of my children now.
I can see it wash across their faces like a flush of red from the hot long day.


title post- Bridge to Terabithia 2007

I guess this post is kinda like when Ferris Bueller occasionally speaks to the camera.

All you can eat DVD buffet and dried cereal in bowls on the couch.
Do not judge me. I am superfuckingmom most days.
Mama bathes and throws on pajamas at three pm and we do not leave this hot house.
We do not do a thing except count down the hours
till Joe shouts through the metal mail slot.
It is always like this on Tuesdays.

I play magna doodle flipping drawfest 2009 with Blaise
until I cannot even draw one more requested kitty.
I slobber on my cheek as I flip in and out of consciousness.
I run my tongue across my slick freshly cleaned teeth.
Oh God why do I always book 8am dental appointments and think it a good idea?
I am tired.
I had slow moving dreams that I kept waking from as Blaise slapped me repeatedly in the face shouting no mummy no mummy DRAW!

I say yes all the time.
I worry a bit more than necessary.
I fear that I live in an alternative universe where John Hughes film quotes fall from my mouth like broken teeth
as the world punches me
and shouts at me
like an insolent child
Do more.
Grab the ring.
Write it all down and when did I start to beat myself up?
When did I gain this thirst for everything?
Like I have to cram it all in at once.
Like everyday is the day you have to make your own.
Oh- when I realized that it was.
I just need a good nights sleep.
Like fatigue can make you an unreliable narrator of yr own life you know.

"You met me at a very strange time in my life."

Joe and I are getting a new mattress delivered today. I am hopping the kids all up on sugar and DVDS after lunch in a vain attempt to delay napping as I want to nap today too. I want to throw my body down on this pillow top heaven and sleep. I never get a fricking nap. I am carving one out today. Our current mattress is so old that the sateen sticker at the bottom of it is one that has a very 70's sexy broad on it in a chiffon night garment. When I change the sheets she mocks me. She is a reminder that there is always something else that needs purchased and it never gets to be a bed! We are crippled from poor sleep and wander through our days propped up on coffee. Seriously, it's a banner flipping day here.

and just because it is my favorite poem and it is about sleep....

Variation on the Word Sleep


I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

-Margaret Atwood



title post- Fight Club 1999

"Great, or maybe we could go somewhere and just eat a bunch of caramels."

My dear friend and I had dinner last night and the conversation drifted towards her study of Gestalt therapy as it often does lately.
It happens because she is surrounded by it and because I am seduced by it.
I like the word. Gestalt.
I like saying it and jutting my chin and placing hands on hips and being very German sexy.I just like it.
And like other fantastic foreign words it cannot be translated into a single equivalent English thought. It means many things like pattern and shape and figure and whole form. I like that. My friend talks to me about the holistic approach to therapy and life. I like that. I never want my whole to be necessarily the sum of my parts.
I like that I am special and you cannot carve me up and serve me crazy or sane.

I like that my friend is working on all of this and giving it to me in small slices over beers and nachos. I should be in therapy- I am an artist. But I never have been and I don't think I ever will be. Much like religion I tend to really do most of my work right there in my noble frontal lobes. I really am rarely without thoughts and work in my mind. I know it sounds stupid, but it is true. But if I did buy into some sort of mode I might like this Gestalt thing. I don't know much more than what she gives me, but I am sorta thinking that at the crux of this philosophy is this little bitch called awareness.
I think it flows throughout the whole shebang and means that one can try and realize what they are doing psychologically and change the path. Their path. Or something like that. But awareness is frightening. It is raw and transparent like onion skin. It is what can perhaps hold us back forever. Our paths get so worn and traveled down don't they? We know them by heart and we don't even have to walk anymore or open our eyes- we kinda fly. But I think if we go outside of our comfortable zone and harness our inner Ferdinand Magellan then we can plow new paths and even invite others to walk down them with us. Right?

So anyways my thing I am working on is me. And it is hard work.
I want to believe those older ladies about ten years ago at weddings or other social functions. They would look at me and my unlined perfect skin and tell me things like "yr thirties are the best!" "Yr thirties is where you really know yrself"
You know shit like that...
Well, I am smack dab in the middle of mine now and fairly certain that there is a whole bunch more about me to learn.
What do you think? When do we ever know ourselves all the way?
When do we stop working it all out?


title post- Good Will Hunting 1997

Why won't you tell me what's inside yr head?

The topic turned to Switzerland the other night at the Holiday cookie party at our friends house. Folks were talking about Zurich and all I could do was transport myself back to Lucerne. I was 18 and it was like the prettiest place I had ever seen. It was like the Barbie dream house and gingerbread men and Snow White all rolled up in a place so far away from home I could do anything I wanted and the world spun round with angular momentum like the fancy Swiss watches in the storefront windows.

I bought a ring there from a fancy little shop and it was super expensive to me at that stage in my life. It was large and silver and I wore it everyday until the Spring day I married Joe. It reminded me of how free I felt and following bliss and such other things.

As I cleaned my bedroom yesterday I found the silver Lucerne ring in my jewelry box. I picked it up and fingered it and put it on. It stopped mid knuckle. A wave of annoyance hit me of course because you want to think that some parts of yr body can remain slim and tidy-but no- even my hands have aged and put on weight. Damn.

I sat down on my bed and held that ring. It's no secret that this year has been a year of looking back for me. It think it is a bit of the novel I am writing that has pushed me back to my historical self and caused me some grief. I think I have started to see mortality and it ain't pretty. I sat on that bed and I held that ring and squeezed it and let myself go back to a time I was so free that I cared about no one really. I was like a toddler with my egocentric views then and as much as I think about how great those days were and how skinny my fingers were and how gorgeous my surroundings were- nothing beats the fact that my fat hands get to wrap themselves around three boys named Joe, Finn, and Blaise.

I wanna take them to Lucerne someday.
I want to stand in the old town square and set my watch to the happiest time in my life.

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photos via luzern.org

i've kissed mermaids/rode the el nino

God I love Kim Deal.
The Pixies were playing on the radio today and it was nearly perfect despite the bitter cold outside and all I could think about aside from my love for Kim Deal was how watching this old video makes me long to rush out and buy five or six of the Gap's favorite t-shirts in black and develop a sort of uniform for 2009. I grew up in these t-shirts and I have decided they are to be born again in 2009 for me.
I have looked lately like a preschooler allowed to dress herself for the first time as I walk the streets with my children.
I am at any moment expecting a fashion ambush from Stacey and Clinton or some sort of planned intervention from my stylish friends at a pub one night. I need a daily uniform. Life is too hard otherwise. I am think black t-shirts and jeans with bright red lipstick. That is what I am thinking. Watch out 2009 I am gonna get my good looking on again.


My God her waist is small.

photos rolling stone and gap

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Bound with all the weight of all the words he tried to say

Who do you miss during this time of the year? I miss people far away and gone. I miss people who are here but not really here. Everything is so nicey nice in December but it is also a month full of big fat tears for some folks. How lucky to be smiling and garland wrapping round yr tree. I am trying to remember this. In the car yesterday I heard this song and it was a song played at a funeral of a boy too young to never be 35 years old like me right now.

And I wonder even when I am very old will I still remember the wood paneling and the hard cushioned seat of that tiny town funeral home and know that I am lucky and know that I am blessed?
And does my grandma miss my grandfather more now in December than any other month?
Wrap yr arms round those you love
tighter...

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All these rules don't apply/When you're high in the sky

good things

That way you exhale and round yr belly with relief as you see yr home in sight after a particularly long time away or while driving on ice

How having to pee very badly can almost feel like sexy times

No line at the drivers licence place and a smiling postal worker

Olfaction hysteria in the holiday season. I stand near the tree once a day and smell the woods I once lived inside

Gingerbread men and hot cider

buffalo chicken dip

photo credit: loving Annie Leibovitz lately. Her photos are like tiny drugs. How gorgeous is her White Stripes one?

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xo

There is some stuff over at Cheeky monkey play too

and I purposely won't turn the heating on

All day I have been pretending to be Kate Nash. Finn and I are talking British and I have styled my hair just so and am wearing a frock on a Saturday with my new shoes round the house.
I screwed up a bit with my list and forgot to have the "a whole day without saying NO to my children" day. I have decided that it is quite impossible to do this so instead of no in my normal wretched way I am doing it in a sweet perky British way.

No Darling. No Sweetie.

If Joe wasn't making toys outside in the SNOW (god love him)
he would think us all mad!
But he does think that my British accent is pretty darn good.
I have tricked his family numerous times on the phone.

But anyhoo, how much do you love Kate Nash? I lerv her.

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well they say the sky's the limit/and to me that's really true

I love me some anthropologie.
I wonder if they freaking love how much blogs chat about them. They really have it though. The whole package. My heart picks up pace when I walk through those large doors. Don't yrs?

I get that feeling (that of kinda too much stimuli but go a head and give it to me) feeling
small shudders of lust

Anyhoo. I like some of the new stuff online. I like it if we were a dress up family for Thanksgiving.
We are not.
I like this little lass.
I love a head wrap for particularly
mischievous days.

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