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© 2004-2008 Linda Escaip
"I may be grumpy, but I like you."
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The Suns and Moons of the Grumpiest Girl in the Room.
Welcome to my journal, Maybelline.
At The Moment 16-April-2005 8:53.p.m.
All of this walking at night is doing something to my dreams. My skin is absorbing the heavens like oxygen. I don't know how to explain what it does to me, the night sky. It is a perfect piece of deep blue quartz that I want to hold in my hand, feeling the smooth coolness between my fingers. I want to embrace it like an old friend I have been away from far too long; the sort of embrace that wraps around you a million times and begins a gentle swaying motion from side to side, like the pendulum of a clock, signifying the time that slipped by during the absence, and the movement of the moment, which stays inside itself always. Forever is right this minute. There is no past or future—there is only right now, ever. I want to fall into it—the sky, the moment.
I feel it inside me like I feel the oceans, the planets, the galaxies beyond this one. It shifts and turns, going back over itself endlessly. When I close my eyes, the light coming down through the top of my head is the constant glow of the moon inside me, the coruscation of the stars. Everything the moon has seen, I have seen too. La Luna, however, is a better witness, for she takes nothing to heart. Like a great writer, she watches silently without judgement, collecting information for the rewriting of everything. I am part of that, but keep forgetting.
Today is a battleground of harsh words and heartless criticisms. The sound of my own voice during these times is about as pleasant as a symphony of leaf blowers and truly egregious bagpipers. It appears I have nothing kind to say to myself, so I am sitting here quietly. But not so quietly; I can still hear it through the sips of tea I'm drinking, trying to escape with every breath. I'm chewing leftover Kung Pao chicken to keep it down, but even that has proven defective.
At the moment, my voice is covering the cracks in the ceiling.
And I do not know where I am going. I don't know what I'm doing. Every last dream and plan fell from my heart while tearing out of somewhere like a bat out of hell. They come back like homing pigeons, tattered and dusty, resembling a loosely-based rendering of what they were. They whisper loudly about 1968 and the alleged distance between then and now. They mourn the lack of fruition. They bite at my tongue as I try to talk back. They want me to know without question that everything is my fault. They ask me to walk to the edge and jump right the hell over, so they can free themselves from me and find someone with worth. An ounce. A teaspoon. Something more than I ever had.
Now there's some drama for you. But I'm the one doing all that, not the dreams, the plans, the wishes, the hopes—they wouldn't behave with such insolence. Hope never cursed or blamed anyone. This acceptance of myself, it does not come easily to me. I struggle with it daily. I have a different set of rules for myself than I have for everyone else. You get away with murder. I get away with nothing. I feel empty. But if I were full I guess there'd be little room for change.
I want everything. I want what I came here for, not just the taking, but the giving. I want to realize my worth more than anything I've ever wanted in any lifetime. And I don't want to feel it because you love me or desire me or tell me sweet words that make me feel better for an hour or two. I want to feel worthy when the phone doesn't ring and when the rejection letters arrive in droves, and when you look the other way after I've smiled at you. I want to feel worthy when you write to me and tell me to go fuck myself and when all the things I ever did come crashing down around my feet and all I can pick out of the bits are the unsightly things I wouldn't want you to see. I want to feel worthy when I ask you a question and you ignore me completely, and when I meet you for the first time and you look at me like I'm from another planet. I want to feel worthy when I am left out and when I'm the last resort and when you look right through me.
I have been hurt by so many people. Who hasn't? Some things are harder to forget. I replay them like worn-out records of tunes nobody in their right mind would have a hankering to hear. I should drop them and watch them crack in pieces like that old 78 rpm my mom used to have (until I dropped it). I don't think I can even begin to tell you what the title was. It was just an enjoyably loopy mother of a song sung by some freaked-out happy lady whose smile you could not only hear but practically taste. (It's possible, you know, to taste a smile. Or a colour, a shape. It's called synesthesia, and it rocks.) Anyway, what the hell am I going on about? Let me just get these three things off my tits.
Don't tell someone you never loved them. Ever. I promise they don't require this information. And don't tell someone you've just broken up with that you've met a titillating tall Texan named Tiffany. (You know there is genuine comedy running through your life when someone stomps on your heart by way of a tongue twister.) Don't tell a person no one will ever love them, no matter how much their behaviour is pissing you off. These things hurt.
I received a message in a dream the other morning from some guy—a disc jockey. "Smaller dreams yield better results." But he didn't mean I'd have to settle for less; he meant that the smaller dreams make up the whole, the one big dream. They're like stepping stones in place of having a starting point with miles and miles between you and wherever your huge dream resides.
A couple weeks ago I met (in a dream) a family of people from the 1800s. The kindness that emanated from these folks was heartbreaking. Their bodies were tall and lean, and they wore plain clothing of varying shades of gray and smoky blue. The woman wore a bonnet. (Sassy!) The whole dream centered around an explanation of some past life of mine, something troubling that I had carried with me into this life. Everything made sense, and I felt relieved and joyful. Half asleep, smiling, I mumbled the details quietly to myself, hoping this would solidify the memory. When I woke up the details were gone.
The dream I am in the process of deciphering is the one where I killed Batman because he was being a lascivious bastard. I was driving my old car up a mountain road (I'm lousy with mountain road dreams), carrying two passengers: my best friend (The Lovely Bea) and My Favourite Canadian. There was a car following us, and at some point I pulled over to the edge of the cliff and got out, as did my passengers. The person who had been following pulled up behind us and got out of his car as well. It was Adam West, television's Batman, dressed in slacks and a dress shirt. He towered over me, ogling the two ladies behind me, but not in a friendly or flirty manner. He wore an oily, smug grin that coolly disguised something maniacal, but I saw it, mostly because I'm crafty. I felt his bad intentions. Being the responsible protector I am, I whipped out my sword, which in this case was one of those sticky pet hair/lint rollers. (Hey, I have cats.) I knew I wasn't really holding a sword, but had the idea that I could transmute it into one if I believed it was a sword. I thought of my friend Rae and her tai chi sword training. I tried to imagine how she would annihilate this potential monster and started these moves that were at first met by his derisive laughter. But the more I did it, the more my body felt confident with the movement, and a primitive warrior-type sound then accompanied each thrust of the blade, for the sticky lint roller was now a full-blown, magnificent sword.
Ol' Batman was starting to get nervous, trying to keep that grin affixed to his face, attempting to mock me through his fear as he dodged my efforts to impale him. I don't think the sword made contact with his body even once, but what he didn't realize was that he was taking a step back every time I lunged forward, and soon the space between him and the cliff's edge was nothing at all. And he fell right over. I had defeated him—all five-foot-two of me. I may be short, but I'm mighty.
Fourteen years ago yesterday I had my first show. So much time has slipped past me, under foot and over head. I am different now. I know more and I know less. I wouldn't want to go back, no matter how much I obsess over my age and all I haven't done yet that I think I should have done by now. The music is still there. The desire never left me. I remember after one of the Luna Park shows, I guy waited for me to come out from backstage. He thanked me for opening his eyes to the unfortunate way he'd been treating his girlfriend. Music is so powerful. You can move mountains with it, you can change individual worlds. Whenever you pour the contents of your heart into something creative, people will feel it. I still have everything I had back then, plus a few more years of being in the world. I have witnessed and experienced more. Independent music is so exciting now; people are having these great, fulfilling, lucrative careers, and they don't have to answer to anyone. I get so sad for the musicians out there who are plugging away with their main focus on getting signed. It has to be about the music or you're missing something huge: the point. And when you miss that, the magic starts slipping through your fingers. I will never do that again.
When you have an artistic talent, it's strange how so often the focus moves away from sharing that talent as your way of seeing the world, and moves into how you can make money with it. And the desire for fame, the ultimate goal, takes over and becomes the central point. And when you shift your attention in that way, it is so bloody easy to forget what motivated you in the first place. You can get covered over with promises never kept by people you hope will push you up the ladder to some place where you'll have all the money you ever wanted and you'll never be blue again. And everyone will adore you forever and ever. But it doesn't work that way.
We just wander about, trying to feel important, trying to remember our worth. Not one outside influence will ever fill that completely; it will always empty out. It has to come from inside you—that's the real stuff. And it's the simplest thing in the world, but very few people ever realize it and keep up with it. You have to just believe in your worth, even if you think you have a million conflicting reasons why you should think otherwise. You have to keep up with it daily, reminding yourself through the arguments against it in your head. The more you spend time believing it, the more that space inside you becomes infused with it, so that eventually you won't need anything outside yourself to make you feel better. And if you do get what you want, it's likely to be more satisfying, because it won't mean everything.
I keep seeing these gorgeous meteorites while I'm out walking. It makes me wonder who else saw the same one just as it flashed across the sky. A few nights ago I watched one sail across the moon. It left me breathless. I make wishes on them and trust they will come true. There is magic everywhere.
Quote From My World
"You'd never see a cat wearing a real fish hat. You know, 'cause they'd eat it."
"Cat's don't normally wear hats."
Well, I'm off to walk beneath the moon inside this moment, the one that keeps spinning interminably and contains everything. See you there.
Linda
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