Strawberry Wine

Here is the New Couch.  It is more modern, a Mad Men's couch (listen).  It is the one I picked up at Red's storage unit.  I can have it for a while, she says.  We'll see.

Q called me tonight to yell at me about calling him nostalgic.  He says my entire blog is, but I disagree.  The past never wins in my view of things.  It is a blight we must move away from.  Memoir is not nostalgia.  It can be, but it does not need to be.  He told me I need to read his last post, so of course I won't.  I don't want to argue.  I don't care.  He yelled at me all night, but it is O.K.  That is how we are.  "Don't be mean," I told him.  And then he sent me entire great albums to listen to.  That is how he is.  So if you read his blog and it is about me, don't pay it any attention.

I was cooking up images tonight and thinking about how sad life is, and thinking, too, that that is the reason we have to be happy.  In the face of it, I mean.  We can't let it win until it does.  But until that time, we must refute it as much as we can.  Everything is wrong, I think, but then something happens to make me smile or make me laugh.  The cat bumps my leg or Red says she wants to come by or somebody I know tells me something very unexpected.  And most people have more of that than I.  Really, a quiet cup of tea is usually all I get.  But sometimes driving home, the sunlight falls just right.  And maybe Q is right.  Maybe that is nostalgia, though I don't think so, for it is not overly sentimentalized but simply a reminder of the scarcity of events and time, a reminder that they can be transcendentally sacred and therefore repeatable.  Or so it is in "The Sacred and the Profane."  Well. . . not really.  I have made that up from what Eliade says.  


Here is a song by Ryan Adams.  The boy was full of something. . . and talent, too.  His albums are not nearly as good as the live recordings he is so generous to let anyone make of his concerts.  This recording is from somebody's pocket recorder made when Adams was still playing small clubs all the time.  Later, when he was more famous (he was in a couple Gap ads, one with Willy Nelson), he let people record directly off the main soundboard and post the recording online.  Hell of a thing.  


I think I am being nostalgic.