Just Me – M. LeAnne Phoenix

Missing You: A Memoriam One Year Later

jareth-happy

I was twelve and staying at home with my two little brothers when my aunt arrived to babysit us. She brought a movie and two board games with her. Clue and Monopoly were (and remain) my favorites, and since she and I were only eight years apart in age, we liked many of the same things. She pushed the videocassette into the player and hit the play button before crashing to the floor in front of the coffee table and tugging the lid off of Clue. The first notes of “Underground” came over the television speakers, and the barn owl flew onto the shiny black screen.

This was the night I met David Bowie.

Labyrinth would go on to stay with me for my whole life; to this day, Jareth, King of the Goblins is one of my favorite villains—and to this day, I also think he was more the victim than Sarah… but that’s probably just my bias, haha!—and Bowie’s songs for the film are some of my favorite songs. In fact, “Within You” is up in my top ten very favorite songs, and if I’m completely and utterly honest, it’s probably in my top three. That year, I begged my mother for the soundtrack for the movie and I played it over and over and over… I think I probably played it until it was dead. I started to write what we now know is fan fiction, and it was called Return to Labyrinth. I buried myself in the story, and wrote on it until I was fourteen. During the interim, I helped my aunt move into her new apartment across town. During unpacking, I saw the cover of the Heroes album and I asked her about it. She told me David Bowie was the man who’d portrayed Jareth in Labyrinth, and that he was a musician.

I wanted to know everything about him, and as was often back in those days, I was able to get pretty much everything I wanted while I was at her house, but as soon as I arrived at home, education was cut short. I did manage to convince my mother I needed his Never Let Me Down album, and I saved my money for a proper stereo, complete with a phonograph and a dual cassette player. His words really cut straight through me in the two albums I had of his. I already knew I wanted to be an author when I grew up, and the dreamer in me felt entirely summed up in these lines from “As the World Falls Down”:

There’s such a fooled heart
Beating so fast,
In search of new dreams,
A love that will last
Within your heart.
I’ll place the moon
Within your heart.

As the pain sweeps through,
Makes no sense for you.
Every thrill is gone.
Wasn’t too much fun at all,
But I’ll be there for you
As the world falls down.

And he was. Bowie took me straight through the end of junior high school, where I didn’t really fit in with anyone, and into high school, with his Never Let Me Down album. I’d dance in my room, twisting and spinning to make the only dress I ever loved flare and swirl. “Beat of Your Drum” and “Too Dizzy” spoke to teenage me.

You can go on dreaming every night
But I’m not letting you out of my sight
I’m ten times the man than any guy around
But you’re just itchin’-twitchin’-itchin’ for a break

There’s too much talking for a night drive
Too much mist in front of my eyes
But I’m helpless in love with you
But you’re just looking for a break

I was always and forever daydreaming, and trying to sort out if I was like all the other girls I knew, or if I was as different as I thought I was. As it turns out, some of the signs I was too busy burying, or convincing myself weren’t what they really were (wanting to kiss my best friend, but telling myself it was just wanting to kiss); were the cause of much turmoil for me. It didn’t help that I was continually bullied. My parents told me what most parents told their kids, “If you ignore them, they’ll stop.” The problem was that they didn’t; I just didn’t talk about it as much, and I tried not to draw attention to myself. I buried myself in writing, reading, and music.

My high school years could take me a zillion years to speak about, and while I was still heavily influenced by my aunt for much of my music taste during those years, we had a falling out my senior year that resulted in us not really speaking for a couple of years. During this quite dark time for me, I spent much time listening to The Cure, Depeche Mode, Bowie, George Michael, and Duran Duran. Bowie started the ascent for me, because these men helped me to understand my quirks give me power, give me an identity which solely belongs to me. I have only one choice: to embrace me for all my imperfections, or to be my own worst enemy and not accept what makes me ME.

Please help me!
Who can I be now? You found me.
Who can I be? Fell apart, you found me.
Now can I be now? You found me.
Now can I be real?
Can I be real? Somebody real.

From 1993-1999, I submersed myself in what I call my “goth years”. This means I let myself do all the things I wanted to do, and I made a wild array of choices. Many, many of them were not healthy choices, and for a variety of reasons. Some of them were good and have stuck with me to this day. On Halloween in 1993, the world lost a bright light as River Phoenix left this plane for the next. I’d been quite enamored with him, and I took his name as my pen name, partially to honor him, and partially to symbolize recognition of my changing life. Six months later, I discovered The Crow, and everything changed after I lost myself inside the dark world of James O’Barr’s world. I must have seen the film fifteen to twenty times in theatres, and when I found out it was a comic, I went hunting.

Wrong—
Love out of tune.
Sweet is the night,
Bright light destroys me!

I rekindled two friendships during this period, and both redirected me back to Bowie. In 1994, one of them brought me into the realms of Simon Gallup of The Cure. In 1995, I went to England with my aunt and thoroughly explored the island to which I’d still like to move. 1996-1997 brought me to Depeche Mode, and then 1998 brought me to terms with all that it meant to be me.

I fell in love. I’m talking arse over appetite, all in kind of love, and it was consuming. I’d posted some of my DM fan-fiction up on an Angelfire website, and linked my Depeche Mode email if they wanted to comment. She did, and we started talking on AOL instant messenger. Things I’d felt, things I’d wanted, things I’d been warned against in all my years of church going but found myself yearning for—they exploded in each conversation with Shanne. I even went up to visit her in Utah for a weekend, and the trip was amazing. A slight miscommunication when I returned to Texas split us up, and it wasn’t until 2002, on a chance instant messenger conversation—we were both in relationships at the time—that we were able to sort it out. Shanne was the one that got away, and she set the bar pretty damn high.

You touch me
I hear the sound of mandolins
You kiss me
And with your kiss my life begins
You’re spring to me
All things to me
Don’t you know you’re life itself?

With Shanne, as I said, I started to realize I was gay, and yet, years of programming still caused me to deny it, to call it bicurious, to call it the result of what had happened to me the night before senior prom. I tried so hard to keep from being what I called a glutton for punishment, by Southern Baptist Christian standards. In 1997, I came out of the broomcloset to my father and it went… well, to be blunt? HORRIFICALLY. I didn’t want that chasm to be reopened, so I kept it hidden. My brothers knew I’d experimented, but I don’t think they entertained it could be serious, that I could really be a lesbian.

Femme fatales emerged from the shadows
To watch this creature fair
Boys stood up on their chairs
To make their point of view
I smiled sadly for a love I could not obey

So I used the AOL personals section after her and started to talk to someone who went by the handle SandNSurf, I think. We hit it off quite nicely, until she came to pick me up for our date with her best bud in the car. All three of us went to the place she was going to take me, but they were closed, so we went back to her apartment, and watched a movie. I don’t remember her name, but when we went to dinner at Denny’s afterward, she told me I wasn’t gay enough for her because I wasn’t out yet. This hurt me and made me angry, because no-one has the right to tell anyone else when they should come out nor how they should do it, and they definitely don’t have the right to demand I do it to be with them.

This really confused me, and I was already confused. Was I gay? Was I straight? My earliest crush had been Jenny Barfield, my first real kiss had been Shanne, but I wasn’t gay enough?

So what you wanna know, Calamity’s child?
Where’d you wanna go?
What can I do for you? Looks like you been there, too.
‘Cause you’ve torn your dress
And your face is a mess…

2001 brought me to my twenty-sixth birthday and a job at an airline in July. I loved that job, and I met the man I’d call home for a year and a half afterwards. It ended horribly, and when I couldn’t function at the end, I picked up the pen I’d put down to spend more time with him, and tried very hard to recapture the level I thought I’d been writing at when I stopped. I started with a good fanfiction, one called Who Wants to Live Forever? and it was an alternate universe timeline, because my main character landed the character of Willow Rosenberg on Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead of her good friend Alyson Hannigan. She and a waiter at a local Italian restaurant, curiously named Orlando Bloom, become good friends, and when her relationship with her girlfriend goes south, she runs to him. Yes, eventually they become a couple, but then I wrote another story, one called I Feel You, and it explored me if I was in a same-sex relationship with a woman. I was able to write it, but I wasn’t able to say it. I still don’t understand why.

I, I can remember
Standing by the wall
And the guns shot above our heads
And we kissed
As though nothing could fall
And the shame was on the other side
Oh, we can beat them
Forever and ever

2005 brought about a friendship made with a wonderful woman, made over Yahoo instant messenger. We met through a writing group, where I was a moderator and she was the archivist. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong that year. I lost the job I’d had for two years, and the one I got to replace it wasn’t paying the bills. My car died a year after I got it, and when it died, I called her and told her I didn’t know what I was going to do. She called me back and told me her husband suggested me moving to Nevada. I laughed, and she told me to hold off until morning, because she wanted to be sure it wasn’t just the alcohol talking. In the morning, she called me and told me he was dead serious. We kind of threw things together over the next couple of months and then October 30, 2006 we took to the road.

I’d fallen pretty hard for her over the year of knowing her, and then over the next couple of years, it became worse. In July 2009, I finally took the step to come out. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, and I came out first to my best friend. The second person I came out to was a woman named Cindi, who ran a newsletter of Vegas lesbian/Pride events. I tried hard to make it to events, and I went to their July pool party, and in so doing, met the Hollys. We’re still friends. My job made it hard to get to much past the annual night Pride parade. (As much as I wish that had changed, my job still makes it hard to be active in the Las Vegas LGBT+ community.) I still had not come out to my parents or family in Texas; I was afraid to lose them, and in 2014, I found out my reasons why had merit.

No one can blame you
For walking away
But too much rejection
No love injection

My older younger brother, one I’d been close to for almost the entire time we’d been growing up until I moved to Nevada, decided I’d been the one to put a photo of two men kissing onto my personal Facebook timeline, which meant my entire Southern Baptist family could see it. There’s no way in the world I’d have ever let that happen, and even though my mother knew I wrote gay romance, she didn’t know her daughter was gay. I asked her to go through my whole timeline, and she said she couldn’t find it. I called my brother on the phone, asked him to explain to me where he found such a photo, because I wasn’t finding it. He stated repeatedly that he “wasn’t down with that gay shit,” and he “didn’t want to see two dudes kissing,” and that I “was the only one he could think of that was cool with that.” He told me it wasn’t personal, he just didn’t want to see it, so he was unfriending me on Facebook to avoid it. I told him I had gay friends, and so the only photo I had that was remotely controversial was the pink equal sign overlay on my profile photo that said I was for marriage equality. He stated again that I was the only one, and that he “couldn’t and wouldn’t tolerate that gay shit.”

Because of this incident, I resolved to never tell him I was gay. Also, the influx of his hate created a chasm between us, a chasm that still exists. Sometimes I wonder if it will ever close, other times I’m pretty certain it won’t.

But the film is a saddening bore
Because I wrote it ten times or more
It’s about to be writ again
As I ask you to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall…

I began publishing that year, and this led me to some people who retaught me to write. I learned quite a bit about self-publishing and I learned I am not a good marketer. Another thing I noticed? It was becoming harder and harder not to reveal myself to my mom and dad. Marriage equality and hate crimes against the LGBT+ community, were on the rise. I felt passionately about keeping my brothers and sisters safe, and so many were dying… I talked about it all the time. I got involved when I could, and I broached the subject when I was dating a girl briefly, broached it with my mother.

“What would you do if you found out one of your kids was gay?” I asked, disguising it as research for a book.

“I’d love them,” she replied simply. I think she saw right through me.

You can’t make love with money
You can’t make mistakes with babies

The election campaigning started full blast at the end of 2015 and I finally came to terms with myself. I was going to tell them. I prepared myself for this by writing a short story called “Glittering Soul” in which the events go down, and much of it was premonitory. I wish the love interest part had happened, but I was glad the incident with her brother did not. I looked towards going down for Christmas 2015, and telling them then, but I could not get the time off from the job that paid the bills. I was crushed, and all the tension that had built with knowledge there’d be release, compounded.

I heard David Bowie was coming out with a new album, and it was to coincide with his 69^th birthday. Blew my mind he was going to be 69, but I made plans to buy it and I gave the first single a listen. “Blackstar” was (and is) so cool, so addictive, so incredibly Bowie, and I knew I’d love the whole album. After Christmas, things in my life took a swift turn for the worse. At 1:41am on January 11, 2016, I saw a post on Facebook from one of my dear friends, Anna. Simply, it said: “No, no, no, no, no. Not David, not yet.” I answered back, “What’s going on?” Her reply was, “We have lost David Bowie.” It felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I mean, I’d never thought he was mortal. I never contemplated a life without him. In 1997, when he teamed up with Reznor for the Outside tour and for “I’m Afraid of Americans” I wasn’t certain he even aged, but dead? No… it wasn’t (isn’t) possible! He’s the Starman! He’s Ziggy! He’s the freaking Goblin King!

Live without your sunlight
Love without your heartbeat

How? What part of my life have you not influenced? You taught me it was okay to be me! You taught me it was okay to be different and to revel in it, and you taught me to appreciate life and that its very soundtrack was music. How am I supposed to live without you here? In this world? This world?!

Now. Not tomorrow.
Yesterday.
Not tomorrow.

And it happened. It really happened. We lost you. In the coming weeks and months, I’d watch the tributes to you—my favorite was Annie Lennox and Gary Oldman’s intro to Lorde’s “Life on Mars?” I still have it bookmarked in a tab from the day I watched it last February, and I still can’t watch it without tears.

I don’t know how to say it all with the right words. I don’t know how to convey how much my heart still hurts knowing you’ve returned to the stars. I don’t know how to tell you how much I, like many others, miss you. Most of all, I don’t know how to thank you for what all you’ve done in my life. Until the day I figure out my “right words,” I’ll look to the sky and when I see stars, I’ll think of you, resting amongst them, home again.

But man, do I miss your presence among us. I really do.

A city full of flowers
A city full of rain
I’ve got seven days to life my life
Or seven ways to die

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Ground Control to Major Tom…

Today was special. It was meant to be special, as it’s a day I have had in the works for quite some time, but it’s only been planned for about three weeks. In fact, on the sixteenth of May, I finally set the ball in motion by contacting my friend, Steve Rivas and asking if he was still in Vegas doing tattoos?

The reply I received within the hour was, “Yes, I am and how are you?”

The conversation was easy between us, and soon I had myself booked to get a tattoo on Memorial Day. I’d made a sketch, and I’d given him my references as well:

20160516_013909 Aladdin Bolt spaceman moon

I’d decided to finally get the second of what I termed “anti-depressant” tattoos. This piece celebrated many things. For one, it would be my semi-colon tattoo, and in my design, I had created the face mask and shoulder from the semi-colon. I wanted to memorialize David Bowie’s presence in my life, and how much the man and his music had shaped and freed me, so I chose the Aladdin Sane lightning bolt to easily represent him. I chose the spaceman to represent both myself and my depression. I chose the lyric “Living on the breath of a hope” from “We are the Dead” off of Diamond Dogs to remind me to keep fighting, that sometimes, all I had to do was open my eyes in the morning and take that first breath. I chose the lyric “I think my spaceship knows which way to go” from “Space Oddity” off of his 1969 David Bowie album, to represent the vow I made to myself to always keep fighting. I wanted the moon and the night sky to be a part of the piece because of how in love I am with the stars and space, and because when I look up at the stars, I don’t feel so small and insignificant. No, we all share the stars, and to me, they’re a lifeline. We are all made of stardust and when I’m far away from those I love, I look up at the sky and know they’re seeing the same stars, the same moon.

Plans made, we discuss pricing, and then the incredible wait of three weeks commences…!

I know from our conversation Steve’s very much looking forward to working on this with me, and some of the days in-between, it is all I can do to make it through, knowing that this tattoo is coming. Last night, I shoot him a text confirming we’re still on for our appointment and to tell him how excited I am about it!

He replies back with, “Yes, I actually started on it yesterday. Be done with the line drawing later tonight. Send you a pic by 7ish. It’s gonna be a good one.”

It had been a crappy week, so the sketch was well worth it!

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It didn’t have the top or the lyrics, and I didn’t see the semi-colon, but I thought of a place to put it. I reminded him of the words, which lyric went where, and then I was off to the races again with the real life job.

Today, I wake up and look at my bare right arm, and I smile as I get out of bed. Today is the last day it will be bare. Tonight, a spaceman would be born there, and he’d forever reach for the stars. Tonight, my love affair with music would be celebrated. Tonight… tonight, would bring Aladdin and his lightning. Tonight would birth a reminder of LIFE!

Of course, I have to earn the right to wear that badge, or so the real life job claims when the day is rough around the edges. I manage to get through with work and get home, changed, and washed up. I grab my bag and my best bud, and we head over to the Strip, making our way to the Stratosphere. Inside, we manage to find the Ship and Anchor Tattoo and Steve’s working on shrinking down the size a bit. We touch base and he asks me if I’ve eaten yet. When I say no, he tells me that I should, since we’re going to be here awhile!

Nik and I walk around the shopping area while he finishes up, and we decide on McDonald’s at the end. We eat, and when Steve approaches us and shows me the final design, I’m more than ready to go. We finish up, and head over to the shop. I finalize everything with payment and by sevenish, I am in the chair!

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This is the first of many photo texts I send my little brother, Matthew, who I’d kept in the loop about the tattoo, and my friend, Derek. All throughout the process, the man on the bed behind me getting his entire calf tattooed, his girl, and the tattoo artist working on him, the apprentice in the shop, and another artist (called Dobby!) compliment the work Steve does on my art. (He free-handed the semi-colon on the spaceman’s jetpack!) All during the process, I am wishing I could play some Bowie to commemorate the beautiful tattoo. When he gets to the color on the outside of the bolt–the red and blue–Steve looks up at me and says, “Wait a minute… the reference you have doesn’t show the top, which is why I drew it the way I did. Is there red at the top? WAIT! The spaceman and the moon are in the RED bolt, aren’t they? This part’s supposed to be all blue!”

I make a split-second decision and say, “What if we made suggestions of red here at the top, and at the top edges of the middle and bottom shadows?”

Steve ran with it. I think I was pretty good until we played with the blue shading! OUCH, I say! Lemme raise that to an OWWWWWIE! 🙂

Soon, Steve is shading the spaceman and touching up the stars… and every second that passes, I’m sitting there thinking, “How the hell does he interpret my needs in this tattoo so marvelously?” I know I told him at one point I needed to find a new word to use for his work, because amazing didn’t cover it anymore and was becoming repetitive, but ye gods, I wanted him to know how much I appreciated it, his time and him!

And then… we are here!

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I’m so jazzed… so jazzed! Steve cleans off and puts a balm of some sort on my arm, and he tells me to let it dry for a few minutes, and when it’s dry, he wants to take a few pictures. The other artist who’s been working on the calf tattoo behind me, chats me and Nik up for a few minutes, and then Steve returns. When he does, the other artist goes over to the computer controlling the Pandora radio station we’re all listening to… and I hear David’s wonderful voice start to come over the speakers.

Except, the artist has not only pulled up the song… he’s pulled up on YouTube the video for “Space Oddity.”

I think I lost any attention span I had left… and I was so touched! I kept my eyes on David, somewhat paying attention to Steve and the other artist, the latter of which said, “It’s a great backdrop, man! Make a video of the tat! This song in the background–”

That’s really all I heard as I watched David sing, my heart so full, my night complete. My dream for the tattoo completely realized, the backdrop (and the perfect song!) played without me even having to ask! It was all I could do to not cry for joy.

As an aside… Momma, please don’t be mad it’s bigger than I said it would be! 🙂

O, Wilt Thou Leave Me So Unsatisfied?

Today, I’m posting a mere day ahead of time because I’ve so many things to attribute to my beloved Bard.

shakespeare-john-taylor-portrait

First, a few stories to tell…

The first memories I have to centre on old Bill Shakespeare are from grade school when my parents acquired some cassette tapes of classical piano music. I fell in love with this version…

… and then, in seventh grade, I got to see the film version, starring Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. I was hooked completely. My English teacher couldn’t teach me enough about this wonderful playwright who had ensnared my imagination!

In seventh grade, we covered Romeo & Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and a bit of the Scottish play. I tried to wrap my brain around some of the others in my free time, but my 12-13 year old self wasn’t ready for it.

In tenth grade, we took almost a semester out to study the Bard, and during this time, we were able to watch multiple film versions of multiple plays AND my English teacher–Mrs. Mary Clarke–took us to the Richland High School production of Macbeth! They did a fabulous job with it, and to this day, when I read the beginning lines with the Three Witches, I get chills as I remember the first line coming from right behind me (I had an aisle seat) and the three working the crowd as they made their way to the stage. Also, in those few months, I would work with a friend of mine named Jennifer and we’d plan this crazy modern rendition of the Macduff/Macbeth fight scene and we’d practice it and take the whole class to the cafeteria to perform it… and I’d lose my nerve and remember all my lines, but chicken out on the footwork with the toy tommy gun. *blush*

It went better when we were studying Romeo & Juliet and our teacher asked that we pair up with a partner and do a scene from the play. My best friend and I did the scene while Romeo was hanging out with Mercutio and Benvolio, waiting on the Nurse to bring word. The banter was amazing, and our rehearsals on the phone leading up to our performance, was nothing short of involved. When I hear the word “pink,” I still mentally riposte, “Pink for flower,” and then hit back with, “Why then, my pump is well-flowered!” 😀

My senior year of high school, I decided I wanted to be an actress, and I auditioned for a Dallas acting studio, utilizing the monologue Lady Macbeth gives in Act I Scene V, lines 37-58.

” Give him tending;
He brings great news.
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood;
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry “Hold, hold!”

Great Glamis! Worthy Cawdor!
Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter!
Thy letters have transported me beyond
The future in the instant.”

My second year of college, my irritating Creative Writing teacher, Ms. Cuyler Etheredge, was leading us through poetry… and of course, no-one does poetry like old Bill! While covering iambic pentameter, she had us write what she called responsive poetry. Still amazed by the above monologue, I wrote the following:

O! Thy cloak of midnight slides in curls down thy
Small back as the evil curls upon thy lips;
The rails of thy arms raise gracefully to thy sister the
Moon! Yea, Diana is thy mother, and the Furies thou
Hast called upon to eat at thy soul, to take the very
Contents of thine own soul; they art thy servants
And having arrived to darken to pitch that
Which thou callest thy heart, thou hast called them also
To sup on that which thou callest thine own kindnesses,
To get drunk on thy breasts stale wine!
My lady! O, my queen!
Darest not this horrible deed! Staineth not thy
Sweet hand; staineth not the soul of thy husband!
Thou doth plan for thine own purposes and care not
A wit for the king . . . care not for thy husband that shall
Be thy king; yea, even now thou knowest the darkness
Of the deed thou wouldst perform.
Sweet lady!
Hurry not to thy chambers; bescreenest thyself not from the
Very heavens that thou callest not upon.
Plan not this deed; I beg of thee.
Lady of Glamis thou art! Lady of Cawdor
Thou shalt be! Happier with these thou wilt be
Than toppling to thy death on thy flagstone steps, dear lady.

Part of the above poem appears as one of David Blackthorn’s in The Covenant. I’ve always been proud of that piece of artistry. I attribute my love of poetry and my use of poetry as a tool to suck out the bad emotions and record the really good times, to old Bill.

That same year, I fell in love with another author called James O’Barr, who wrote another tragedy centred around love: The Crow. Eric Draven’s love of Shelly Webster seemed so close to Romeo & Juliet, but it was so much darker… and so much madder that I fell head over feet for it. I immersed myself in the music of The Crow (O’Barr was a big fan of Joy Division and The Cure) and in Edgar Allan Poe, and of course, old Bill’s tragedies.

Enter 1996… and Baz Luhrmann… and Leo and Claire.

Romeo + Juliet

Ye gods, I loved that adaptation. It was flashy and perfect and somehow, it made Bill’s words seem normal-speak. I saw it in theatres so many times. I bought the soundtrack and the score– both of them! Of course, after seeing this in theatres, I went on a binge of film adaptations. I watch a ton of Branagh in those days.

Over and over, Bill haunts my words. As I wrote my own stories then and even now, references to Shakespeare seep into my writing. Characters who love him, obsess over him like I do.

The second novel I ever published, Butterflies are Free, was a nod to Romeo and Juliet in that my guys are star-crossed, and while they do say the three words, they also say, “R & J, my love,” to signify the depth of emotion they feel. Of course, The Covenant gives us David, who tells Jonathan that he ranks over The Bard.

Then, of course, there’s a famous long-running sci-fi show, aired on BBC since 1967, that when renewed in the early 2000’s did a show to include old Bill… and J.K. Rowling. 🙂 It was awesome. I loved it entirely.

And then… enter this wonderful idea to celebrate good old Bill, my Phai and Jen, and a story I tried to write a few years ago… and all of a sudden, I’m writing about Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Nothing has ever felt this good… nor this right. Truly, no-one has ever been able to sum up life in all its light and dark, quite the way he always has. Not for me.

To tie this up, especially since I have a big habit of running on at the mouth, I will end with one of his most iconic lines. Taken from Macbeth, Act V Scene V, lines 19-28:

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Happy birthday, Bill. I’m so glad to have known you all these years.

“Carry On, My Wayward Son”

Carry on, my wayward son
There’ll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don’t you cry no more…

Once I rose above the noise and confusion
Just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion
I was soaring ever higher
But I flew too high

Masquerading as a man with a reason
My charade is the event of the season
And if I claimed to be a wise man
It surely means I don’t know

Carry on, my wayward son
There’ll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don’t you cry no more…

I realize that if I saw the title of this post, I would think one of two things: A/ This post is sure to have something to do with the Winchester brothers, or B/ What the heck’s she talking about Kansas for?

Actually, it has to do with neither.

I know that I’ve been all but silent, but for the occasional likes and shares. I know I’ve not been social in any sense of the word. I know that conversation takes effort put forth by both parties, and I know that I’ve not been very forthcoming to any of the people that really care for me, but my mother said it so well the other day when she apologized for not taking my call [something she never does]:

“I just really didn’t feel like talking.”

Lately, I just don’t. Maybe that’s a bad thing for a writer, because apparently, being a writer means I have to be anything but what I feel like being, which is not even a social introvert. Lately, I feel as though if I say what I feel, it will be the wrong thing to do/say/think/feel. I think that if I say “this is how I feel,” then someone will say, “well, that’s YOUR fault” or “you feel that way because you’re a selfish b*tch” or “I can’t believe you’re saying this to me” or WHATEVER.

I feel damn near invisible. No, that’s not right. I feel unnecessary. I feel like that person everyone knows is there, but that no-one really takes the time to get to know. Honestly, I kind of feel like if I closed up shop, no-one would know the difference. I feel like the only reason that people at work would miss me would be because there’d be no-one to open/close the restaurant, and I kind of even feel that way here in cyberspace, too. There are a couple of exceptions, but for the most part, I really understand that video that circulated a month or so ago–the one that talked about people having 250,000 “friends.” (How would a person go about maintaining that many relationships?)

Maybe I feel like this because I’m nearing the big 4-0 in March. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been someone else’s heart. Maybe it’s because I never did get to be a mom like I wanted when I was a kid. Maybe it’s because not having a family of my own [life partner/wife/kid/et cetera] means not having ANYONE at the end. Maybe it’s because I’m not as talented as I wish I was and I’m beginning to wonder if I should find a new career choice. Maybe it’s because I’m angry at myself for missing the last opening night for a Tolkien movie and still not having put forth the effort to see it. I don’t know! I don’t know much of anything and I’m not even sure why I’m telling anyone this, but I haven’t updated this since that ill-fated Christmas special I’m ashamed to say did absolutely nothing to help my kind collaborator, Miss Leona Windwalker.

Before that, I think, aside from reblogs, it had been at least a month since I did anything, and so I felt an explanation was needed.

I haven’t made any rash decisions, and I don’t plan on it. I just know that this jumbled up whine-fest is the best explanation I can come up with, so if there are people out there that read this little thing, know that I’ve been listening to Carry On, in Kansas form and in 200th Episode Supernatural form in effort to build myself back up, but that it may take a concerted effort to do so.