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In Palm Springs, California, we inherited a sad, little tree. It came with our rental and it was more like a stick with branches, but it was stuck in the ground and didn’t seem quite dead yet, so we called it a “tree.” After a few months of cremating sun and no rain, a wrinkly little fruit appeared on our sad stick. Colorless and shapeless, the fruit continued to grow into a slightly bigger wrinkly, colorless blob. Which, on careful inspection, revealed itself to be a pomegranate. This seemed magic to us. Pomegranates are…well, fancy. Our stick was not.

One boring afternoon, we decided to pick the pomegranate. Figured it was just gonna fall off anyway. And ruby red jewels that taste better than jelly beans could only help us be less bored, right? So we hacked the pomegranate off it’s sad, little Giving Tree and then chopped the fruit in half. Inside were not ruby red jewels, but clear baubles. Cubic zirconium pomegranate seeds. We were bummed. Then we tasted them. They were better than better than jelly beans. In fact, they were better than just about anything.

We looked it up. White pomegranate is a thing. A good thing.

We felt we’d wronged the little stick and swore never to be so shallow again. In fact, we planted some of the magnificent seeds nearby, in the hope that another Giving Stick might make a future renter’s afternoon less boring with white pomegranate seeds and a lesson in small.

Clark’s Nutcracker is a grayish bird that is capable of planting entire forests. It can stash 30,000 seeds in one season; a huge surplus that, if not eaten by something else, will eventually germinate and grow into trees. This bird, like your children and your flowers and your kindnesses, is not wealthy or famous or attention-seeking and yet it sure seems more important than a lot of the crap we humans pay attention to. We’re ephemeral, brief moments of will. “Us too shall pass.” We have no time to waste.

Love,
Kristin

This month’s Throwing Muses demo, Clark’s Nutcarcker is here. Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support my work by becoming a subscriber is here.

A couple of guys spilled off their motorcycle in front of us and died instantly, under a full moon. That desert moon that still shines on LA through the light noise.  It actually seemed extra dark right then, even with the neon and the streetlights glaring and that crazy moon. The men crumpled to the ground and then froze in two homunculus heaps as their motorcycle spun away and crashed on its own against the sidewalk.

When we saw that the cops were gonna leave the men lying there, we realized they were no longer men, but bodies. All us traffic people who were still alive took a minute to feel sad and then we drove on. Our car was headed for the real desert, the unspoiled one, the one that gets so freakishly dark, you can’t see your own feet. Sparks and sparklers and stars light up the stuff that really matters there.

And when the sun appears, it opens everything up to squinting eyeballs. No secrets in the daytime desert. You cook and blister in its expansiveness and freeze in its contracted shadows. This is rising to an occasion, though, so it doesn’t hurt.

Keep driving. Cross the bottom of the country and watch the landscape green up and wet itself down. Rain seeps through everything in the American south, whether it’s raining or not. Just the memory of past rain soaks the trees, whose branches hang heavy and drip mystery moisture. Sparks and sparklers light up the day here.

And rising to this landscape’s occasion means clean dreaming, swearing off parody, soaking in wicked memories that drip off the branches like so much forgotten rain.

Love,

Kristin

This month’s Throwing Muses demo, Cherry Candy/Dripping Trees is here. Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support my work by becoming a subscriber is here.

Ugly couches’re like ugly dogs: they’re everywhere and they have a certain quirky charm. Maybe you’d prefer a pretty dog or a clean, lovely couch…you don’t know; it hasn’t come up. You feel lucky to rest your head on something – in a dressing room, an apartment, a hotel lobby. You tame squalor by allowing it to suit you.

Musicians know that, like tamed dogs, a tamed couch will follow you around. “I coulda sworn I saw that couch in Milwaukee,” I think, staring down at a stained hunting scene stretched over a seat cushion in Denver. And then again in Santa Fe. This particular couch followed me all the way to Nottingham, England. I squinted at it suspiciously. So it can swim, I thought, placing my backpack strategically over an ancient, gray wad of gum.

The filthy couch that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, of course. Not true of the bottomless coffee cup you try to fill up the next morning. Not with coffee necessarily. You’re hoping that the big waitress in the sky’ll deem you worthy enough to pour a hunk o’ liquid love into your fragile, china cup. Which she often does. However this fragile china, like I said, is bottomless. You may have tamed a gum-encrusted seat cushion, but it is unlikely you will ever tame the draining vessel that is your heart. It is voracious. “How many sugars you want with that?” she asks, refilling your empty cup. “How many you got??” you ask her, panicking.

She does her best to keep you full of sweetness, because the waitress is good at her job when you can catch her eye. So you begin to feel a little stronger, a little less panicky. Skating along on this temporary lift of enough, you begin to notice the fragile china hearts gripped by white knuckles all around you. My god, they’re everywhere! Then you remember the packets of sugar you carry around in your pockets with other people’s names on them and count them, hoping you have enough to ease their pain. You do, of course. This love, the kind that fills draining, fragile vessels, is, of course, bottomless.

Love,

Kristin

This month’s Throwing Muses demo, Curtains / Triangle Quantico is here. Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support my work by becoming a subscriber is here.