words

If you watch your friends carefully, sometimes you’ll notice their features beginning to change; curling up into themselves, looking within rather than without. Hurt feelings or a distracting life event may precede this – sleepy disappointment, confusion. Sometimes your friend will accomplish something really impressive and then their features fall into themselves because the person feels finished. Or would like to before he or she gets boring or fucks up again. This would never happen to, say, a seagull. Seagulls don’t stop looking around with their shiny opaque discs. God knows what they see. Everything, I guess. And bags of McDonalds. If a seagull stopped looking without, it’d starve to death. We like to feel more complex than seagulls, though this allows for a host of icky ailments to take root.

Anyway, snapping your fingers in front of a friend’s face could wake them up. “I’ll snap you out of it!” you think and grab their face with a Welcome to Earth grin. Show ’em something majestic, play ’em a big, fat song. Make ’em think you like ’em more than you do ’cause you actually do as it turns out. I love it when this works. I hate it when it doesn’t. When it works, it’s because you were sharp enough to call their bluff; when it doesn’t, your friend’s face melts in your grasp and their blurry features begin to resemble those of a blind cave fish. “Seagull’s better,” you murmur helplessly, as your friend slips away.

Love,
Kristin

This month’s Throwing Muses demo, Bluff / Blurry is here. Find this demo 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.

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.