Tag Archives: John Sebastian

What A Day For A Daydream. . .

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Alright, alright, alright.  So I love John Sebastian and the Lovin’ Spoonful.  I was totally born out of my time, musically (and perhaps in many other respects).  John Sebastian is not only an extremely gifted songwriter, but he has very much rolled with the times and the changing memes of music.  And my parents (who were there) describe him simply as “Mr. Woodstock.”  I believe it.  I can see it.

Today I ended up spending in my own sort of Daydream.  I had what is commonly called “stuff” to do this morning, including an insightful visit with my primary care doctor.  Now he has been my doctor for more than half my life, so he’s seen a lot of shit go down in me.  He’s funny, he doesn’t believe that this time is any different from the brief periods of “stability” or “euthymia” that have happened for me in the past.  Okay.  That’s alright.  I get it.  But his nurse said to me, as she was checking me out after my appointment, “There’s something about you that looks different.”

A million superficial things could be credited.  Wearing my contact lenses instead of my glasses.  Just having had my hair touched up last week.  The way I did my makeup today.  But I choose not to credit them.  I think she saw the sparkle emanating from my eyes.  The one my mom saw when she stopped me in the hall last Sunday night.

Something looks different about me because something is different, within me.

So this afternoon, I figured I would catch up on some emails, comment responses, other blogs, do things for this blog and for Canvas, and on and on (incidentally, check out the awesome new piece of art in my sidebar, courtesy of Tallulah “Lulu” Stark, my very good friend, co-founder of Canvas, and all-around totally inspiring lady).

But it was (and is) such a gorgeous day Where I Live, and I wasn’t going to waste that.  So I slathered on the sunblock – I hope you lovelies have all bought a new bottles for this year, because they pretty much need replacing annually – and took my laptop out onto the back deck, along with some assorted sundries.

Well, apparently I have never played with my laptop outside.  I discovered that I couldn’t read the screen of it with my sunglasses on, and the light was much too intense for my baby blues with my sunglasses off.  I pondered what I should do for about half a second.

“And even if time ain’t really on my side,
It’s one of those days for takin’ a walk outside,
I’m blowin’ the day to take a walk in the sun
And fall on my face on somebody’s new-mowed lawn.”
~ John Sebastian

So what if I didn’t end up walking, but instead reading in the sun for hours without my mind telling me I should be getting stuff done?

Besides, I did enough walking yesterday.  I saw my Sunshine (aged nearly nine) and her sister, my Wild Thing* (aged very much four), and they dragged me walking all over the world!  We walked to the park, played there, then home again for lunch, then we walked to the nearest Starbucks because they wanted Frappuccinos (I know, right?), then home again. . .  I thought it bookended this week beautifully.  Last Sunday with my Babygirl, yesterday with my Sunshine and my Wild Thing.  Now I just have to get them all together at once, and watch the fun that ensues.  :)

So that was my afternoon.  And I’ll get to the rest of everything during moments less sun-filled.

Moral of the story:  Time is always on your side.  You just have to figure out how to spend it.

*You now have all of their names: my Babygirl, my Sunshine, and my Wild Thing.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Do You Believe In Magic?

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I do.  Because of John Sebastian and the Lovin’ Spoonful, and their capacity to lyricize something that I felt but didn’t know how to express.

At this point in my life, I don’t believe in much.  I used to wish, to have hope, to trust that love would make everything all right, and that if I just tried hard enough, I would find something that could allow me to live a life free from constant mental anguish.

Those urges, impulses, and ideas all got shot to hell, for various reasons.  Although I do still believe inside of me that I’m not trying hard enough.  I’m working on that one.  I read a study recently which reported that people who are most understanding and forgiving of others are also generally hardest on themselves.  No kidding?  I could have told you that one for free.  But, then again, I wouldn’t have been able to isolate it as a scientifically provable human trait.  I would have just said that I was a fuck-up and because I could understand what causes others to act the way that they do, I should be able to apply those principles to my own life to make me a better human being.

I used to be able to hide from life and take comfort in my favorite books.  ”I have my books/And my poetry to protect me. . .” (~ Simon and Garfunkel, ‘I Am A Rock’).  I would read everything that I could get my hands on, during every free second that I found.

I haven’t been able to sit down and focus on anything longer than a magazine or newspaper article since I underwent ECT.  Which was more than a year ago.  That hasn’t stopped me from trying to, though.  At the moment, I’m hanging everything literary on Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.  It’s a book that has been very good to me in the past, and I’ve read it enough times that if I set it down for a month or more, I can pick it back up and still know exactly what’s going on.

Sometimes, when I’m too far gone to read, but not so far as to be unable to focus at all, I can watch old films or good television shows on DVD.

But there frequently come times when it’s all just too hard.  When I can’t lose myself in Katharine Hepburn or Miranda Cosgrove, and I can feel the weight of the world pressing down on my chest as though I were three miles beneath the ocean without benefit of pressurized air to breathe or encompass me.

“And when the static’s screamin’ louder than your life/Just try to ride the waves in the air tonight. . .” (~ Goldfinger, ‘Radio’).

It’s then that I turn to music.  It may not fix me, or even make me functional again, but it does pull me back from the edge, from the point where if a feather landed on my back, I would go reeling over into the abyss, not sure if I was ever going to hit the bottom.

And if there is anything worse than bottoming out, it’s knowing that as low as you are, you can and will get lower.  I don’t really give a shit when people say, ‘Everyone has their breaking point,’ and ‘You have to hit bottom before you can climb back up.’  Because the bottom doesn’t exist for me.  I never hit.  I just keep falling, falling, falling. . .

Moral of the story: “Do you believe in magic/In a young girl’s heart/How the music can free her/Whenever it starts/And it’s magic/If the music is groovy/It makes you feel happy like an old-time movie/I’ll tell you ’bout the magic and it’ll free your soul/But it’s like tryin’ to tell a stranger ’bouta rock ‘n’ roll. . .”  (~ The Lovin’ Spoonful, “Do You Believe In Magic?”)

To John Sebastian, a.k.a “Mr. Woodstock”

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.