on a darkling plain.

i am the child of the wasteland....a land of haunted houses and monsters i call father. dark talents run in the family, but i shatter the glass to let the moonlight in, not to destroy something fragile for the feeling of breaking beneath my fists. all i can do is scream, crawl out, and keep screaming. but i can hold the sparrow, mend its wing... i am the spring rain and the hurricane... the monsters cower now, not me, not you. *xn*

i love books but i also love TV, and i don't agree with the general labeling of TV being "bad". there are just as many crappy books as there are crappy tv shows. sure commercials are surreal (and they are fun to me) and desperate to sell, and at least reading involves a skill- but as i am all so painfully aware, there are places i will never go, but i've seen them. as you get older you begin to realize there will be places you'll never get to- for real. some are accessible to some, like walking the great wall of china, but realistically- i doubt i will make it there. then there are places like the bottom of the sea and then outer space.. you might have thought to yourself "oh i'll make it to the great wall" but you'll never see those places either up close and personal. and it makes me sad- but i have seen these places- alive and moving, and its because of TV... so i'll join in with a rant about ignorant programming and parents who let TVs babysit their kids and then complain little johnny is weird- but its a question of how its used, not that the whole "thing" is bad.

anyway i don't want to go on about TV. i got a book yesterday i have been wanting for a long time. its finally been released- its Paul Theroux's newest, "Dark Star Safari, overland from Cairo to Capetown". its funny to say someone is a favorite author but to not like all of his stuff. he writes fiction too and most of it isn't what i read, or what keeps me interested. he has a tone of voice for lack of a better term, thats not as good to me as when its real, when its him speaking for himself. not everyone agrees with me and one of his fictional pieces was made into a movie "Mosquito Coast" (River Phoenix- rip, and Harrsion Ford), but its not like i think his all fiction sucks or that in general its bad- i think "Kowloon Tong" was one of the best and creepiest books ever written. (there is a scene in there where a guy is eating that still makes me feel like puking reading it :) )

Dark Star is actually a big deal, because he's finally gone back again to the thing that made his genius really stand out, travel and observation. to say this is a travel book is wrong, its a quirky niche of travel literature, a person in the world and their observations of it. he never hides the truth either (in an earlier book the poor guy is in some tiny island nation with an infected penis and has to explain himself to a pretty indian female doctor who obviously has some expression on her face and mock to her voice that makes him feel even worse) he tells you his ups and downs and sometimes its frightening how nightmarish parts of this planet are. there are parts of the world where humans have become like ravenous packs of dogs, skeletal, agressive and clinging. but he also has a way with words that makes you know how amazing some places are. believe it or not- some corners of this planet are still like eden, where a bird will come right up to you because it has no fear, because there isn't anything to fear where it lives.

i envy him- not because he is a man, but because he is a male and that allows him freedom to be alone and wander in distant places. a woman alone is a target many times. this is not a feminist issue- that BS about "anything you can do i can do better" is insane. i can do things that some man may not be able to do, but that does not make me "better"- and when he does the things he can do that i can't- its doesn't make him "better" either. we are different but equal. when Paul tells of an experience at a tattoo party or trying to blend into an inner city scene or where young people are gathered- well he seems like a dork. genius but a dork. its because he is also tall and can be imposing looking- and alone in a foreign land his physical stature keeps him from becoming a target of those who want to harm someone, so dork no more.. they would think twice about attacking him- but when face to face, he is kind and open and people spill their guts and bring him home with them. he gets glimpses into the lives of people some never would. so its not his being a male, its that a certain type of person can wander generally unmolested, and he happens to fit the description. through him many can see a world they know they never would.

when i moved to nyc i was alone and fast becoming broke- i moved with only $200, and that was it. i stayed in the Martha Washington Hotel for Women , yes the one from the valley of the dolls- but i didn't know that then, had never seen the movie. (fun creepy MWH story here... i stayed on the 12th floor too but never had this much fun ) it was cheap (i don't know about now, its also gone co-ed from what i hear), and centrally located and i eventually held two jobs down- one an all night shift for a legal proofreading company and one at a retail store. i had a schedule stretch in there where i didn't sleep for two days out of the week, then i would try to "catch up" on my one day off. i ate breakfast by going to a famous bakery in the morning when they had samples out and dinner was a 99c loaf of bread made to last. ah yes the good ol' days.

well what actually helped me feel not so scared was reading Paul's book "Kingdom By The Sea" . I had always dreamed of going to England and exploring the worlds and landscapes of Hardy and Tolkien and yeah even James Harriot- so i thought reading about it constantly would keep my spirits up. Just randomly i picked Paul's book up, a little paperback- it had been out for awhile- and was amazed. i had never read anything like it, and his way of being and doing and just plunging headforward and onward, actually helped give me courage. i was alone in NYC, i needed it. sure i was happy to be here, but it was lonely then. i had been beaten up once by a gang of girls- bigs ones little ones- it was ugly and weird (tiny girls snarling and kicking, not a pretty sight)- they had mistaken me for some other girl i think- it was just so out of the blue. and of all things, thuggy looking guys on bikes came to my rescue- probably one in there was the boyfriend of one of the girls who thought i was some bitch doin' her man. no one knew me, but all of us latino-esque girls all look alike to scorned gang bimbos i suppose. i cried, i survived, it never happened again.. but its wasn't so calming back then. i read that book over and over. it helped. i am still not 100% sure why.

then i got to meet him. as i got other books of his, and as other came out, of course i read and developed my tastes for his stuff.. or not. i went to a book reading. i was psyched because i had written him a long letter and sent him a CD of mine- and he wrote back. when he arrived- he recognized me. i watched him read from his book and then turn to me to answer a question i had. he came up and looked at me- it has never happened before and i doubt it will ever happen again- but i guess i was starstruck. i could see him, looking at me, hear a thing like a voice speaking, but suddenly i couldn't breathe, couldn't move- and didn't realize it until he'd moved on to another person- and suddenly the air rushed back into my lungs and i couldn't remember a thing he said- and i was dizzy now too and then suddenly flushed in the face. what the... its not like i wanted to sleep with the guy, its not like i thought his face was "like ohmygod hesfine!"... i just admired him so much. he said he loved my music and my voice- and after that every time i wrote him he wrote back. i missed the next reading he had (and the next). he had his son with him at one of them he wrote.

i think now he doesn't like me, or i pissed him off somewhere. his son is also a writer now, Marcel Theroux - (and one was a TV show host, "Weird Weekends" with Louis Theroux , not sure what he's doing now..) and i hated the son's book and told him so. his son had also taken a quote from a zine of mine- not something i wrote myself, but a strange quote i have always loved for its sadness and beauty (� �The best I can wish you my child,� so said the fairy Blackstick in Thackeray�s The Rose and the Ring, �is a little misfortune.� � From the book Tender Is The Night By F. Scott Fitzgerald) - and stuck it into the mouth of a character of his that was a corrupt politician- and the quote coming out of that kind of mouth totally messed up the meaning of it... anyway, i told him all of this. i was truthful, i thought the son was sounding too much like he wished he were his dad and did not have a unique voice of his own yet- something to that effect and of course saying something like the son will not give a damn about what i think anyway. but yeah. don't get too many notes from Paul anymore. but i wasn't going to lie.

i am a fan of the father, but not so big a "fan" i'll go on and on about the son just to suck up to dad. so i am out of the loop so to speak i think- i never got any hate mail from him- oh i did get a christmas card once. so i guess somewhere in there i might be occasionally laughed at around the dinner table. he is truly lucky/blessed/whatever to have two talented sons. so who cares about some dork in nyc. i wouldn't.

now that Paul has returned to the writing of the kind of book that makes him amazing to me - i may try to make it to a reading. he may recognize me and say you look scrawny now- you look fat now- wow you look old- my son has millions of dollars and you? actually the man is not that kind of bitch- i think i can say this from having read enough of him to sort of "know"- he'll probaby be very kind. i'll get all stupid feeling and smile and blurt out something my cats did that morning and then wonder why the hell i just did that, and some book store flunky on a power trip will usher me past him very quickly and that will be that.

i'm not a big enough fan to be a fanatic- i'm just glad the man exists, and its fun existing in the same period of life/history to be able to say hi. he writes in a way that can never be properly expressed on a tv, an adventure thats unique. i feel lucky to have found his books. now to find the time to read the new one. its so heavy...maybe i'll wait for it to come out as a movie of the week.. hahaha.. yeah that was stupid

� �Go on, Mr. Medved.� �Please call me Pavel.� I wanted her to inquire about my name (�Slavic?�), because although it seemed like an exotic corruption of my old alias �Medford,� it was the Russian word for �bear�, but better than bear. It was one of those glorious praise names that tribal people give to dangerous creatures, meaning to propitiate them. Medved meant �honey wizard�.� From the book "My Other Life" By Paul Theroux

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