Lou on Parenting

Anyone who’ ever had to spend any time with me knows I love everything Lou Reed has ever written. (Yes, even Metal Machine Music…)

Had to hum this today, tomorrow is the first shoot in my new studio…  very excited. The lyrics don’t fit my mood perfectly, but I thought I’d share anyway:

Beginning of a Great Adventure

It might be great to have a kid that I could kick around
a little me to fill up with my thought
A little me or he or she to fill up with my dreams
a way of saying life is not a loss

I’d keep the tyke away from school and tutor him myself
keep him from the poison of crowd
But then again pristine isolation might not be the best idea
It’s not good trying to immortalize yourself

Beginning Of A Great Adventure
Beginning Of A Great Adventure

Why stop at one, I might have ten, a regular TV brood
I’d breed a little liberal army in the wood
Just like these redneck lunatics I see at the local bar
with their tribe of mutant inbred piglets with cloven hoovers

I’d teach them how to plant a bomb, start a fire, play guitar
and if they catch a hunter, shoot him in the nuts
I’d try to be as progressive as I could possibly be
as long as I didn’t have to try too much

Beginning Of A Great Adventure
Beginning Of A Great Adventure

Susie, Jesus, Bogart, Sam Leslie, Jill and Jeff
Rita, Winny, Andy, Fran and Jet
Boris, Bono, Lucy, Ethel Bunny, Reg and Tom
that’s a lot of named to try not to forget

Carrie, Marlon, No and Steve La Rue and Jerry Lee
Eggplant, Rufus, Dummy, Star and The Glob
I’d need a damn computer to keep track of all these names
I hope this baby thing don’t go too far

I hope it’s true what my wife said to me
I hope it’s true what my wife said to me
Hey I hope it’s true what my wife said to me

She says, baby, it’s the Beginning of a Great Adventure
Baby, it’s the Beginning of a Great Adventure
Take a look

It might be fun to have a kid that I could kick around
create in my own image like a god
I’d raise my own pallbearers to carry me to my grave
and keep me company when I’m a wizened toothless clod

Some gibbering old fool sitting all alone drooling on his shirt
some senile old fart playing in the dirt
It might be fun to have a kid I could pass something on to
something better than rage, pain, anger and hurt

I hope it’s true what my wife said to me
I hope it’s true what my wife said to me
I hope it’s true what my wife said to me
She says Lou, it’s the Beginning of a Great Adventure
Lou, Lou, Lou, Beginning of a Great Adventure
She says baby, how you call your lover boy
Sylvia, quite you call your lover man

Have a great weekend, y’all.

In the Passenger Seat

Loving someone is easy: It’s your car and all you have to do is start the engine, give it a little gas and point the machine wherever you want to go. But *being* loved is like going for a ride in someone else’s car. Even if you think they’ll be a good driver, you also have a lurking fear that they might end up doing something disastrous and in an instant you’ll both be flying through the windshield towards pain and later on, your heart billing you big time for this ride. Being loved can be the most frightening thing of all. Because real love in any form means goodbye to control; so what happens if halfway or three-quarters of the way through a trip with someone, you decide you want to go back or in a different direction, but you’re only the passenger?

In need of Change

On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and to move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice may be the result of love … or is it that life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not know it, habit being a great binder.

I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing.

… A man or woman sunk in dreams that cannot be spoken, about a life they do not possess, comes suddenly to a door in the wall. They open it. Beyond that door is that life and a man or a woman to whom that life is already natural. It may not be possessions they want, it may very well be the lack of them, but the secret life is suddenly revealed. This is their true home and this is their beloved.

I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover’s dreams. And perhaps such a thing is enough. To be a muse may be enough. The pain is when the dreams change, and they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn’t understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself.

Jeanette Winterson

No, we can’t just be Friends

At the end of their relationship she asked if they could still remain friends. His face was expressionless when he said, “No. Because we put friends in boxes, like we do with everything else in life for convenience sake. Most friends you see only occasionally, and even the ones you see a lot still all have their boxes, their specific place in your life and no more. That’s one of the best things about being someone’s love– you don’t have one box in their life because you’re in all of them. You’re their friend, lover, trusted confidante– all those things at the same time. I do not want to be put in one of your boxes now. I also don’t want to whittle you down to fit into just one of mine. That would completely demean what we had. I don’t want to end up air-kissing you on each cheek when we meet now and then and say things like ‘How ARE you? You look so *great*!’”

A Girl Who Reads

By Rosemarie Urquico, via J Carroll:

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by God, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.