Code Blue for Spanky and the Love Handles

Everyone and everything has its own path and the blues is no different. From the first note to the last, each song is a journey and is unique to its moment in time. You may hear the same song again and again, but you can’t possibly hear it the same way twice.

Allow me to struggle with the first note and accept that I don’t know how this song ends. More importantly, it doesn’t matter.

Now I don't know much, but I do know this: if life is a song, then I prefer the offbeat version.  I took an exit one night marked Code Blue and got lost in a back alley of blues, where tradition leaves the front porch and stumbles upon a feral cat somewhere along the filthier side of New Orleans. This cat was black and white, dirty and deep.   I closed my eyes and felt every move, every thought and every note that ever was...and ever will be. 

I felt Clark Vreeland.  And this feeling definitely tagged along when I took another exit marked Spanky and the Love Handles.

What can I say?  I love quirky!  And Clark is the King of Quirk.  He is many things to many people, but he is always true to his spirit - good, bad and everything in between.  He is that feral cat.  Self-possessed and always hungry for nothing more than what is required to sustain the moment.  Not saying I'm a mind reader, but that's what I believe based on what I intuit in the music he creates. 

As for the genre of blues?  I do love some down home blues, but I refuse to keep it in a box.  There are more shades of blue than there are people trying to find themselves.

KS:  If there's anything that I know, I sure don't show it.
RL:  You should've learned what you had to know.













Rainbows and Moonbeams: I Have Never Laughed So Hard!

This is another big hair,  Carolina girl story.  I might have been 24 or 25.  I looked like this:

Actually, my hair was much bigger than that in my twenties but this was taken on my 30th birthday and by then I had downsized in the hair department.  However, makeup and hairspray were still essentials.  I sometimes wonder if I am personally responsible for all those holes in the ozone layer.  I'm sure really bad hair karma awaits me in a future life.

But enough about hair.  In my twenties I was raising my first daughter, alone...having said a tearful goodbye to her Palestinian father, to this day the biggest heartbreak of my life.  (You can read about it here if you like.)  And I was on the path of spiritual discovery. 

My best friend was a 250 pound Catholic girl from Long Island, NY.  She worked as a dispatcher for the Greenville County Sheriff's Department, possessed a very dry sense of humor and an impatient acceptance of my antics.  So when I asked her to tag along to this crystal workshop I'd heard about she did what she always did...rolled her eyes, took a drag on a menthol cigarette and said, "this oughta be good."  I told her it was at this really cool, new store called Rainbows and Moonbeams.  The stoic glare on her face spoke volumes but she summed it up by saying, "can't wait."

If there was a YouTube video of that evening, it would be the funniest thing ever.  Even now, I can still say that I have never laughed so hard in my life.

So we arrive.  Me and my big, late 80's hair, holy jeans, black gargoyle t-shirt and a burning desire to uncover the meaning of life.  My BFF?  Big ass, big perm and an immediate dislike for patchouli air and a room full of pot-smokin' hippies cramming pita chips in their mouth while inviting everyone to have a seat on the floor (keep in mind BFF is very large and not at all happy about sitting on the floor). 

And so begins the workshop, and I'm a little nervous.  Mainly because BFF is giving me "the look" and I'm trying not to notice.  I give her a big smile, she smirks and the crystals are presented.  The first thing we learn is that you don't choose a crystal, a crystal chooses you.  As we're passing around the crystals, a young girl tells a story of a crystal that followed her to Alabama.  Seriously?  Did it take a bus?  Even I'm stifling a giggle at this point and BFF is really giving me "the look."  The one that says, "I hate you." 

In time the crystals had chosen their BFFs and we were instructed to place them on our heads and close our eyes.  I kept one eye open because a rather sinister looking hippie was staring at me, pointing a two-pronged metal thingie in my direction and saying some of us are in serious need of healing.  BFF kept one eye open to maintain "the look" lest I forget that I was the one who suggested this. 

We were later asked to go outside.  Nice.  It was a beautiful, sunny, summer evening and fresh air seemed like a good idea. We joined forces on the sidewalks of a very provincial downtown Greenville, South Carolina and the first order of business was to find a tree that we liked and hug it.  I'm not making this up...we hugged trees.  I'm really getting "the look" now and I can't even smile back, because if I do I'm going to lose it.  As if that wasn't enough, we were then asked to kiss our tree.  Okay.  BFF isn't just giving me "the look," she speaks.  She says the words I will never forget:  "I ain't kissing no f****ng tree."  Again, I'm not smiling.  I kiss my tree and await further instruction.  BFF is ready to kill me, but first we have to cross the street to the beautiful fountain in front of the Hyatt Regency.  Normal people are milling about in large numbers as we cast imaginary tears from our dry eyes into the fountain.  Now I have nothing against rituals, but we could've picked a better spot.  A secluded field or farm maybe? 

I'm not sure what happened after that - and I may very well be blocking the memory - but eventually we were free to leave.  Now I have every respect for another's beliefs and I wasn't about to make an early exit or laugh at an inappropriate time, but after quickly making our way to the car and rolling up the windows it was time to release some very real laughter from the gut.  It was the kind of laughter that takes your breath, hurts your stomach and threatens to soil your pants. 

Again, I have never laughed so hard in my life. 

That was more than 25 years ago and I have come a long way on my spiritual path.  I'm still open minded, still respectful and I have since become a Reiki Master Practitioner Teacher (that's a mouthful I know), but I am much more grounded in the application of and attitude towards spiritual matters. 

However, funny is funny!  And a song from Sesame Street just popped into my head.  Who are the people in your neighborhood?  Remember that?

Oh, and I'm not making fun of hippies.  I consider myself to be one, sort of.  And I love trees.

The Tarot Tango: A Fool's Journey

Source

The mystery of evolution is no mystery.  We evolve.  From cavemen to condo dwellers, and everything in between, we have foolishly continued to search for things we already have.  Sometimes a little worse for the wear and tear, but ultimately better. 

I sure hope so.  If I had a dollar for every time I took one step too many and landed on my ass, I'd be rich.  Filthy rich.  However, I will credit myself with this:  I trust the process.

Wise men say only fools rush in, but that's okay because the process may be the only thing I do trust.  And I may not always look where I'm going, but when I get there I am exactly where I need to be.

My latest cliff diving adventure feels like the most successful yet.  I woke up in a funhouse of mirrors and through another saw parts of myself I had not considered before.  Simply put, we attract what we need to look at in ourselves.  In this case, everything was so distorted that it was laughable...a funhouse where no one got the joke until it was too late. 

I get it now.  With another roadblock out of the way, let the process begin...again.

KS:  Was that too short?

RL:  Yes, but it resonates.

The Personal Manager - Simply Stated

If you sign my contract baby
You know all of your worries is over for you

Yea I wanna be your milk man every morning
Your ice-cream man when the days is through

Personal Manager - Albert King

From the first time I heard The Personal Manager in a little ribs 'n' blues shack in Decatur, Georgia, I've been trying to figure out what it is about that song that so resonates with me.  

And I don't believe in accidents.  I believe everything happens for a reason and every pothole on the highway of life is a lesson learned.  My life began to change with a simple blues song and the potholes were plenty.  Although I was having so much fun, I hardly noticed.  Blues is like that.  The simple chords and innuendo lure you into the heart of it all.  And if you're a hearts on fire Leo type like me, it's easy to get lost and miss the meaning. 

.

Fortunately, Kimmy Sue and Ruby Lou do meet halfway on occasion and see the writing on the wall. Together we finally figured this one out, and one whole woman is hearing that song with her eyes open.

I want a man whose dick is bigger than mine. 

Yea, I said that.  It's the truth.  Figuratively speaking of course, but literally would not be frowned upon.

Relationships are a dance, and in the human attempt to find pleasure in the roles of man and woman it's important to bring it all to the dance floor and find your song...the one that tells the truth, plain and simple. 

When I die and go to Heaven (don't laugh, it could happen!), forget St. Peter.  Albert King better be standing at the gate with a big ol' shit-eating blues grin.  He'll have one question for me:  What took you so long?

Source

Pillow Talk Around the World

From a distance, you look like my friend

even though we are at war...Bette Midler (Julie Gold)

Long before I moved to Atlanta and wandered into my first blues joint, I was a Carolina girl.  I had big hair, big cars and a big tendency to find myself in funny situations. Or maybe I convinced myself they were funny.  Those were some tough years, but a sense of humor did get me through.

At age 20,  I had one of those "love at first sight" experiences - an 18-year old Palestinian who had just arrived and was getting his first taste of America.  Seriously, it was like one of those scenes in a movie when boy meets girl, eyes lock and you just know that nothing will ever be the same.  And it wasn't.

I don't know who was more naive.  He taught me how to say I love you and hairbrush (hair has always been important to me) in Arabic, and I taught him how to kiss.  Not that I was all that experienced. I was a late bloomer when it came to intimacy. But I do remember that we were young and pillow talk consisted of his stories of growing up in Beirut, Lebanon...bombings, studying by candlelight and poor vision at a very young age as a result, Yasser Arafat making his rounds to check on everyone, his mother struggling to raise three sons alone because his father died in his 40's, his mother worrying every time her sons left the house.  Forget the history books or the news, he took me there.  I could only share a life in rural South Carolina and my earliest memories of desegragation...riding my bike through corn fields, marching bands, my mother's health food store on Main Street, climbing trees and then crying for my mother to get me down (coming down is always the scary part).  And somehow it all made perfect sense that we were together at that time.  People are just people right? 

We were both so caught up in our own little world that the consequences caught us both off guard.  Did I mention that he was a virgin and we made a baby the very first time?  I said we were both naive didn't I?

The next two years were interesting.  The oldest brother was flown to America to oversee this situation since he was the man of the house.  I will never forget oldest brother.  He was very stern as he lectured me about his people.  Needless to say, I got my first real taste of culture clash...something I had never considered.  He told me they didn't do these things (really?) and that there were required classes in abstinence.  I wasn't much of a smartass then, but I remember telling him that little brother obviously skipped his. It was the weirdest experience of my life.  I can still see him standing in front of me, all serious and pointing fingers.  I was too curious and incredulous to say much. I was taking it all in.  There was an Arabic man outside my classroom door in Greenville, South Carolina...lecturing me.  I half wondered if Arafat was on his way to save my little Palestinian from the wicked Western whore!  I didn't argue with him, I intuitively knew better. 

I knew that his family was going to make him come home and that was that. 

My parents kept our precious little girl so that we could spend one last night together, and the next morning he took a taxi to the airport and I got up and got ready for work.  The sudden separation was worse than the flu and all the sickness was in a race to come out, as quickly as possible.  But I got over it and focused on raising a daughter.

Something was awakened in me by that connection and my spiritual journey began, for that experience was on a level of existence that knew nothing of segregation, religious wars and walls. These things seemed irrelevant.

Actually, it has always seemed irrelevant to me.  I can't stomach the media with its graphic and glorified production of what's going on in this world.  We watch in horror and disgust, then change the channel.  And if we talk about it at all, we take sides.  If you ask me, money isn't the root of all evil...it's taking sides.

Duality exists because of these sides and walls are a manmade construct.  Bridges are far more useful.

KS:  How do I get past this wall?
RL:  Silly girl, stop climbing...walk!